DARPA TAKES A DIVE

The first in the U.S. Navy’s new class of Virginia sub­marines was com­mis­sioned just last month.
But already, the mad sci­en­tists over at Darpa, the Pentagon’s way-​​out research divi­sion, are bored.
They want a sub that can run with a frac­tion of the crew of cur­rent boats. So Darpa has put together a new, $97 mil­lion effort to build the sub­marines of the future, code named Tango Bravo. Last week, the agency held a clas­si­fied meet­ing with defense con­trac­tors and researchers inter­ested in bid­ding on the project.
At the heart of the Tango Bravo project is a prob­lem that’s older than U-​​Boats: how to run a sub with­out pack­ing the crew in like fish in a can. Why the con­cern? Well, it’s not for the sailors’ com­fort. “People are expen­sive,” notes GlobalSecurity​.org direc­tor John Pike.
For years, the Navy has been push­ing to run big­ger and big­ger ships with fewer and fewer sailors. It took a crew of about 320 to run the World War II-​​era Fletcher destroy­ers. Today, an Arleigh Burke destroyer uses the same num­ber of men but, at 8300 tons, it’s three times as big.
Things have been dif­fer­ent on sub­marines, how­ever. While crew sizes have basi­cally remained sta­ble, sub sized have only dou­bled a lot less than the destroy­ers’ three-​​fold increase.
One way to cut down on the num­ber of peo­ple is to auto­mate the sub, par­tic­u­larly its attack cen­ter and sonar bat­tlesta­tions. Those areas require 17 peo­ple on the Virginia class sub­marines, Darpa notes. The agency wants to see that crew cut to eight, with “a set of sys­tems should be pro­posed which can replace the cur­rent VIRGINIA Class sonar, fire con­trol, and tac­ti­cal data dis­play sys­tems.“
But even with a crew trim, space on a sub is still beyond cramped. “There’s never enough room for peo­ple,” says retired Rear Admiral Hank McKinney, the for­mer com­man­der of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s sub­ma­rine force. “On the Los Angeles class [of subs], a third of the crew didn’t have bunks of their own. Seawolf same prob­lem.“
Tango Bravo’s solu­tion: take the tor­pe­does, and store them out­side the sub, not within. “They take up a lot of room inside what we call the peo­ple tank,” Adm. McKinney notes. And it’s some­thing that’s been done on a num­ber of sub­marines before. Tomahawk mis­siles were kept in the bal­last tanks in some of the later Los Angeles-​​class subs, for exam­ple, to increase the num­ber of tor­pe­does that could be kept aboard. What’s more, the lat­est Mark 48 tor­pe­does aren’t even main­tained on the ship, McKinney observes. “They’re prepped before hand, and then left alone.”

November 18th, 2004 | Ships and Subs | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.