US Navy DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class

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Captain Kirk said:

Shipbuilding is tough, it’s hard. With a new class of ship, when you put this many new things on one ship it requires great resilience and toughness to get through the challenges, come out the other end and have succeeded.”

“If you ask where the ship is today? It’s a toddler, it’s a young ship that has to come through and grow up and go through its adolescences. Ten years from now we could have a great conversation, just like we’ve had for other classes of ship, the Spruance-class destroyers, the Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates… But the first thing we have to do is get through the test program and integrate it with the fleet.”

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Naval Sea Systems Command is still working on a fix for the engineering problems on USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) that resulted in the ship breaking down at least twice during its transit from Maine to San Diego – including in the Panama Canal — service officials said on Thursday.

NAVSEA has zeroed in on failures with the ship’s lube oil coolers as the major cause of the difficulties that sidelined Zumwalt at least twice during its three-month transit. Lube oil coolers prevent the lubrication of rotating shafts from breaking down due to heat and friction. In late November water from the coolers seeped in to two of the four bearings that connect to Zumwalt’s port and starboard Advanced Induction Motors (AIMs) to the drive shafts.

“I think what’s frustrated us with DDG-1000 is we’ve had lube oil coolers since Noah had an ark, so what’s the cause there? We’re still really working our way through what the root causes are there,” Vice Adm. Thomas Moore, commander NAVSEA said on Thursday.
“So I think it’s, from our standpoint, it’s a key reminder that these are, even lube oil coolers, even though the ships are complex systems, relatively simple things can cause these ships to have problems.”

According to information provided to USNI News by NAVSEA, the service is analyzing the lube oil coolers at the Naval Surface Warfare Centers in Philadelphia and Carderock.

“Root cause analyses related to casualties experienced during the ship’s transit are ongoing, and results will be leveraged in the development of long-term corrective actions for this ship class,” read a statement provided to USNI News.

Zumwalt’s engineering woes began when in route to Naval Station Norfolk, Va. and the crew found the saltwater in bearings on the ship.

The Navy replaced the affected lube oil coolers using replacements from under-construction Zumwalt-class Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG-1002) and the Navy’s land-based test site for the ship’s electric integrated power system in Philadelphia.

The ship suffered

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resulting in both shafts locking and the ship losing steerage. Zumwalt suffered minor damage after scrapping against a lock wall and had to be towed to undergo additional repairs.

The ship suffered an additional casualty on its way to San Diego and came in under propulsion restrictions.

As of this week, NAVSEA officials said while the fix is under consideration, it would likely be completed by the time the ship begins the work for its combat system activation period.

“I feel pretty confident we’re going to come through these and we’ll have the fix in place by the time we get through the combat system activation industrial period that’s getting ready to get started in San Diego in the March timeframe,” Program Executive Officer Ships Rear Adm. Bill Galinis said on Thursday.

“There’s a number of options out there in terms of how we address that, whether it’s a material change, a design change, a change in terms of the lube flow flowing through the coolers, or maybe even an operational change in how we operate the coolers. So a number of items in terms of what we can do there.”

Two more ships in the class are currently under construction at General Dynamics Bath Iron Works shipyard in Maine.

The following is the complete NAVSEA statement to USNI News on the ongoing work to fix the engineering problems on USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000).
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As shipbuilder Bath Iron Works laid the keel for the third and final destroyer of the

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, the Navy and industry were struggling to understand embarrassing

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on the first ship, the

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. Congress fears there could be worse to come. “The hard work hasn’t really begun yet in terms of delivering the capability of the ship,” frets one Hill staffer. “We don’t even know really what we don’t know yet about the combat systems because they hadn’t done testing.”

The root cause of the problems may be something with which the F-35 program is very familiar:

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, developing and testing a weapon system at the same time. On DDG-1000, there are months of testing still to come even as the third ship, the future Lyndon Baines Johnson, is nearly 60 percent complete (in the form of pre-assembled modules yet to be attached to the keel). “There’s definitely a lot of concurrency,” the staffer said. “It’ll be two more years before combat systems delivery occurs, and then the ship can begin

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(Initial Operational Test & Evaluation) and starting the training cycle to deploy.”

Naval Sea Systems Command is still working out the root causes of

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that, among other things, required the $4 billion ship to be towed out of the Panama Canal. But that’s the easy part. What failed in Panama was a relatively simple component called a lube oil cooler, something ships have used “since Noah had an ark,” lamented NAVSEA’s commander,

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. What the Navy has yet to test — indeed, what the Navy has yet to turn on as a single, integrated, ship-wide system — is the ship’s far more complex array of unique, high-tech combat systems:

• the “
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  ” system to distribute the ship’s massive amount of electrical power to the highest-priority equipment while re-routing around battle damage, a lot like the fictional starship Enterprise;
• the two 155 mm
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  (AGS) cannon, designed to fire rocket-propelled precision shells that proved so costly the Navy is looking at cheaper but shorter-ranged replacements;
• the AN/SPY-3 radar, which is new to the Zumwalt destroyers and the similarly troubled carrier
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  ;
• and the unique ship-wide computer system meant to control it all, the Total Ship Computing Environment Infrastructure, with
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  , based on open-source Linux software.

Even when the Zumwalt appears to resemble earlier classes, it’s significantly different. For instance, the Mk 57 Vertical Launch System that allows the Zumwalt to fire a wide variety of missiles is slightly different than the Mk 41 VLS on the Navy’s mainstay warship, the

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class. In particular, the Zumwalt‘s missile tubes are squeezed in around the

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of the ship, rather than forming one easy-to-load central block as on an Arleigh Burke.

“The combat system testing is a significant concern, since so much of it is new,” said

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, a retired Navy commander now with the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments. “The Mk57 VLS launcher, AGS, SPY-3, and volume search radar are all unique to DDG-1000. While each system has been tested individually to some degree, the integration testing of all these new systems is likely to identify unforeseen problems, and subsequent delays in the ship’s first deployment.”

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Guns and Voltage

Even once everything is working and all systems are go aboard ship, Clark continued, the Navy will need to build a support infrastructure on shore. That means special training programs for the crews of the three DDG-1000s, distinct from other destroyers, he said, “because of all the DDG-1000’s unique systems, including a different electrical system, generators, propulsion system, combat systems, and hull equipment.” The DDG-1000 even draws a different voltage of power from other destroyers, he said, which means it’ll compete for high-voltage pier space with big-deck amphibious assault ships and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.

Then there’s the cost of ammunition. The ship was built around its two 155 mm guns, a caliber used by no other ship in the Navy. The Advanced Gun System in turn was built to fire a unique hybrid of artillery shell and missile, the rocket-boosted Long-Range Land-Attack Projectile (LRLAP), able to strike targets about 100 nautical miles away. Unfortunately, as the DDG-1000 program kept getting cut back, and the production run of ammo with it, the cost-per-round rocketed to somewhere around

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. Now the Navy’s not actually buying LRLAPs and instead looking at the

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round, which is precision-guided but not rocket-boosted: Excalibur costs about

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a shot — less than 10 percent the LRLAP’s price — but can hit targets at most 26 nautical miles away — about 25 percent the LRLAP’s range.

That’s a tactical tradeoff that undermines the whole raison d’etre of the Zumwalt class, shore bombardment, argued naval historian and analyst

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. “Less range? It doesn’t have enough range now (with LRLAP)!” Polmar told me. With everyone from China and Russia to Lebanese Hezbollah and Yemeni Houthis boasting

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nowadays, “amphibious forces have to stay at least 25 and preferably 50 miles off shore,” Polmar said. With modern aircraft like the

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and the CH-53K helicopter, he went on, “

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…. We’ve got a capability of going more than a 100 miles inland easily.” So adding the distance ships must stand out to sea and the distance ground forces will go inland, you get ranges that even the LRLAP couldn’t cross, let alone Excalibur.

So what does DDG-1000 do? “It was designed for a mission that’s no longer relevant,” Polmar said, but bombardment of land targets with big guns isn’t the only mission the Zumwalt can do. Take away the guns and, “what do you have? A large ship with a lot of electricity,” he said. “The ship has phenomenal capabilities in terms of its power plant, so let’s get rid of the guns and let’s start putting

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and other high-tech weapons on the ship.”

“The best things about DDG-1000 have to do with its electrical power (76MW) and internal volume,” agreed Clark. “It will be a great testbed and developmental platform for electric weapons like lasers, high-power radio frequency weapons, and

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.”

The Hill staffer wasn’t so sure: “The idea that you would reopen the shipbuilding contract to put in a railgun begs for more trouble” on a program that’s already seen plenty. (That doesn’t rule out expensively extracting the 155mm guns and replacing them with railguns later, though).

On the other hand, the contract structure and the advanced state of construction makes it impractical to

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, as the Pentagon once studied doing. “(DDG-)1001 and 1002 both are on fixed price contracts,” the staffer said. “The idea of not building the third one doesn’t make any sense; we’ve already paid for it” — all but $200 million — “so we’d better get a ship.”

So what, at this stage, can be done to fix and improve the Zumwalt class? The Navy is reviewing the ships’ missions and studying Concepts of Operation (CONOPS), which will likely reflect the reduced range of the guns. Congress will watch the combat systems testing closely, and it’s already reformed one aspect of shipbuilding. After the Navy commissioned the Zumwalt in

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and formally accepted delivery of the ship from Bath, Congress enacted language in the 2017

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(Section 7301) defining delivery to occur only when “all systems contained” are ready and ordering the Navy to amend the Zumwalt class’s delivery dates accordingly. That statute should help prevent concurrency from rearing its troublesome head on future shipbuilding programs.

Then there’s the longer-term lesson of the DDG-1000 and similarly ambitious ships like the aircraft carrier

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and the

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. On both sides of the Potomac, the emerging consensus is that the hoped-for

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should be built with

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, not with more ambitious, leap-ahead ships packed with new technologies like the Zumwalt.

“I think the ship has a lot of potential,” the Hill source said, “but we shouldn’t believe it until we see it demonstrated.”

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Jura said:

continuation of the post right above:
source:

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at first I wanted to add something but I won't

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Lethe said:

Yes but this was an American tow, far superior to the Russian sort.

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Air Force Brat said:

"hey, you shoulda said it, but if you won't I will??

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Jura said:

LOL learning "best practices in military management" aboard a ship belonging to the class which is a typical example of so called death spiral, and which is a typical example of concurrency (for those who haven't heard it from me yet hahaha: https://www.sinodefenceforum.com/aircraft-carriers-iii.t7304/page-85#post-395328) turning it into a tremendous ... success
US Navy’s ‘super-stealth’ destroyer hosts international officers

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Air Force Brat said:

... building more Super Hornets, maybe more!

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Air Force Brat said:

"hey, you shoulda said it, but if you won't I will?? What a "stinkin MESS! the Navy may go refuel the Enterprise and bring her back online, that makes as much sense as building more Super Hornets, maybe more!

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Jura said:

well I didn't want to sound as Enemy Of The State (again but I'm fed up of the bravado as in
Aug 17, 2016
see the date? before the Zumwalt was repeatedly "sidelined", they had "schooled the World":
Cmdr. Keith Reams, deputy director of the Naval Command College said: “We brought this class to Zumwalt to show the United States Navy’s might at its finest.”

now: ships with no bullets, waiting for years for the combat system, brass talking about frigging railguns!!

oh I don't like F-35C either but will give you Like

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Air Force Brat said:

Well, I'd bet my last Franklin on the F-35C, but that 155MM Gun Krap is major stooped, we better be talking rail guns and lasers, we got the POWER to do it, well, as long as the ships powerplant throttles up?? LOL

I agree that Obama shoulders the major blame with his "Socialist Welfare STATE!", but somebodies been "burning their credits", pulling down all these high capital, high zoot, projects that end up being "semi-functional"??

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