Navy to Scrap New Destroyer Plans In Favor of Building 'Family of Ships' By ANNE MARIE SQUEO Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Senior Pentagon and Navy officials are scrapping plans to build the service's DD-21 destroyer in favor of building a "family of ships" that are smaller, faster and more affordable, according to Pentagon and industry officials. The Pentagon and the Navy, as early as Wednesday, will announce they are asking the contractors currently competing for the DD-21 contract to return to the drawing board and quickly come up with a new ship that also can be adapted for missile-defense purposes as well as attacking closer to shore. Teams led by shipbuilders General Dynamics Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. have been vying for the DD-21 work since 1999 and likely will stay intact as they alter their proposals for the new criteria. A new request for industry proposals is expected to be released shortly, with a winner in the revised competition chosen in the spring of 2002, these people said. The decision to move forward with what is being called the "DD-X" comes after Pentagon officials in May forced the Navy to delay choosing a winner in the DD-21 competition. At the time, they cited the need to review the need for the new attack ship against the Bush Administration's goals of transforming the various services of the military to meet 21st-century challenges. "We know future requirements won't be met by a single class of ship," said one Pentagon official familiar with the decision. "We need common elements for a destroyer" that can be used elsewhere, the person said. The plan, in some ways, mirrors that of the recently announced Joint Strike Fighter, which adapted a mainly common design for the specific needs of the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. In this case, the DD-X would serve as the launch point for at least two other ships, according to Navy-prepared documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal. The hull designed for the destroyer also can serve as the basis for a ship that will cart the Navy's missile-intercept system to a potential battle scene. Meanwhile, the technologies developed for the destroyer could be applied to a combat ship that is intended to get closer to shore than the big destroyers used today. Under the revised timeline, construction of the first DD-X ship is expected to begin in 2005 and enter the fleet several years later. According to the Navy budget request submitted recently to senior Pentagon officials, $103 million will be allotted for this new DD-X program in fiscal 2003, while a total of about $3 billion is sought over the next five years, according to another Navy document.
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Not sure how this will effect SATC. Most likely it may delay deployment of the drive technology that they are working on. See linked post.
Jim |
