The office of the deputy chief of naval operations for integration of capabilities and resources - a mouthful of a title known in the U.S. Navy as simply "the N8" - is among the toughest jobs in the service. For two years, Vice Adm. Barry McCullough has had to balance the myriad needs of the Navy's surface, submarine and aviation communities against available budgets.
During his tenure, he's built what many regard as a more realistic 30-year shipbuilding program that ends the DDG 1000 destroyer at three ships, restarts DDG 51 destroyer production and restructures the Littoral Combat Ship effort.
McCullough next month will become the first commander of the 10th Fleet, the Navy's newest, which will oversee cyber operations.
A. We're working through that, but I can talk to you about the 2009 shipbuilding plan because obviously we wrote one. But what concerns me is, if you look at the 2009 plan and you go in the out years, the cost to replace the ships that we built in the late 1980s.
So we have a large number of ships that are going to retire starting in the mid-2020s. And given the current cost of things, we cannot afford to recapitalize those on a one-for-one basis for the budgets we have. If you look at the age of the ballistic missile submarines, they're going to start going out of service in the mid-2020s. We're going to have to recapitalize them. We've got the same problem with aviation.
Where are we going to get the money to do all this?
It's tough. The [federal budget] deficit's not getting any better and where does the discretionary spending go? It's us. The Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Army, Coast Guard. I don't know how to solve the problem. I really don't.
A. Manpower is a tough issue. We had about 385,000 people and we're on our way down to about 330,000. The cost of people's been going up 1.5 percent a year when you got rid of 55,000 people. So the real cost of people is going up somewhere between 8.5 and 10 percent a year. This is the box that my folks and I and the CNO live in.
Then you've got ops and maintenance. As the land forces come out of Iraq, there's going to be no less demand for naval forces. Because you're still going to need some air support, and if you don't have it coming off a concrete runway in Iraq, it is going to come off an aircraft carrier.
As you go into Afghanistan, if you don't want to put the same level of infrastructure in, which I don't believe we want to, you're going to need support and that's going to come off a carrier.
A. First, there are some current critical war-fighting gaps that LCS will fill. There's anti-mine capability, mine hunting and clearance. There's shallow water anti-submarine warfare, especially against quiet diesel electric submarines. And there's a capability against multiple incoming swarming boats, dependent on the intel. Multiple is much greater than 10.
I've been the CO of a hydrofoil, a guided-missile destroyer and an Aegis cruiser. The capability package we've put on the ship is very appropriate for the threat environment we see the ship working in.
Draft was a goal to be able to get into the green water with this ship type. The key performance parameter there was to be between 10 and 20 feet. That gets you to a large swath of water that's not available to a 20-plus-foot-draft ship, which is important to us.
The northern Arabian Gulf has fingers of very shallow water that stick down. On either side, you've got deep water, so you can't go east and west or you run aground. If you've got a 13-foot-draft ship, you can go east and west.
A. Both meet all our needs. When I look at Freedom, I like the remote vehicle handling system. And when I look at Independence, with its 103-foot beam, I like its tremendous flight deck. Both ships have got huge internal volume, which we want for the mission packages. And they both go the speed that we have prescribed. The threshold for speed was 40 knots and the objective was 50 knots.
It gives you the speed to maintain a depth of engagement to defeat a swarming-boat attack, then it gives you the speed to reposition.
A. No. It's only going to run at high speed when necessary. I was a four-engine, 30-knot guy on Normandy and Scott. I like to go fast in ships. But I'm not worried about the range on it.
The captains have to employ the ship the way they think is driven by the tactical situation. You don't zorch around at 40 knots when you don't need to. No fleet commander's going to tell a ship CO you can't go 40 knots, because he doesn't know what the tactical situation is. But the fleet guidance for normal ops is to steam at an economical rate.
When it's underway you can refuel it at sea.
A. The DDG 1000 was never designed to be a ballistic missile defense ship. It was designed to be a land-attack destroyer. It had local area anti-air warfare capability. And its active sonar was built with lesser power in it to work in the reverberation environment. The dual-band radar was designed specifically to work in the high-clutter environment, seashore interface. I think it will do exactly what we asked it to do.
So here I've got a good program doing what it's supposed to, and we decide that we don't need this capability any more. And it's really what we saw in the proliferation of ballistic missiles globally. If you look at a chart from the early 1990s to today, it's mind-boggling of who has these things. When I look at the area of quiet diesel-electric submarines in an open ocean environment, the proliferation of that capability has gone far beyond what we ever envisioned.
A. Yes. And that's what I have when I buy an Arleigh Burke destroyer.
There were a bunch of us that worked this pretty hard based on the proliferation of missiles and diesel-electric submarines and things of that nature. So we went down a road with Aegis open architecture to develop something we'll call Advanced Capability Build 12. It's a COTS-based combat system with a multimission signal processor that can do simultaneous ... ballistic missile defense and area anti-air warfare as well as open-ocean anti-submarine warfare.
For once, I'd say we were all pretty smart when we thought that up. Because with where [Defense] Secretary [Robert] Gates has gone with missile defense, it's pretty much going to be a combination of sea- and land-based missile defense.
A. The concern we all had was, OK, if we do this, this costs money. And if we spend the money to do this and look at the employment rotation to support this, what are we going to give up if we don't get any more top line? It was a new mission for us. It was a new mission for anybody. Were we going to get money to do it, or what were we going to give up to afford it? That's the debate that was going on within the Navy, not that we didn't think we should do it.
A. With the right technical oversight and management from NAVSEA, the Navy's real comfortable with DDG 51s probably for the next 10 years. Now we've got time to work on that.
People say the Analysis of Alternatives for a new cruiser was a waste of money. No, it wasn't. It showed us that for autonomous detection, track and engagement of high-end threats, it is almost cost-prohibitive. I mean, when you don't have a network of sensors, you start to need huge phased-array radars. I'm talking about a 22-foot diameter array. But if you can network overhead, land-based, sea-based sensors and get that track quality data to a shooter, and then develop the right command-and-control system so you don't fratricide your interceptors, you don't need that radar.
A. Yeah. Then everybody says you've got to make it nuclear-powered. If you're going to build a 25,000-ton ship with a super radar on it, you need to look at the electric capacity demand and the energy density to produce it, and the tankage that you'd have to put on a ship to not refuel it every two days would be incredible. So nuclear power might be the right way to go.
But if you don't need that high-end radar, the demands of that electric power generation and thus the power density to fit it inside a ship hull, then you probably don't need it to be nuclear powered.
A. We're looking at hybrid electric drive on those ships now and I'd tell you in the out years, the Navy is very interested in anything that drives down crewing. So if you look at what we did inside DDG 1000 with the autonomous fire-suppression system and the flight deck fire-suppression system that allowed us to reduce the size of the flight deck crew, we'd be absolutely foolish if we didn't incorporate that in the ship. ■
- By Vago Muradian in Washington
The deputy chief of naval operations for integration of capabilities and resources (N8 in U.S. Navy organizational parlance) oversees:
■ Director of programming
■ Director of assessments
■ Director of fiscal management
■ Director of warfare integration
■ Director of warfare integration, under whom are: oceanographer/navigator of the Navy; director of expeditionary warfare; director of surface warfare; head of submarine warfare; director of air warfare; head of special programs
Source: U.S. Navy
The Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program is ready to test a few components that soldiers may have in their hands by 2010.
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