DDG 51 Flight III Program Update with Capt. Mark Vandroff at SAS 2016

Thank you all for coming to this. I've got a few slides. I'm looking very much forward

to a good question and answer. I'll give you an update on where the DDG 51 program is today

We've got a lot of exciting things going on. You can see just there on my slide, that's

two ships at two different shipyards, both of them in the water, both of them in their

final throws of testing, and both of them will be going to sea for the first time sometime

later this summer. I'll talk a little bit about where we were to where we are. This

is a special week for me. It was five years ago this week. Where's Pete? Right, my predecessor

Pete Lyle in the back there. It was five years ago that Pete and I turned over and that I've

been the DDG 51 program manager. The team has been phenomenal. We'll talk a little bit

about what's happened over that time. We'll talk about the profile, a little bit about

where we are in production, what we're doing with Flight 3, and then again I'll be happy

to take any questions. This is my favorite chart to put up here. I only have half an

hour and I really only want to talk for ten minutes, but my staff especially knows I can

put that chart up and I can start talking for a couple of hours just to this chart

But I'll use it to refresh everyone's mind there. After the initial 62 ships were appropriated

built, and delivered to the Navy and currently in service, starting in FY10, we restarted

the program. Four ships over three fiscal years, 10, 11, and 12. Those four ships, DDGs

11, 13, 14, 15, 16, all of them in construction now, all of them very far along in construction

I believe 113 and 115, the first ships at Ingalls and Bath will deliver this year with

114 and 116 soon on their heels behind them. Then you get into the third multi-year. Not

very many programs are in production so long that they've done three different multi-year

procurements, but this is now the third for the DDG 1s. FY13 through 17, those 10 ships

the first few are in the early stages of production both at Bath and Ingalls, although you'll

see 117 not so early anymore. She's starting to come along really nicely. She looks like

a ship now. She'll go in the water early next year. Then with that, and we'll talk a little

bit about FY3, the program is so successful that in FY16, Congress decided to add most

of the funding for an extra ship there in FY16. Then starting in 16 into 17, we'll implement

the FY3. We've also started the initial planning and early work towards a fourth multi-year

procurement in FY18 and beyond. That's where we are today with the program

I'll just talk about where we are at the two shipyards, give everyone an update. DDG 113

we had her Aegis light off late last year. She's in the throes of the test program. These

ships, we've always historically done three sea trials on Aegis ships. Then during the

latter part of the first 62, we collapsed those all the way down to a single unified

sea trial, what we called a super trial, where we would do builders and acceptance trial

all in one week event. For the first few ships of the restart, we've gone back to the three

trials, an alpha for HM&E, seaworthiness, survivability, a trial Bravo, which was very

combat systems focused, where we would do missile firings and gun firings. Then finally

an acceptance trial, which is where NSERV comes and evaluates the ship for acceptance

into the Navy. Trial alpha 113 will be later this summer. You can see if she went aboard

her today, she's starting to look like a really complete ship coming through the last part

of her testing. 114, great launch, great christening. We have the Aegis light off, which is scheduled

for the early part of next month. They're going to make that on time. Last time I was

at Ingalls, the ship there on 114 was coming along beautifully to be ready for that milestone

Then she'll go to sea early part of next year. 117 had a great keel laying last year, and

we expect her to go in the water the early part of next year. She's really starting to

look, if you had a better picture there for 117, that's a good picture. You can see the

aft deck house going on. If you took back and had a larger picture of her, seeing the

whole ship, you can see, especially over time, she's gone from the initial few blocks out

on the building ways to now she's almost entirely built out. The only thing left to put on her

is the mast. Then 119, start of fabrication, she'll have her keel laying here next month

so really starting to get into good production on 119 down at Ingalls. At Bath, 115, which

is their first ship, they had her ALO again late last year in the throes of her test program

She's got a trial office scheduled again for late this summer as well with the delivery

sometime before the end of the year. 116, Bath, because of their facility, they keep

their ships on land a little longer in the production compared to Ingalls, so 116 still

on land, but again, you can see all put together looking very much like a ship marching towards

startup combat systems testing later this year and launch again at the end of this year

Then 118, start of fabrication with a keel laying sometime next year and then progressing

similar to 116 and 115 after that. Again, ships coming along very nicely at both yards

So let me talk a little bit now about the future, and I sound a little bit like a broken

record because I've given this pitch a lot and it really hasn't changed. I used to think

well, something has to have changed or I'm not going to be very interesting when I talk

about Flight 3. Then I realized it's actually good that this hasn't changed because it means

that we're on track. So Flight 3, the new radar, SPY-6, the DDG-51 fielding of the air

and missile defense radar. What do we do to the ship besides changing out the radar? We

do three things, three basic things. New power or modified upgrade power, so we go from three

megawatt generators to four megawatt generators and a new 4160 bus tied back into the 450

bus to service the radars. Cooling, replace the 200 refrigeration ton plants with the

new high efficiency 300 ton refrigeration plants. And then finally, weight and KG, we

thicken up the scantlings, we thicken up the keel, we thicken up some of the low weight

in order to bring the center of gravity back down where it needs to be. And then in order

to give us the weight to take that extra weight, the stability, we widen the stern

a little bit. Move a few berthing compartments around, a little bit of change in the way

of the internal piping. And when it's all said and done, that's a Flight 3. That's going

to be the third ship here in FY16. We had always planned that one of the FY16 ships

was going to be the first Flight 3. When Congress in their wisdom plussed us up from two to

three, said, okay, that plus-up ship is going to be the Flight 3. The first two base will

be two A's. And that's coming along very well. So the design for this, we're in the throes

of detailed design. Both yards, Ingalls and Bath, working that. At both yards, we are

on schedule, we are on budget for that detailed design. A brief aside, someone who I will

not name, told me with a straight face, they said this as if it were news to me. They said

we see that you are on track, you are on schedule with the detailed design for Flight 3. But

we are worried that if the design falls behind, you could experience cost growth and schedule

delay. And I said, right. I said, yes. Like every other project ever undertaken in human

history, if you fall behind, you will have cost growth and schedule delay. That is true

The Flight 3 does not. It's a great idea and a great design, but the laws of physics still

apply to it. I was not able to get around the laws of physics or the laws of economics

with Flight 3. It's still part of it. But the good news is that both yards are doing

great on the design. They're both doing great on it. We're on track and we're very pleased

with how they're doing the detailed design. So let me talk a little bit about where we

are with the systems that are my part of it. If you want to know where we are on SPY-6

I will tell you we're on track. And if you want more details on that, my colleague, Captain

O'Connor, who's the radar program manager in IWS, I don't know if she's speaking here

this week, but she's got it. You know, she's the expert on that. She's delivering me the

radar. The first piece, which is the generator, this is a modified repeat of the DDG-1000

generator. DDG, which in itself is mostly in the engine case, a mod repeat of the original

Flight 2A generator. The engine that Rolls-Royce puts in that is a DDG-51 engine with a couple

of extra compressor stages in order to get you the extra power to go from 3 megawatts

to 4 megawatts. So that engine has been through its preliminary and critical design reviews

and we're expecting in the fall of 2017, the first of the units to go to our land-based

engineering site at NAVSES, or excuse me, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Philadelphia

not NAVSES anymore. It's its own echelon for command. And to start our land-based testing

there with deliveries to the shipyard soon after that. The 1000-volt power supply, DRS-1

a very spirited competition to build that, has been through preliminary and critical

design review, completed its production readiness review, and is now in production. And it'll

be delivering both to the Elbess in New Jersey and to Wallops Island out in Virginia so

that there could be a unit to tie in the power on the power side and then another unit to

test the radar against so that if we don't get a full end-to-end check out before it

goes to the ship, we've at least checked out all the interfaces ashore before we take

that to the ship. Again, the systems engineering here in order to reduce risk so that when

we take this radar to the ship, we have high confidence that all the things that need to

support the radar, the power, the cooling, the space, everything that that radar requires

we're going to have high confidence that we can deliver that. And then finally, we're

in the throes of first article testing, nearly coming to completion there this summer, into

the fall for the AC plant, and then we'll be ready to put that into production and start

delivering AC plants to our shipbuilders that are the new high efficiency AC plants

roughly another 100 tons per AC plant of cooling. And when I say ton, some people think

wait, that's a refrigeration ton. It's a measure of how much refrigeration a given

AC plant can put out. So that's kind of my brief in chief. I've got my summary there

I want to take slides, but I want to say one thing. Someone asked me, one of the reporters

asked me if I was going to make news. This might make a little of it, so. Getting ready

for this, and especially since this is the fifth anniversary of me being in the program

I went back and I looked at what all the different folks said when the program restarted

and I owe a huge debt to the leadership of the program before me. The team has been great

and we've had turnover in the team, and the new people have benefited from what the existing

folks and their solid foundation and the wisdom they put in place. But when the Navy made

the decision to restart the DDG 51 program, they put a budget request to Congress and

said, okay, we're restarting the DDG 51 program. This is going to be tough. We're going to

need, it's going to cost more than a regular DDG 51, and in 2010, the President's budget

requested $2,240,000,000 in 2010 to go forward and do the first ship, and was roundly criticized

by everyone who likes to be a pro at criticizing the Navy. That's not enough. There's no way

you can do that. You've obviously underestimated it. I think there was a GAO report at some

point soon after that that kind of listed, amongst other things, when they were talking

about the radar hull study, all the different risks of the restart. And whenever the Navy

tries to do something and comes in over budget, that'll make news. But I'm going to make news

in a different way. Every fall, we, the DDG 51 program and all the other shipbuilding

programs, has a review with the Navy budget office, ship by ship, what's that ship going

to cost, because the Navy budget office might have to move money around. And I looked at

what, in 113, that FY10 ship is essentially done. We've got a little testing, a little

fielding, but we're months away from delivering that ship to the Navy. It's essentially done

The costs are what they are. They're all known. And so the Navy had asked for $2.2, $2,240,000,000

So you would think that if we delivered it at $2,240,000,000, you know, $2,240,000,000

if that was our price today, you'd think we had done a really good job, right? You'd think

that would be great. You'd think that'd be worth writing about. Our review with FM, we

said final price of that ship, $2,100,000,000, $103,000,000, $137,000,000 less than what

we had estimated back then. Now, $100,000,000 of that was claimed a few years ago by Congress

and reprogrammed into the excellent use of giving us an extra ship in 13 when you saw

that. So some of those savings have been booked and applied to other Navy priorities. But

five years ago, six years ago, we said $2.2 billion. Today, we say 2.1. So when you read

about, oh, there's no way that they're going to bring in the flight three for what they

say they're going to bring in. The Navy's always cost more than what they say. I want

to go back to the DDG restart and say, no, sometimes we get it right. Sometimes it takes

a little luck. It takes a whole lot of hard work by a whole lot of people, both on the industry side and the government side. But sometimes the Navy does get it right. And

maybe that'll make a little news in and of itself. So with that, I will take your questions

Questions, comments, brief alternate speeches. Shell. So, right. So for the flight three, you'll have two buses connected by transformers

right? A high voltage, or it's actually medium and low. So you have a medium voltage, 4160

volts. Power will be generated at 4160. The radar will be fed at 4160. And then the 450

existing loads will be serviced by stepping that down with transformers and then using

the existing 450 infrastructure. Right. So we'll step down, step. Yeah, you'll step down. I don't have it in backup. I actually

have a great slide that shows the existing electric plant and then the additional. But

right. Thank you, Shell. Hi. Dan Gaff of Aviation Week. In addition to the SPY-6, what happens on the flight three

with regards to the missile illuminators in the earlier aircraft? Same Mark 99. So still three illuminators, still Mark 99s. So those are as of yet unchanged

That's the baseline today. There are interesting things happening in illuminator technology

and there are interesting things that you're doing like on the DDG-1000, where if you have

an X-band phased array. So my X-band solution for tracking, search and track on the flight

three design now is a Spook 9B. Great radar, but it's not a phased array radar. And there's

you can't do some of the things that you could do, say, with SPY-3 as far as illuminator

uplink. So right now the flight three retains the existing three Mark 99 illuminators. In

a future iteration, because we're doing lots of things in future iteration, could you alter

the ship to take a fourth illuminator? That might be desirable. Yes, that would be a ship

design change. Could you alter the ship to put a phased array X-band solution and do

your illuminator uplink that way? Yes, you could. But that was one of the tenets of flight

three has been to bound our risk, right? We don't want to have such a radical change that

we end up making it too much of an investment at any one time. So the illuminator solution

for missile illumination on the flight three is the same three Mark 99 illuminators. Could

we take a step forward in the future? Yeah, but I want to make sure that I've got SPY-6

working and working right and doing that before we do something else to the platform. But

the answer is a long answer to a short question. Yes, sir

Yes, which shipyard do you think the first flight three will be at and do you know which

ship will be there? So let me answer that. You asked three questions. You only thought

you asked two, but you asked three questions. So I'll answer the easiest one first. That

third ship in FY16, based on the terms of the last LPD DDG 51 swap agreement between

Bath, Ingalls and the Navy, assigned a DDG amount of workload to Bath Ironworks. So the

current strategy is that's a Bath ship because the LPD 28 was an Ingalls ship. So that balances

out the workload and fulfills the swap. So that's the who. You said what? Let me go back

to that. I am now going to, someone again asked if I was going to make news, I am now

going to complain. Something I very rarely do. Write this down and take notes. This is

the multi-year as it exists now. DDG's 117 through 126 inclusive. 10 ships numbered

117 through 126. Because the Navy received from Congress economic order quantity AP for

buying things in groups of 10 or more than one, more than two, in the beginning of the

multi-year, we have already bought significant amount of components. For example, the vertical

launch system is already under contract and funded for these ships out here. It doesn't

change. The BLS Mark 41 doesn't change between flight two and flight three. Because we're

spending money against those ships, the advanced procurement, in the Navy's ERP accounting

system, we had to create the hull number and we had to create UX for the ship to account

for being spent against it. When Congress added this ship, they've now given us a ship

and you see there's purposely no hull number there. There will be at some point in the

future when I write this. You would think if we lived in a sane world, that I would

this is 123, this is 124, that I would just make that 125 and then I'd move all the numbers

so 126 and 127 became the FY17 ships. But the Navy's system currently for tracking stuff

and money against that stuff doesn't allow you to do that. So, I think what's going to

end up happening is you'll have 123, 124, and 127 as the three FY16 ships and 125 and

126 as the two FY17 ships and 127 will come out several months before 125 and 126. That

will confuse everyone. And every time I say this to anyone in senior Navy leadership

they look at me as if I have lost my mind, but I promise what I have told you is 100

accurate. My business manager is in the audience here today and she's looking at me and smiling

that everything I just said is right. Now the other question is what will it be named

We have names now up through 121. So, DDG 120 is named for the former senator from Michigan

recently retired SASC chairman, Senator Carl Levin. That was just announced. And then 121

is the Frank Peterson, a deceased senior Marine Corps general. So, I don't have names beyond

that whether or not between now and whenever the Secretary of the Navy chooses to name

any of these ships is up to him. Secretary of the Navy controls names. I get a letter

from the SEC NAV's office saying, these are the names of the ships, go put them on the

stern. So, I don't know what that 127 will be named yet. I have not received such a letter

But where we've got names out through 121. Electronic Warfare CWIP? I would love to talk about Electronic Warfare CWIP. So, the CWIP

program, just to kind of baseline everyone, is the Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement

Program being released in blocks. So, you have CWIP Block 1, CWIP Block 2, CWIP Block 3

eventually a CWIP Block 4. CWIP Block 2 is the baseline. So, let's do this one. So, CWIP Block 1 is basically a SLC-32 improvement. That takes

me up through 113 to 116. 117, I'm pretty sure I have that right. It's not 119. One

of my guys here from D5 wants to throw his hand up in the air and say, you're getting it wrong, sir. But I'm 90% sure 117 and follow is CWIP Block 2 on these ships. So, that's

the current baseline. CWIP Block 3 and CWIP Block 2 is a huge improvement over SLC-32

over the CWIP Block 1. It's a new EW system with tremendous new capability in that area

CWIP Block 3 takes that tremendous capability and then adds an active component to it. So

we are in the middle of working with our partners in POIWS and CO5 to study how we

would put CWIP Block 3 on DDG-51s, both the 2As and the 3s. That study, the technical

study is ongoing. So, that's certainly something that we plan to do in the future. But I don't

have it programmed. And I can't tell you, yep, it's these ships in back fit. It's these

ships in forward fit. I don't have that yet because we've got to finish the technical

study so we can make that decision. Any plans to integrate advanced anti-surface weapons on the flight 3

Advanced anti-surface weapons? So, right now it's the same anti-surface suite, excuse me

here. So, right now it's the same anti-surface suite as on the flight 2s. What you see here

is you've got the 5-inch gun. This is a CWIS-1B. So, that's a CWIS with an anti-surface. And

you can see it here, you've got the, whatever the current substantiation of the 25-millimeter

side guns for anti-surface defense. I can tell you we're looking intently at things

like laws and the next generation of laws for a directed energy weapon. I think the

additional power in the 4160 architecture will fit very nicely with that as that becomes

ready. I think we're looking, even in the back fit, we're looking at that for both the

2A and the 3 eventually. We don't have a program of record where I can say back on that

chart, yes, this ship is the first ship right now that's going to get a directed energy

anti-surface weapon. But it's something we're looking at intently and something we're very interested in. I could see that happening unlike that first flight 3 in a post-shakedown

availability type time frame. I think that would, by then you'd have a more mature

directed energy weapon there in the early 2020s. And we used to have two CWISs. That

now is a space and weight reservation for something the size of a CWIS. I think that

depending on what is available as the ships are being built and once the ship's commissioned

in a back fit, I think you'll see something go there that'll have both an anti-surface

and anti-air capability. Whether that's a directed energy weapon or another particular

kind of weapon remains to be seen. But there's a space and weight reservation up forward

where the forward CWIS used to be that would be used for something like that

Admiral back in the back there. One more question. The 127 is under current acquisition. Right

Flight 3s after that, are they going to be multiyear? So let me go back and I'll talk about that

I missed it. I apologize. No, no. That's great, sir. That's a good question. So I probably glossed over it. So

the only reason I want to be, let me be careful how I answer it, because any future acquisition

strategy would be until it's actually published and approved would be, as we say

it would be pre-decisional. But the notional SECNAV 30-year long range shipbuilding plan

that was just delivered envisions between 18 and 22, two ships a year in the Flight

3 configuration. And we've always said we were very happy with how we bought these 10

ships. So another 10 ship, five year, multiyear would be what would make sense. Now for that

we would have to go next year to Congress with the 18 budget and ask for legislative

authority to do that. And we would have to have that then as our acquisition strategy

I think that it would make sense to do that. That would be using things that were successful

in the past and the future. But until we actually come out with that ledge proposal, it's not

the official Navy policy yet. But I would say if you looked at the 30-year shipbuilding

plan, that would be a reasonable assumption based on what the Navy has said publicly so far

Any more questions? No time? Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you all very much

Thank you