
DATE: Wednesday, October 15, 1997           TAG: 9710140419

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Special Report: The Changing Face of the Navy Sailor 

SERIES: Future of the Fleet 

SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  325 lines

THE NEW NAVY SMARTER SHIPS, SMALLER CREWS

Through 12 years and six ships, Petty Officer 2nd Class Dave Woods has seen a lot of the U.S. Navy. But nothing compares to his past year aboard the cruiser Yorktown, the service's first ``Smart Ship.''

The muscular Baltimore native holds a job - signalman - often regarded as among the most mind-numbing in the Navy. Lately though, he's been doing the work of nine sailors, at times even acting as a navigator on the 567-foot ship.

And he loves it.

``I've got five other ones to compare it to, and this is a good deal,'' a grinning Woods said as he stood on the Yorktown's helicopter pad.

Woods is what Navy leaders say tomorrow's sailor will look like - a careerist with a wide range of skills and the drive to learn more. And the Yorktown hints at the warship of the future, its crew pared down and its navigation, engineering and damage assessment systems monitored or controlled by computer software.

Woods is learning to plot the cruiser's course on a computer, using a version of Microsoft Windows that runs a program with maps of every waterway on Earth. The video charts are so detailed they can be ordered to show each pier at Norfolk Naval Station, where the Pascagoula, Miss.-based Yorktown pulled in for a visit in mid-September.

From the bridge, or from the Yorktown's engineering control room, the ship can be steered to any spot on the globe with the touch of a finger on a computer screen. Signals from a satellite tell the Yorktown's computer the ship's exact position every 15 seconds, and the program adjusts the helm to keep the ship on course.

There used to be a lot of make-work aboard the Yorktown, Woods said. Watches were stood, even when there was really nothing to watch, because Navy policy or custom required it. Equipment was torn down and rebuilt, or at least opened for inspection, not because it was malfunctioning but because a long-standing tradition dictated it.

But since the Navy launched the Smart Ship program in 1995, installing about $8 million in new sensors, computer and communication systems on the Yorktown - and giving the crew freedom to experiment with different ways of organizing and doing its work - the ship has been transformed.

Where 10 sailors once stood a standard watch on the bridge, three work today; where up to 13 stood watch in engineering, there are four. Sailors not part of these ``core watches'' may be on ``flex teams,'' assigned to respond to problems as needed, or part of a ``day-worker'' force that handles many of the routine maintenance chores formerly assigned to watch-standers.

``It takes a lot of the mundane away,'' Woods said. Sailors ``feel like what you're doing is actually running something.''

Navy leaders say the lessons they are learning aboard Yorktown can be applied to carriers, amphibious ships, indeed any kind of vessel, but acknowledge that not everything they've tried has worked. More than a year after their installation, some of the computer systems still crash on occasion, as Yorktown's machinery controls did during a recent visit to Hampton Roads.

The computer turned the ship's four gas turbines off that night, briefly leaving Yorktown dead in the water. But sailors diagnosed the problem within minutes and the ship pulled into Norfolk the next morning so that the software contractor's technical experts could look things over.

Computer systems that plot the Yorktown's course and control the helm, monitor and control the operation of its engineering plant, and help manage damage-control systems were installed in about 20 days, said Cmdr. Richard Rushton, the ship's skipper when the work was done last year.

``We had to put them in the ship to find the problems,'' he said.

Automated systems like the Yorktown's have been used for years on commercial container ships and tankers, many of which go to sea for months with crews of a few dozen sailors. Computer maps and positioning software similar to those it uses are even being installed in some new cars to help drivers navigate the highways.

But until the advent of the Smart Ship, the Navy preferred to rely on people power to guide, run and maintain its vessels.

For as long as anyone can remember, the first instinct of Navy leaders has been that if ``you had a problem, you added another body (on the bridge) to do something,'' said Capt. Carl E. Garrett Jr., an assistant chief of staff for the Navy's Atlantic Fleet Surface Force.

``I probably will get blasted for this, (but) our answer was to throw people at the problem. Because you know what we thought? People were free.

``Well, all of a sudden people are the most expensive thing we own. So we've got to get smarter about the way you use your people.''

Doing that is not only cost-effective, but acknowledges the evolution that sailors have undergone, said Rear Adm. Daniel J. Murphy, director of plans and policy for the Navy's surface force.

``We're getting much better-quality people,'' he explained. ``We're paying them better. We want to get the tedium out of the ship.

``The first major step toward doing that is by using sensors and remote controls and condition-based maintenance to have computers and machines do what people used to do by walk-around observation.''

Murphy sees Yorktown pointing the way toward a surface fleet that is smaller and manned by far fewer sailors, but is dozens of times more lethal than today's cruisers and destroyers.

He shies from the comparison - the surface Navy has always been the most conservative branch of a conservative service - but it is not unreasonable to suggest that the ships Murphy is planning could replace aircraft carriers as the centerpiece of American naval power.

The Yorktown steams today with a crew that is more than 10 percent smaller than the usual complement of 380 carried by a Ticonderoga-class cruiser. Forty-four enlisted sailors and four officers formerly assigned to the ship have gotten jobs on other vessels or ashore, their tasks on Yorktown either abolished or taken over by computer-assisted machinery.

They could have cut more, said former skipper Rushton, now a student at the National Defense University in Washington. ``There is plenty of room there.''

So Murphy and other Navy leaders are working on a next-generation destroyer that will carry a crew of no more than 95 and be substantially larger than the ships it will replace.

Elsewhere in the Pentagon, planners are working on a next-generation aircraft carrier that some early reports suggest will go to sea with only about 3,000 sailors and airmen - roughly half the number on today's flattops. Also under development is the first in a new series of amphibious assault ships, LPD 17, which is to have a crew of around 500, fewer than half as many sailors as today's ``gators.''

Murphy promises that his ``land attack destroyer,'' the first of which is to join the fleet around 2008, ``will be as dramatically different from the ships in the force today as the Monitor was from the sailing ships that were in its timeframe a century and a half ago.''

Each of the new ships will deploy for two, perhaps three years at a time, with replacement crews ferried out every six months so that the Navy can keep its commitment to limit sailors' time away from home.

The new ships also will have ``submarine-like survivability,'' Murphy said. They will ride low in the water - like the Monitor - and be built using materials and coatings that will disguise them from even the most sophisticated enemy sensors.

At sea, ``you're seeing not with the naked eye today, you're seeing with sensors,'' Murphy said. ``This ship will have such a small radiated cross-section, whether it's from radar, optical, acoustic . . . that it will indeed be in roughly the same category as a submarine.

``(That) means you'll have to get real close to it to know that it's there and to target it. And by getting that close to it, the targeting platform places itself in serious jeopardy.''

Perhaps most important, the ships will carry an assortment of precision missiles and vertical guns able to fire rocket-aided and computer-guided shells to targets up to 100 miles away. A 5-inch gun on today's cruisers and destroyers can hurl a shell only about 12 miles and has no ability to guide it once it leaves the barrel.

Already being developed under Murphy's tutelege is a new version of today's 5-inch gun, able to fire a projectile up to 70 miles and, he said, ``drop it in the space the size of this office every single time.''

The gun has been test-fired at the White Sands Missile Range, near Las Cruces, N.M., Murphy said, and within 12 seconds of leaving the barrel its projectile picked up a guidance signal from a satellite 200 miles above. Within two years, he expects firings in which the satellite will direct the shell to the target.

The new gun's rounds were originally projected to cost $40,000 each, but Murphy said the use of commercially available guidance software, adapted for military use, has lowered that to $18,000 per shot; he expects the cost to be less than $10,000 per round by the time the gun is deployed.

That would make the new rounds no more expensive, and just as accurate, as bombs delivered from the Navy's new F/A-18 ``Super Hornet'' fighters. Those planes will cost $70 million or more apiece and in battle will have to operate against sophisticated air defense systems, putting man and machine at risk.

Murphy expects the new 5-inch gun to be followed by a vertical gun that will be mounted flush with the ship's deck, another radar-signature reducer, and be able to fire a rocket-propelled shell up to 200 miles. That gun is to have an automatic magazine, for rapid and safe firing.

``The traditional way that we have operated guns is a nonstarter. We can't have people loading ammunition and training guns and double-checking the mechanics and the hydraulics. This thing has to operate independently,'' Murphy said.

With the blessing of his boss, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jay L. Johnson, Murphy and his staff have rewritten the surface Navy's budget to shift more than $3 billion into planning for the new destroyer and its weapons systems as well as for Yorktown-like upgrades of existing ships.

They are retiring old frigates, unsuitable for those improvements, and pressing ahead - despite anemic support in Congress - to build a ``Maritime Fire Support Demonstrator'' that soon after the turn of the century will serve as a test bed for systems to be used on the new destroyer.

The demonstrator, originally dubbed the ``arsenal ship,'' is to be equipped with up to 500 missile tubes and manned by a crew of about 20.

With the help of computers and electronic sensors, its sailors will monitor the demonstrator's mechanical and weapons systems, do routine maintenance, and drive the ship from place to place.

But most of the real work, and all of the warfighting, is to be done by computer software. Computers will launch and steer the ship's missiles and fire its guns on command from other ships or forces ashore or in the air; computers will run fire-supression and damage-control systems that will set off sprinklers to put out fires or automatically seal bulkheads to keep a wounded ship afloat.

Goals that a year ago ``I thought were wildly aggressive, are going to be met in the demonstrator,'' Murphy promises.

The key to the design, operation and manning of future ships, indeed to future military forces of all types, may be in what Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, the Navy's most prominent futurist, calls ``the power of information.''

Cebrowski is the Navy's chief guru for ``network-centric warfare,'' a concept that aims to use the world's rapidly-expanding communications networks to link ships to one another and to U.S. forces in the air and on the ground. It is ``the most basic and fundamental revolution'' in thinking about warfare since the Napoleonic era, he argued in an interview.

While others in uniform study the tactics of the old Red Army or the Israeli special forces, Cebrowski looks to innovations in American business for clues as to how the Navy should position itself for the next century.

``If you want to see where the military is going, take a careful look at areas in society,'' Cebrowski said. ``How can you have plants at full capacity, record low unemployment and no inflation? What is it that's powering that?

``Pull some of the pieces on that and you find that last year one-third of the growth in (America's) gross domestic product was owed to the information technology sector of industry, which is only 3 percent of industry.''

Cebrowski suggests that the information sector is able to pull the rest of the economy along with it because of the growth of information networks, linking computers and the data they hold all over the globe. Those networks let businesses stay in constant touch with their customers, timing the marketing and delivery of goods and services for exactly when they're needed. They can do the same, will do the same, for the delivery of warfare, he argues.

``If the technologies have changed, if the underlying economics have changed, if the business of America has changed, then wouldn't it be naive to suppose the military wouldn't?'' Cebrowski asks.

Cebrowski envisions a Navy of ships that act as nodes in a giant warfare database, able to see what the enemy is doing or about to do and to react to it precisely and instantaneously.

Some U.S. ships already are being equipped with a ``Cooperative Engagement Capability'' that hints at what he's after. They have computers able to track incoming missiles and air traffic in a coordinated way, providing each skipper with a common picture of the whole battlefield, not just his portion.

And that picture is provided live, so that the American response can be directed to where the enemy is - not where he was a few hours, or even a few seconds, before.

During peacetime, Navy leaders intend to use that same power and connectivity to make ships run more efficiently with fewer sailors, again building on the Yorktown's example.

Through a ``Smart Base'' being developed in Pascagoula, the Navy will experiment with the kind of on-time delivery of goods to its ships that has let manufacturers and retailers like Ford Motor Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. reduce their inventories and thus cut costs.

Murphy looks toward a time - within the next decade - when a sailor at sea, opening a can of paint and passing it by a bar-code reader, will automatically trigger an order for a replacement can from a distributor ashore. The distributor's computer will time the shipment of the new paint to arrive at pierside as the ship pulls in for its next port visit.

Continuous connections to shore facilities also will help the Navy cut today's huge investment in specialized training for its senior enlisted members, said Rushton, the Yorktown's former skipper.

Ships go to sea today with chief petty officers who are able to tear down and completely rebuild much of their equipment without help from ashore. That made good sense when there was no way to call for help, Rushton suggested.

But the explosion of communication links between ships and shore facilities should mean that tomorrow's ships can sail with fewer technical experts and more generalists, sailors able to show shipborne problems to experts ashore and take directions on fixing them via a live television hook-up.

``What I need in my (future) Navy is three or four super-technicians on shore vs. having a supertechnician on every ship out there. . . '' Garrett said.

``No longer can you take a young sailor, give him four weeks of schooling and expect him to fix this complex gear. We're talking about a guy who needs years and years of schooling, plus years and years of experience.

``I've got 130 ships in the Atlantic Fleet. I can't afford 130 techs.''

Rushton argues that even if tomorrow's ships will need fewer experts, their sailors will require better training. For every sailor taken off Yorktown, someone remaining aboard had to have at least some knowledge of the departed shipmate's job and the ability to do it if called on.

``You can't take as many weak sisters,'' Rushton said.

Rushton and Yorktown's crew created a training department, a first for a Navy ship, to run regular classes. Where a sailor coming straight to the Yorktown from boot camp once needed six months or so to pick up basic damage control skills and get qualified to stand in-port watches, he now gets them within his first four weeks.

While having fewer sailors means those who remain must have a broader base of skills, it shouldn't mean they must work harder, Rushton said. Yorktown's restructuring and the installation of a system of computer-monitored sensors produced a 46 percent reduction in routine maintenance; the ship cut the number of sailors assigned to damage control almost in half, from 124 to 64, without any reduction in the number of firefighters, just by reorganizing.

A Navy assessment team that evaluated Yorktown concluded that the changes actually gave those who stayed aboard more free time. The creation of a day-labor force to do most routine jobs, Rushton said, gave sailors in those billets a 7 a.m.-to-5 p.m. workday, leaving many ``a couple of hours to watch a movie'' most evenings.

``If you don't invest in training, the whole thing falls like a house of cards,'' he added.

And the drudgery known to generations of sailors remains a major part of life for some aboard Yorktown. George Hegamin, a boatswain's mate 3rd class from Philadelphia, said that with so many of his former shipmates gone, he and others in the ship's general detail must do more paint chipping and repainting, more deck-scrubbing, than ever.

There are smaller watches and more time for training than before, Hegamin acknowledged. But he figures that if the Yorktown ever really sailed into harm's way, the officers would order a return to the old watch schedule, not trusting the machines and software to perform when lives are at stake.

Greeting visitors aboard his cruiser, the Vella Gulf, parked two piers over from the Yorktown one day in September, Capt. James ``Stretch'' Phillips mused aloud about why the Navy waited until recently to try something like the Smart Ship.

The service gives skippers considerable freedom to decide how their bridges and watches should be manned, Phillips said. But a caution has been instilled in those commanders and captains throughout the service, a sense ``that if you go ahead and do it, you may find someone to disagree with you.''

That's not all bad, said Rushton, because many of the Navy's customs and policies continue to make good sense. But ``it's time to revisit virtually everything we do and why we do it and how we do it,'' he added.

Rushton agrees that making the Navy's middle managers convert to change is the service's biggest challenge. They ``have to be told to take reasonable risks,'' he said.

Given freedom by his bosses to ``lean into the wind pretty far,'' Rushton initially cut Yorktown's crew by 56 enlisted and 4 officers. But before the ship was cleared for permanent duty by the Navy's Operational Test and Evaluation Force, 12 of the enlisted billets were restored.

Even if it's less than he might like, ``it's a good, conservative first step,'' Rushton said.

And radioman Woods, for one, is eager to take the next step. ``You like to have something to go home and brag to the neighbors about,'' he said.

``This gives you something to brag about.''

Next Wednesday: The Navy's emerging efforts to use technological advances to gain information superiority. ILLUSTRATION: Color Pentagon Photo

Computer help Petty Officer 2nd Class Cleveland C. Daniels...

Photo by Ian Martin/The Virginian-Pilot

Yorktown...

Photo

The Maritime Fire Support Demonstrator...

Petty Officer 1st Class Michael Clairain... KEYWORDS: U.S.NAVY SERIES