By Ben Ames
WASHINGTON — For 20 years, Aegis has been the gold standard for maritime warfighting electronics, installed aboard dozens of American cruisers and destroyers. Now its reign may be over.
Navy planners are asking for two different prototypes of Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the multimission warship designed to cruise shallow waters close to shore. Neither will use Aegis, which represents the core air-defense sensor and weapons systems for the Navy's Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Arleigh Burke–class destroyers.
Instead, a Lockheed Martin team will tap its Aegis expertise to deploy COMBATSS-21, an acronym for component-based total-ship system. A General Dynamics team, meanwhile, is enlisting partners to help build the Core Mission Systems infrastructure.
Both the Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics teams say their systems will rely on open architecture and commercial off-the-self (COTS) components. Team members say they will use the latest commercial software and enable simple, frequent hardware upgrades. Both teams are relying on software reuse to borrow components from a handful of other weapons and command systems.
The similarities end there.
The Lockheed Martin vessel is a semi-planing monohull about the size of an Oliver Hazard Perry–class frigate, while the General Dynamics version is a three-hulled catamaran, roughly comparable in size to an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer.
The challenge
For both teams, the LCS C4ISR system (command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) presents a difficult challenge.
Navy planners need a fast ship that can perform different missions simply by swapping interchangeable equipment modules. A single LCS must be able to perform antisubmarine warfare, surface warfare against small ships, mine detection, and special-operations missions.
That means the onboard C4ISR must network with a huge variety of unmanned vehicles, distributed sensors, shore teams, and the Navy ForceNet web of other ships, planes, and satellites.
Navy leaders expect a finished LCS by late 2006. They have extended separate contract options for Lockheed Martin and the General Dynamics Bath Iron Works division in Bath, Maine, to build "Flight 0" ships.
The Lockheed Martin contract is for $46 million ($423 million with options) for the company's Maritime Systems and Sensors division of Moorestown, N.J., to deliver one ship in late 2006 and another in 2008. The General Dynamics contract is a $78-million deal ($536 million with options) with Bath Iron Works to build one ship by 2008 and another by 2009. Navy leaders could order as many as 60 ships over the lifetime of the LCS project.
The deal is surprising since it breaks up the venerable team of Lockheed Martin and Bath Iron Works that has built dozens of Aegis-enabled Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Arleigh Burke–class destroyers over the past 20 years.
Now Lockheed Martin will use hulls from Marinette Marine of Marinette, Wis., (for the first ship) and Bollinger Shipyards, of Lockport, La. General Dynamics must build a whole new system.
The Lockheed Martin plan
Engineers from the Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems and Sensors division in Moorestown, N.J., started with a proprietary Aegis core, rebuilt it with an open architecture, and started adding components from other systems.
Lockheed Martin engineers picked up software code from the Integrated Combat Weapons System (ICWS) aboard the high-speed vessel USS Swift (HSV 2) and from the Ship Self-Defense System (SSDS).
SSDS is a Raytheon combat system that integrates all the sensors and weapons systems aboard non-Aegis vessels for cruise-missile defense. The Swift, meanwhile, is a fast catamaran-shaped aluminum mine-countermeasures ship built by Australian shipbuilder Incat/Bollinger.
Lockheed Martin engineers also upgraded the system's Aegis command-and-decision (C&D) system to Open C&D, and made sure the final product agreed with standards such as Navy Open Architecture and ForceNet — Pentagon initiatives to integrate naval, air, and space electronics into a shared battlefield network.
"It is based on our experiments with small-ship command-and-control systems in the 1990s. It features open architecture and uses commercial computer parts, so it has the ability to quickly integrate components like the radar, launcher, and guns," says Keith Mordoff, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin.
"One of the main goals was to design, develop, and deploy a command-and-control system both fast and cheap. So we've been able to integrate and test the system in months — not years — by integrating existing architecture through code reuse," he says. "There's some Aegis stuff in there, but also a lot that's borrowed from other platforms."
Navy sailors have already tested early versions of COMBATTS. Lockheed Martin engineers tested the conglomerate system by installing it aboard Sea Slice, an experimental, 104-foot, four-hulled Navy catamaran.
Sea Slice participated in Fleet Battle Experiment Juliet, a joint service exercise in July 2002. The ship's role was to imitate the future LCS, and demonstrate Navy requirements such as the ability to quickly add different modules for new missions, updating the craft's toolbox for a new battle task each time. Sailors used COMBATTS to run the ship's radar, Identify Friend or Foe (IFF) system, NetFires missiles, and Millennium Gun.
The Lockheed Martin engineers also tested earlier versions of COMBATTS aboard the Swift when the vessel deployed to the Persian Gulf in 2002.
After that deployment, Lockheed Martin designers improved the system to handle 3D radar, the Mk3 57-millimeter gun, and ICWS Plus, which includes a control suite to handle the LCS suite of off-board vehicles, such as helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles, and remote mine hunters, Mordoff says.
The team demonstrated the updated COMBATTS for Navy planners in January and June 2004. Next, team members plan to integrate more components from SSDS into COMBATTS-21, enabling it to control the Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) launcher, another defense against cruise missiles.
The changes won't take long. "We start cutting metal in February, so this will all be happening soon," Mordoff says.
The General Dynamics plan
The General Dynamics version of LCS will use a Core Mission Systems infrastructure that relies on open architecture and net-centric design. That will ensure a low lifecycle cost for Navy computer engineers because they will be able to easily upgrade components, a company announcement claimed.
The approach relies on contributions from five business groups. Prime contractor Bath Iron Works chose its sister company, General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems group, of Pittsfield, Mass., as the integrator to unite them.
Members of the Bath Iron Works/General Dynamics team include:
- BAE Systems Applied Technologies Inc., Rockville, Md., to build the ship's internal and external communications systems, as well as topside antenna modeling and mission module-interface coordination;
- CAE USA Inc., Marine Systems, Leesburg, Va., to be responsible for the ship automation and control system;
- Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems, Baltimore, to be responsible for the Integrated Combat Management System (ICMS);
- General Dynamics Armament and Technical Products, Charlotte, N.C., to be responsible for all of the weapons and effectors; and
- General Dynamics Canada, Ottawa, to be responsible for the above- and below-water sensors.
Engineers at Advanced Information Systems have been working for two years on the system, a flexible information-technology backbone that allows "plug and play" integration of custom-designed, robust mission modules, the announcement states.
Their approach builds on the General Dynamics Total Ship Computing Environment, a system that includes net-centric naval-combat management, real-time command and control, command support, and integrated shipboard sensors and weapons.
It also includes Northrop Grumman's ICMS, which is the U.S. version of the TACTICOS combat-management system, currently installed onboard more than 80 naval ships from 11 countries.
The Total Ship Computing Environment meets Navy Open Architecture requirements, and is designed to reduce cost by using industry standards and nonproprietary interfaces.
General Dynamics planners say that mix of modern-computing technologies and commercial middleware will eliminate dependence on relatively old infrastructures, provide flexibility for sailors, reduce staffing requirements, and seamlessly connect LCS to the Navy's network-centric warfare vision.
"Our ability to identify, qualify, and select the most capable team members to contribute to this system is a key differentiator of our information-technology proposal for the LCS," says Mike Tweed-Kent, vice president and general manager of maritime digital systems for General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems.
"Our design and our team philosophy created an infrastructure that allows hardware and software manufacturers to easily interface their products, delivering the lowest-cost, lowest-risk LCS approach to Navy for both the current phase and for future spirals. Our approach allows the best-of-the-best to combine forces, and the Navy reaps the rewards."
Engineers can easily insert new technology into this system thanks to two factors — its open architecture, and the large power supply and storage volume provided by General Dynamics' unique ship design.
