LPD 17 readies for Oct. '04 sea trials: amphibious assault ship design stresses quality of life for sailors, Marines.

Taking shape at a shipyard on the Mississippi River near New Orleans is the first of a new class of U.S. amphibious assault ships.

The USS San Antonio (LPD 17)--christened in July at Northrop Grumman Ship Systems' Avondale Operations--will include improved war-fighting technologies, such as an advanced command and control suite, increased life capacity and enhanced ship survivability features.

For the vessel's crew of 360 sailors and 720 embarked Marines, however, the most important improvements, on a day-to-day basis at least, may be the creature comforts built into the ship.

In designing the San Antonio, "we emphasized quality of life all across the board," Art Divens, executive director for amphibious and auxiliary ships at the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, D.C., told National Defense.

The Navy and Marine Corps have been conducting amphibious operations since 1776, when they raided the port of Nassau in the Bahama Islands, which were then part of the British Empire.

Amphibious assault ships--designed specifically to send combat troops and heavy fighting equipment ashore under enemy fire--were intended for moving forces quickly across oceans and onto hostile beaches, not for the six-month cruises conducted by today's amphibious readiness groups. As a result, shipboard living conditions always have been austere, particularly for the Marines, officials said.

"On the amphibious ship that I served on when I was a midshipman, the Marine Corps berthing was four, five and six racks high," said Rear Adm. Charles Hamilton, NavSea's program executive officer for ships. "We stacked them like cord wood."

Conditions on today's ships haven't changed much, said retired Marine Maj. Gen. William Whitlow, former director of expeditionary warfare for the chief of naval operations. Each Marine has about 18 inches of space, he said. "That's enough to slip into bed and turn over, but not enough to sit up and comfortably read a book."

In summertime, the heat becomes a serious problem, particularly in the Persian Gulf, where temperatures can rise above 125 degrees Fahrenheit, said Whitlow. "We had to treat a lot of Marines for rashes. The heat is absolutely brutal.

The San Antonio is designed to overcome these and other quality-of-life issues, Divens said. For the first time, he said, berthing spaces will be identical for embarked troops and ship's crew. The only difference is that Marine spaces will have lockers for rifles and packs, and adjacent armories for storage of heavier weapons. In older ships, packs and weapons are stored in remote storerooms and armories.

Berthing compartments also will have lounges nearby. Personnel will have room to sit up in their bunks to read or write on portable surfaces. Each berth will have 40 percent more storage space, including:

* An individual ventilation fan.

* Electrical outlets and lighting for reading.

* A small shelf to hold an alarm dock or personal photos.

* A pan locker beneath the bunk for storage of personal items.

* A separate stowage area for boots and helmets.

* Stirrup steps to avoid stepping upon shipmates' pillows.

* Individual towel racks to eliminate putting wet towels on racks.

Berthing areas will be convertible to accommodate virtually any mix of males and females among the crew and Marines. Reflecting the average five-inch gap between men and women, LPD 17's key systems, valves, shelves and electrical outlets all will be lower than in older ships.

Sanitary facilities--heads--will be accessible from berthing areas and equipped with commodes, just like at home.

Unlike older ships, which used distillation for purifying seawater into potable water, the LPD 17 will use a reverse osmosis system to remove salts and other impurities. This system will produce 72,000 gallons of potable water daily for drinking, vehicle and aircraft wash downs, and other shipboard uses.

The ship will have a single, consolidated galley and scullery to feed both Navy and Marine officers in one wardroom, chief petty officers and senior non-commissioned officers in their own facility and everybody else in the enlisted mess. More than 1,200 sailors and Marines can be fed three times a day or more, spending reduced amounts of time in line.

LPD 17 will have a 1,100 square-foot fitness center, electronic classrooms, a mission-and-training briefing room and 50 laptop computers specifically for training. A central mall will offer a barbershop, ship's store, post office, vending machines and other amenities.

The San Antonio's shipboard wide-area network will provide e-mail and Internet access to more than 760 drops throughout the ship.

The San Antonio, however, will offer far more than creature comforts, Navy officials said. The 684 foot-long ship will be the first one designed to transport the Marine Corps' "mobility triad"--the Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle, the Landing Craft Air Cushion and the MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. Her flight deck will accommodate two Ospreys, two CH-53E Super Stallions or four CHq6E Sea Knight helicopters. Her well deck will handle two LCACs or one Landing Craft Utility at a time. She will have 25,000 square feet of increased vehicle storage capacity.

For self defense, the San Antonio will be outfitted with two Rolling Airframe Missile launchers. She will be designed to present a significantly reduced radar cross section.

The LPD 17 also will feature the latest command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

An Advanced Enclosed Mast/Sensor System will replace conventional masts, protecting radar and communications antennas from weather, while allowing electronic signals to pass through. The AEM/S--the largest composite material structure ever installed aboard a U.S. Navy steel ship--is designed to make the ship less vulnerable to detection by hostile radar.

Sailors will get their chance to try out these enhancements in 2004, explained Northrop Grumman spokesman Jeffrey Nowakowski. "The schedule is to do a dock trial in July '04," he said. In a dock trial, Nowakowski said, Northrop Grumman will "power up all systems while the ship is at the dock."

Then, in late July, comes a builder's trial, "where we take it out into the Gulf of Mexico for testing," he said. "That's followed by an acceptance trial in October '04. And then we deliver the ship to the Navy in November '04."

The Navy plans to commission LPD 17 in early 2005 and to base her in Norfolk, Va., Divens said.

The San Antonio is the first of a new class of 12 amphibious assault ships intended to replace four older families of vessels--LPD 4, LSD 36, LST 1179 and LKA 113--that have reached or are nearing the end of their service lives.

Currently, four of the LPD 17 class, including the San Antonio, are under construction at Avondale and Northrop Grumman's Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss.

Keels were laid for the USS New Orleans (LPD 18) in October of 2002 and the USS Mesa Verde (LPD 19) in the following November. The keel for the USS Green Bay (LPD 20) was laid on August 26 of this year. The contract for a fifth vessel--USS New York (LPD 21)--was scheduled to be awarded in September, Divens said.

There is little doubt, however, about who will get the contract. Avondale has been the prime contractor for the entire LPD class since 1996, when it won a $641 million award to build the San Antonio.

Almost from the beginning, however, LPD 17 has been plagued by cost overruns and construction delays. In 2002, the program ran afoul of the Nunn-McCurdy amendment to the 1982 Defense Authorization Act.

Nunn-McCurdy requires the termination of weapons programs whose total costs grew by more than 25 percent above original estimates, unless the defense secretary certifies to Congress that the programs are critical to national security or that the cost growth can be attributed to specific changes in the programs.

In a Selected Acquisition Report to Congress last year, the Pentagon said that LPD 17 program costs had increased from an estimated $8.8 billion to $15.4 billion--an increase of 75.2 percent. The program is essential to national security, the Pentagon told Congress, because it addresses a shortage in the Navy's amphibious lift, which is needed to maintain the required U.S. forward-deterrence and forcible-entry capability to reassure allies and deter threats.

A primary reason for the cost increase, the Pentagon said, was the Navy's decision to build all 12 of the vessels in the Northrop Grumman shipyards at Avondale or Ingalls.

Previously, the Navy had planned to build four LDP 17s at a General Dynamics shipyard, Bath Iron Works, in Maine. In 2002, however, the Navy signed a memorandum of agreement with Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, calling for all of the LPD 17s to be built in Louisiana and Mississippi, in return for the construction of four additional DDG 51-class destroyers in Maine, rather than at Northrop Grumman.

The agreement permits General Dynamics to concentrate on building destroyers and Northrop Grumman to focus on LPDs, rather than require both corporations to operate separate construction facilities for the two kinds of ships, said John J. Young Jr., assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition.

Meanwhile, the San Antonio is running about two years behind schedule. Originally, she was scheduled to be completed this year. One reason for the delay, Navy officials said, is the turmoil caused by a series of corporate mergers. In 1999, Avondale--previously an independent shipyard--was purchased by Litton Industries, which already owned Ingalls. Then, in 2001, Northrop Grumman acquired Litton, including both Avondale and Ingalls.

Another Factor was the complexity of the LPD 17 design. The San Antonio is the first ship of its class, Diverts explained. Designers had to make a lot of time-consuming decisions about the San Antonio that won't have to be repeated for future LPDs, he said.

Also, the San Antonio is the first surface ship to be designed using three-dimensional computer-assisted modeling, Hamilton said. "We had the Maine Corps and the Navy waterfront community inform us at every stage of the design process," he said in a press briefing, held at NavSea headquarters in the Washington Navy Yard.

"We allowed them to say, 'You don't want the gym there. You want it over them. You don't want the bridge wing to be this was Yon want it to be that way for better war fighting.'"

This interactive process is more time consuming than traditional methods of ship designing, but it results in fewer mistake that have to be corrected later, Divens said. "LPD 17 has had unprecedented low levels of rework," he said.

A restructuring of the Navy's acquisition organization should improve the process of ship construction, Divens said. Until recently, the Navy officers who supervise the development of a wide range of surface ships, including destroyers, amphibious vessels and transports, reported to different program executive officers.

In 2002, the Navy assigned responsibility for the acquisition and modernization of all non-nuclear surface ships to the PEO for ships. The reorganization concentrates the Navy's knowledge, management skills and buying power into a single organization, Divens said. The result, he said, is a significant increase in coordination among managers of surface ship programs.

"We talk to each other a lot more often," he said. "We're all part of the same family now."

As a result of such changes, "the LPD 17 program has stabilized dramatically," Hamiton said. "I would say we're headed for the center of the channel."

One question remaining, however, is how quickly future ships of the LPD 17 class will be built. A contract for a sixth one, LPD 22, is scheduled to be awarded in 2004. But the Pentagon--with limited funds for shipbuilding--had planned to delay the next vessel, LPD 23, for a year, awarding the contract in 2006, rather than 2005.

This caused a stir in both houses of Congress. A Senate Appropriations Committee report said that the proposed delay "creates instability in the program and the industry." U.S. Pep. David Litter, R-La., protested that the delay would mean more than 2,000 layoffs at Avondale.

The House-passed 2004 Defense Appropriations Act included $175 million for advance procurement of materials, equipment and components for LPD 23. The Senate bill ser the figure at $75 million for such material.

At press time, the two versions had been submitted to a joint House-Senate conference committee to work out a single bill. Both versions made it dear, however, that Congress wants LPD 23 to be in the 2005 budget.