Littoral Combat Ship sensors pose integration 'challenges'.

Officials in charge of developing the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship express confidence that they can deliver a first prototype by 2007. They appear less certain, however, that they can seamlessly integrate the first generation of LCS into a network of ships, unmanned vehicles and offboard sensors, each equipped with dissimilar communications, command and control systems.

The LCS is a new warship being designed specifically for coastal operations, in particular anti-submarine warfare, maritime patrol, and mine detection and clearance.

The Navy expects to select next summer one or two LCS designs, out of three currently in competition. Navy officials said the ship concepts proposed are promising and innovative, but they see rough waters ahead when it comes to the C4I portion of the program. C4I is military parlance for command, control and communications networks that allow weapon systems to share information, such as battlefield intelligence and targeting data.

In fiscal year 2004, the Navy will spend $41 million--out of $168 million appropriated for LCS--on systems integration. A key requirement of the program is to connect LCS with other ships, unmanned vehicles and off-board sensors, none of which was designed to be compatible with LCS. The Navy's goal is to deploy a "dispersed force of smaller networked platforms with distributed unmanned sensors," explained Rear Adm. (S) Raymond Spicer, Navy deputy director for surface ships. Each LCS would be configured with one or more sensor packages, depending on the mission needs.

The initial version of LCS, which the Navy plans to introduce in 2007, is called Flight 0. No matter which hull-form the Navy selects, Flight 0 will need to be interoperable with three types of unmanned vehicles: the Fire Scout vertical takeoff drone, the RMS underwater remote mine-hunting system and an unmanned surface craft. Each of the three systems already was in various stages of development before LCS was conceived.

That presents a "huge challenge" in the program, said Arthur Divens, Navy deputy program executive officer for ships. The unmanned vehicles and sensors that now must operate with LCS never were designed as a "system of systems," Divens said. In comments to the Expeditionary Warfare conference of the National Defense Industrial Association, he said the LCS will operate "within a squadron of ships." The squadron will be networked with off-board sensors (unmanned vehides), with the larger surface force, and with the other military services and foreign allies.

"If LCS can't connect to the force net and share information, we have a problem," said Cmdr. James Malloy, LCS requirements officer.

Malloy explained in a recent interview that most of the money allocated in 2004 for C4I integration will be spent on modifications to the command and control systems of the unmanned vehicles, to make them interoperable with the LCS so-called "open architecture." The LCS will become a "poster child" for the Navy's open architecture model, aimed at standardizing the combat systems throughout the fleet, Malloy said.

"Some of our mission systems in Flight 0 are in varying levels of technical maturity," he said. "We want to ensure that in Flight 0 we are leveraging programs from other platforms."

The integration of existing systems such as the Remote Minehunting System into a new LCS open architecture in theory should not be complicated, but likely will be taxing, Malloy noted. "LCS will have an integrated combat system, but none that RMS was designed for."

RMS originally was meant to be deployed from destroyers, which do not have the open architecture that will run on LCS. The plan is to modify the RMS command and control system and test it aboard the catamaran HSV-2, which will serve as an LCS surrogate in various experiments during the next several years.

"That level of integration is something that we recognized early on is going to be a challenge for Flight 0," said Malloy.

The follow-on generation of LCS, Flight 1, will be the "mass production" version, which the Navy hopes will lead to the construction of up to 60 ships during the next 20 years.

The systems integration will be much easier in Flight I, said Malloy, because the open architecture standards will become more mainstream in the Navy. "We are looking toward designing interfaces for Flight 1, so that every mission package can plug into this without any band-aid in the middle."

The Navy has not yet set precise guidelines for open architecture, and is working with industry teams to come up with solid requirements for contractors. The open architecture falls under an umbrella program the Navy calls "Force Net."

LCS will be the "leading edge of Force Net and open architecture," said Spicer. "Every program is heading toward open architecture."

The three LCS hull designs competing for Fright 0 are a trimaran (General Dynamics), a surface-effects ship (Raytheon) and a semi-planing monohull (Lockheed Martin).

Flight 0 may end up including one or two hull forms, said Spicer. "We may select two different designs, after we review designs in February."

The long-term acquisition strategy remains in flux. Flight 1 may be a completely different design from Flight 0, said Malloy. "We don't want to make that decision yet, so we don't build a dinosaur."

Notably, the Navy may decide that none of the three current competitors meets the Flight 1 requirements and may reopen the competition to companies that were eliminated earlier this year, when the Navy narrowed the field from six to three.

Although the program gets high level support in the Navy, it has been under fire from critics on Capitol Hill who contend that the Navy has failed to prove the need for LCS and has not provided Congress enough details on how LCS will fit into the overall force, or what assets it will replace from the current fleet. Lawmakers directed the Navy to spend $51 million of the fiscal year 2004 appropriation for LCS on a study. Due March 1, 2004, the study will detail the missions LCS will conduct, which platforms and systems currently conduct these missions, and what changes, if any, will be made to future years' budgets to eliminate duplication of effort.

Spicer said the criticism is unfounded. "There is a ton of analysis that already had been done," he told National Defense. "A capability gap in the littoral had been documented since the 1980s, in war games, further validated in fleet battle experiments."

As to whether other ships, such as destroyers or cruisers, could be assigned to littoral warfare missions, Spicer said that would be wasteful. The Navy's billion-dollar multi-mission warships are not "optimized" to take care of missions such as mine and submarine detection, or maritime interdiction, he said. "Everything points to a smaller, high speed more agile combatant."

But Spicer conceded that the LCS program is risky, because its schedule is being compressed significantly. "We are taking a process that has taken 10-14 years down to five years," he said. "There is some risk involved. But we understand the risk."