Column: How not to build a ship: the USS Ford

The Navy’s next-generation aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, is a monument to the Navy’s and defense industry’s ability to justify spending billions on unproven technologies that often deliver worse performance at a higher cost.

The Ford program also provides yet another example of the dangers of the Navy and industry end-running the rigorous combat testing that is essential to ensuring we go to war with equipment that works.

The Navy had expected to have the ship delivered in 2014 at a cost of $10.5 billion.

Instead, because the Navy tried to develop more than a dozen new and risky technologies at the same time it was building the ship, the schedule has slipped by more than three years.

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And, the cost has increased to $12.9 billion -- nearly 25 percent over budget.

For all this time and money, a 2015 Defense Department operational testing report concluded that “poor or unknown reliability” of the newly designed catapults, arresting gear, weapons elevators and radar could affect the Ford’s ability to generate sorties, make the ship more vulnerable to attack, or create limitations during routine operations.

Failure to Launch

The problems with the ship’s systems, including the catapult, are well-known.

But President Donald Trump still caught virtually every Pentagon watcher off guard when he told Time magazine in May that he had directed the Navy to abandon the new “digital” aircraft catapult on future Ford-class carriers.

Instead he wants the Navy to revert to the proven steam catapults, which have been in use for decades.

The president is correct when he says there are significant problems with the Ford’s “digital” catapult, but abandoning it in future ships will pose significant problems.

The Ford’s “digital” catapult is, in fact, the Electromagnetic Launch System, or EMALS.

In the long run, it is intended to be lighter, more reliable, and less expensive than the steam system. Unfortunately, EMALS is immature technology. So far, the program has not lived up to the promises made.

Steam-powered catapults, though said to be maintenance-intensive, are proven technology. They have been in service with continuous upgrades and satisfactory reliability for more than half a century.

The new EMALS stores an enormous electrical charge -- enough to power 12,000 homes for three seconds -- and then quickly releases the current into massive electromagnets that push the shuttle down the track.

Testing has already revealed that the Navy underestimated the workload and the number of people necessary to operate the system. As a result, the Navy has to redesign some berthing areas to accommodate more people.

It was also supposed to increase the lifespan of aircraft by putting less stress on their airframes. Unfortunately, recent tests of land-based prototypes showed that the system actually overstressed F-18 airframes during launch.

Perhaps even more serious is that the design makes it impossible for the crew to repair a catapult while the ship is launching planes with other catapults. This is done as a matter of routine on current carriers as each catapult operates independently of the other.

The Navy has found there is no way to electrically isolate each EMALS catapult from the others during flight operations.

This means that repairing the failed catapult must wait until all flight operations have been completed, or, in the event that multiple launchers fail, all flights may have to be suspended to allow repairs.

This problem is particularly acute because the EMALS has a poor reliability track record. The system thus far fails about once every 400 launches.

That’s 10 times worse than the 4,166 launches between failures the system is supposed to achieve by contract.

At least four days of rapid-fire combat flights are to be expected at the beginning of any major conflict. At the current failure rate, there is only a 7 percent chance that the USS Ford could complete a four-day flight surge without a launch failure.

The decision to pursue immature EMALS technology has been a boon to contractors, particularly San Diego-based General Atomics.

With only a nuclear fusion magnetics background and no previous experience in carrier catapults, the company won the EMALS System development and demonstration contract in 2004. At the time, the contract was valued at $145 million.

This figure has predictably ballooned over the years as risky, not-yet-realized technology programs tend to do. The most recent figures show that the Navy will have spent approximately $958.9 million simply to develop this one component -- and more may be required to correct deficiencies.

The cost to build and install is another thing entirely. In January, the Navy awarded General Atomics another $532 million contract to install the system on the third-in-class Ford-class carrier, the USS Enterprise.

And although EMALS is problem-ridden and enormously expensive, replacing it with the proven steam catapult substitute would likely be more.

It would require a complete redesign of the nuclear reactor plant’s steam generating system. Because the Navy planned the Ford to be an electric ship, the reactor was not designed to produce service steam for major ship systems.

Furthermore, installing four new steam-powered catapult tracks would require a complete redesign of the supporting deck structure. The cost of both would be staggering and the delay may be upwards of two to three years.

Arresting System

Of course, launching a fighter jet over the bow of the carrier is only one part of the equation. The jets also need to land, which is another very large challenge on a moving ship.

Instead of rolling out to a conventional stop, a plane landing on an aircraft carrier has to catch a cable on the flight deck with a hook attached to the plane to bring it to a halt on the relatively short deck.

As it did with the catapult, the Navy decided to use unproven technology for the Ford’s electrical arresting system and it has proven to be more of a challenge than the Navy expected.

Navies around the world have been using arresting systems for more than a century to land aircraft on ships

The U.S. Navy currently uses a hydraulically braked arresting system called the MK 7. When the hook on the landing aircraft catches one of the cables on the deck, the cables are braked by an engine inside the ship.

In order to get increased funding for the Ford program, the Navy chose to an entirely new and untested electrical system, called the Advanced Arresting Gear, or AAG.

The original 2005 estimate for development alone was $172 million. It was revised upwards in 2009 to $364 million and has now ballooned to well over $1.3 billion.

The new arresting gear is also built by General Atomics, and, as with the EMALS, the company doesn’t have any prior arresting gear experience.

The AAG is based on a “water twister,” a paddlewheel inside a cylinder of water.

When spun by the pull of the deck cable, the paddlewheel uses the resistance of the water to absorb 70 percent of the energy of the landing plane and bring it to a stop—with additional braking forces provided by a very large electric motor.

At least that is how it is supposed to work.

The Defense Department inspector general concluded that the entire program has been mismanaged.

“Ten years after the program entered the engineering and manufacturing development phase, the Navy has not been able to prove the capability or safety of the system to a level that would permit actual testing of the system on an aircraft carrier,” a July 2016 report said.

Test personnel found damage due to insufficient strength of several subcomponents inside the water twister following developmental tests in 2012.

The water twister required two years of “significant redesign.” The first land-based aircraft tests occurred in 2016.

Separately, earlier failed tests revealed damage to the AAG’s cable shock absorber, which was also reportedly corrected.

Nevertheless, the latest reliability results show only 25 landings between operational mission failures of the AAG. That’s 660 times fewer than the Navy’s requirement of 16,500.

This makes it utterly impossible for the Ford to meet its surge sortie rate requirements. And, in an astonishing design oversight exactly like that of the EMALS, General Atomics engineers made it impossible to repair AAG failures without shutting down flight operations.

Even after spending an estimated $1.3 billion, the ability to correct the AAG’s dangerous unreliability remains so uncertain that the Navy cannot yet commit to a schedule for at-sea testing of it.

Problems with the AAG are so bad that the Department of Defense asked the Navy to study shelving the idea completely for the follow-on ships in favor of an enhanced version of the proven MK-7 system currently in service.

However, recommending to drop the AAG after spending $1.3 billion would have been a major admission of failure. Unsurprisingly, the Navy decided to stick with the AAG and push forward with plans to install it aboard the second Ford-class ship, the USS John F. Kennedy.

That decision may be overturned now that the Navy has had to report the AAG program’s costs exceed its 2009 estimate by at least 50 percent, triggering an automatic review.

Of course it is extremely rare for any program to actually be cancelled by such means.

As acknowledged in Fitzgerald’s First Law of defense acquisition: There are only two phases of a program. The first is “It’s too early to tell.” The second: “It’s too late to stop.”

Electrical Problems

To feed massive electrical demands, as well as the ship’s expanded electronics, the Ford’s four generators were designed to provide three times the electrical power provided by the eight generators on Nimitz-class carriers.

These new ultra-high voltages pose substantial risks, such as increased electrical arcing and failure rates, particularly in humid salt atmospheres.

They are also much more fragile than legacy systems, which can make the ship far easier to cripple in battle. The possibility that these risks could require substantial ship modification or render the Ford unsuitable for combat cannot be assessed until the completion of operational testing in 2020.

The Ford-class ships will be equipped with two newly developed Bechtel A1B nuclear reactors that together will generate approximately 25 percent more total thermal power and 300 percent more electrical power than the Nimitz’s A4B reactors.

In the hopes of reducing the reactor operating manpower by two-thirds, the new reactors will halve the control valves, pumps, and piping and will be far more dependent on control automation than legacy reactors.

The relatively inflexible automation and grossly reduced manning may significantly reduce the Ford’s ability to operate and survive in the face of battle damage.

Underscoring this risk, the Ford suffered a small electrical explosion on one generator in June 2016. This was followed in July by another similar event in a second generator.

Fixing the damage is expected to cost approximately $37 million. As a temporary fix to prevent yet more delays to commissioning and in order to resume testing, the rotors inside both generators were replaced.

But, according to the Navy, generator No. 2 will have to complete additional “full repairs” after it is commissioned. These full repairs may be quite extensive.

This means that the USS Ford will be commissioned and put into active service with only a temporarily repaired electrical system.

Shock trials

All of these systems have yet to be pitted against perhaps the biggest testing challenge any new Navy ship must face: full ship shock trials.

These critical tests discover whether each new ship class is suitable for combat. Explosives are detonated underwater to learn if the ship’s systems are sufficiently hardened to carry out missions in the rigors of combat conditions, and if the crew would be able to rapidly fix any problems.

Navy rules used to require the first-in-class ship to go through shock trials. Despite the obvious importance of verifying shock-hardening, the Navy changed its rules in 2013.

In June 2012, the Navy attempted to abandon its plans to conduct full ship shock trials on the Ford, claiming that EMALS and AAG were shock hardened by design.

The Navy announced its intention to conduct the shock trials on the second-in-class ship, the USS John F. Kennedy.

There was resistance Pentagon’s director of testing and senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In the end, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work, under pressure from Senate, overruled the Navy and ordered the USS Ford to undergo shock trials.

The decision to test the Ford as originally required was a clear—though unfortunately reversible—victory for long-time advocates of realistic combat and live-fire testing.

Actual utility of aircraft carriers

Plenty of frank commentators have questioned in recent years whether the day of the supercarrier has passed.

The wisdom of investing such a large amount of capital into a single weapon system deserves scrutiny. There is the basic matter of battlespace economics.

The USS Ford costs nearly $13 billion so far. In a few years, she will likely carry at least 50 F-35C fighters. Conservatively, each aircraft will have a real cost of $185 million.

That’s a total of $9.25 billion worth of strike aircraft concentrated on one ship. That means this one ship when underway will be worth at least $22.25 billion, to say nothing of the 4,297 sailors on board.

That is putting a great deal of proverbial eggs in a single basket.

Today the Navy’s carriers are almost constantly in the news as presidents use them as a symbol of strength anytime there is a potential hotspot around the world. They have become, in effect, a very expensive version of gunboat diplomacy.

Potential adversaries have been developing weapons to keep U.S. aircraft carriers from getting close enough to bomb their territory.

Most potential adversaries have large fleets of diesel-electric subs: North Korea has approximately 70; China has approximately 50; Russia has 18 (plus 22 nuclear attack submarines); and even Iran has 20.

Clearly, they decided years ago that subs would be their best bet for neutralizing or sinking American carriers. Thirty years of Navy fleet exercise results bear them out.

An Australian Collins-class submarine penetrated a U.S. carrier battlegroup and was in a position to sink an aircraft carrier during exercises off Hawaii in May 2000, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

There have been many such exercise “sinkings” since then, including aircraft carriers Reagan and Lincoln.

A possibly greater carrier threat is the sea-skimming anti-ship missile. Essentially every potential U.S. adversary has substantial quantities of these in versions launched from patrol boats, warships, jet fighters, truck launchers, subs and even merchant ships.

No matter what kind of missile is being used, it makes much more economic sense to defend against an aircraft carrier than to build one.

Since missiles and torpedoes cost significantly less than the carrier and its planes, a determined foe would likely do everything in its power to launch a saturation attack.

Sinking $22.25 billion with $1 million—or even with $20 million—is a good return on investment.

Conclusion

The Ford-class carrier program is in much deeper trouble than the Navy and the Defense Department are willing to admit.

As further testing reveals further serious deficiencies, cost overruns will balloon and promised combat capabilities will shrink.

There is the very real possibility that, as currently configured, the Ford will prove to be unsuitable for combat.

Dan Grazier is a fellow at the Project on Government Oversight and Pierre Sprey is a contributor. A longer version of this column is available at the POGO website.

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