A former partner in a top-10 global management consulting firm, Joe Buff is a seasoned risk analyst and professional writer on national security and defense preparedness. Two of his non-fiction articles received annual literary awards from the Naval Submarine League. He is also a national bestselling author of tales of near-future warfare featuring nuclear submariners and special operations forces in action at their bravest and best. Joe holds a master's degree in math from MIT, earned under a National Science Foundation Fellowship. He worked as an intern at the Argonne National Laboratory. Previously a qualified actuary for twenty years, with extensive experience at interpreting policy implications of dire "what if" scenarios, he is now a member of the Society for Risk Analysis, a non-partisan international scholarly body headquartered in McLean, VA.
Joe's father was an enlisted man in the Navy (Seabees in the Pacific Theater) from 1946 through 1951, and his uncle was a merchant mariner on the North Atlantic convoys late in World War II, before being drafted into the U.S. Army to serve in the Occupation of Nazi Germany. Joe is a Life Member of the following Navy-related organizations: U.S. Naval Institute, the Navy League of the United States, the Fellows of the Naval War College, CEC/Seabees Historical Foundation, and the Naval Submarine League. During 2004, after having been a guest luncheon speaker at their Annual National Convention, Joe became a sponsored Life Associate Member of the U.S. Submarine Veterans, Inc. He was recently made an Honorary Life Associate Member of the Navy Seabee Veterans of America, partly in recognition of his pro bono work for Operation Seabees Knowledge.
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at the Frontlines.]
In late autumn 2004, the U.S. Navy and DARPA jointly announced a new submarine design feasibility study, TANGO BRAVO. The name derives from the initials T and B, standing for “Technology Barriers” (or more optimistically, “Technology Breakthroughs.”) That initial announcement was met with a mix of enthusiasm, skepticism, and confusion, depending on who you were and whom you listened to back then.
Well, enough time has passed for some dust to have settled, some multi-million-dollar contracts to have been awarded, and some clarity in general to have emerged. As stated rather emphatically by senior Navy officers who are now overseeing and managing the project, TANGO BRAVO is not the design of a new class of super-submarine. Rather, the effort consists of a cluster of interrelated feasibility studies, looking “outside the box” at many different aspects of fast-attack sub layout, arming, and manning. There's no guarantee that any particular one of these innovative concept thrusts will pan out in practice, and the timeframe for any payoff -- in terms of new subs actually in commission, in the water -- may be better measured in decades than in years. But this is definitely not bad news: It's simply a reality check on public expectations.
The driving force behind TANGO BRAVO can be summarized in one word, cost. The latest class of fast-attack sub (SSN), the Virginias, at the present funded building rate of one a year have a price tag around 2.5 billion dollars each. Some experts believe that if this building rate could be doubled, to (say) one Virginia per year by General Dynamics Electric Boat, and one by Northrop Grumman Newport News Shipbuilding (who now share the work on each sub in a complicated teaming arrangement), the cost per boat would drop to around $2 billion each. That's still a lot of money, though arguably it's reasonable for what the Navy and America get in undersea peacekeeping and combat power -- the Virginias are truly superb 21st century capital ships.
But here's where the problem of fleet size comes in, driven by the problem of cost: A modern SSN has a useful hull life of about 33 years. Building at the rate of one a year, eventually the fast-attack component of our Submarine Force would reach a steady state of 33 vessels. By the 2020s, however, China alone could outnumber us with nuclear-powered and diesel subs together by a factor of five, maybe more. That puts us at the danger point where the advantage tilts from individual quality to sheer quantity, especially in enemy home waters -- i.e., WESTPAC.
If we could build more than one good or great SSN for the same money that currently pays for just one Virginia, our Navy and our country would be better prepared for whatever challenges the future holds. One conceivable way to get a cheaper but capable SSN is to perfect innovative means to make it smaller without sacrificing performance, and perhaps even while enhancing performance. Hence the bold push named TANGO BRAVO.
TANGO BRAVO feasibility studies are looking at five main areas of technology, every one of which contributes significantly to SSN cost over a sub's useful lifespan, and every one of which could produce very valuable breakthroughs -- genuine upside discontinuities -- in what next-generation American SSNs look like and how they work. It's way too soon to know for sure how much each of these different directions of exploration and experimentation will pan out productively. Tradeoffs will have to be made, and competing new design options will lead to winners and losers in the always-brutal Beltway acquisition game. Above all, there's the chance of technology failure. Some ideas that sound wonderful today or next year may prove to be too expensive or even infeasible in practice. Enticing artists' conceptions of futuristic-looking fast attacks in magazines or brochures are merely that -- artists' conceptions. And implementation of any new prototype models or production designs will be subject to the same familiar bugaboos as ever: deadline delays and budget overruns. (The Virginias, originally, were supposed to go for something like only half their current price in constant dollars. The UK's new Astute-class SSN has suffered nearly crippling delays and overruns due to an atrophying design and engineering expertise base -- a cautionary tale for the U.S.)
So a bit of healthy disbelief seems advised when TANGO BRAVO's goal is labeled as “the same or better mission capabilities for half the money,” or claims are made that “with concerted effort, an SSN design derived from TANGO BRAVO would be ready for procurement in 2011 or -- under ideal conditions -- even earlier.” On the other hand, we can't afford to not do TANGO BRAVO, or our own expertise base will wither irrecoverably, and we won't have a good follow-on class beyond the Virginias.
These are the five main technology areas encompassed in legislation and contract language for TANGO BRAVO:
1. Shaftless propulsion. The propulsion shaft of current SSN designs is long and rather heavy, causing center-of-gravity (trim) difficulties for naval architects, and the shaft requires a large hole in the stern of the pressure hull. Moving to all-electric propulsion, with the drive motors encased in pods outside the people tank, and with hull penetrations needed only for power cables that don't rotate, is a very attractive alternative. A word of devil's advocacy, though. A commercial ship with a similar arrangement recently suffered a serious fire in one such pod; no one was injured, but the ship was crippled. And this was on the surface with help nearby -- not deeply submerged during battle maneuvers. The tech for submarine use will surely get there, but the point is it isn't there yet and it won't be cheap.
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2. External weapons stowage. Right now, a lot of pressure-hull volume is taken up by an SSN's torpedo room, including its weapon-handling machinery and the torpedo tubes themselves. Were weapons to be carried outside the hull, the ship could prove to be smaller and cheaper. In fact a greater number of bigger weapons might be deployable on a submarine significantly smaller than today's available SSN classes. If it works, it's a major gain for American taxpayers. But once more, just for argument's sake, let me play devil's advocate. If weapons are stored outside the hull, several new requirements arise. The weapons have to be protected from ambient sea pressure until ready to fire, because riding around for months on end at tens of atmospheres, down deep in corrosive salt water, is more than an Improved Mark 48 ADCAP torpedo or Tactical Tomahawk cruise missile is meant to bear. The weapons, whatever their physical arrangement, need to be enclosed in a streamlined casing of some sort, or else they'd create severe hydrodynamic drag and “singing” that would emit a telltale -- noisy -- acoustic signature and also reduce the ship's maximum speed. (Are we moving toward a double-hull design like long-standing Russian/Soviet practice? If so, are our cost savings quickly evaporating?) Lastly, even if the weapon-rounds themselves are “wooden,” i.e., meant to be free from any maintenance while on board, the hookups for data links and other required preambles to firing, plus the entire complicated firing mechanism itself, could create fatal problems in case of any malfunction that occurs outside the main hull. Today, at least, all these numerous items required to put torpedoes on target, and the supporting equipment that comes with each Tomahawk vertical launch system tube, are accessible to men in the torpedo room in a shirtsleeves environment.
3. Hull adaptable sonar array. This is a very promising area, since at present an SSN is equipped with several different sonar complexes each of which makes for awkwardness in ship equipment layout, and also in sonar blind spots. As just one example, the sonar dome within the soft nose of current SSNs makes the bow extremely vulnerable in case of collision or battle damage. (See photos released by the Navy of USS San Francisco's sonar dome while in dry dock after she hit an uncharted seamount.) If sensors could be integrated directly with high-yield steel, all around an SSN's hull, designers would have important new flexibility.
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