India is the Russian defense industry’s lat­est ben­e­fi­ciary:

When Russia gave India a retired Soviet air­craft car­rier five years ago, New Delhi was delighted — lit­tle real­is­ing the ves­sel would turn into a costly white ele­phant.
Russia, India’s long­time weapons sup­plier, said in 2004 it would give the coun­try the 44,570-tonne “Admiral Gorshkov” as a gift, pro­vided Delhi paid a Russian ship­yard 974 mil­lion dol­lars to refur­bish the car­rier.
Since then, the price has sky­rock­eted for fix­ing up the 27-​​year-​​old ship, which was decom­mis­sioned after the col­lapse of the Soviet Union.
In 2007, Russia demanded 850 mil­lion dol­lars more, cit­ing cost esca­la­tions. Then, six months ago, Russia star­tled India with another demand — this time for 2.9 bil­lion dol­lars.
It also pushed back the ship’s deliv­ery by four years to 2012 — a year after India must moth­ball its last remain­ing air­craft car­rier, the British-​​origin INS Viraat.
Now India’s national audi­tor has waded into the row, say­ing the navy could have paid less for a new carrier.

What’s this mean in the long-​​term? India moves away from the Russian kit they’ve used for decades, buys more US-​​NATO gear (hope­fully, I’m a big India fan… would like to see our alliance tight­ened).
–John Noonan

David Axe reports:

Under cur­rent plans, the Royal Navy circa 2020 will be a very strange force. There will be just six high-​​end war­ships to pro­tect two 65,000-ton super-​​carriers, plus a mixed flotilla of old Type 23s and FSCs num­ber­ing just over a dozen. Itll be a top-​​heavy force with too few destroy­ers to escort the car­ri­ers into a shoot­ing war, and too few frigates to per­form day-​​to-​​day patrolling dur­ing peace­time. Its a fleet opti­mized for nothing. 

For the past few decades, Her Majesty’s Armed Forces have steered away from the preser­va­tion of empire and colonies, instead con­fig­ur­ing them­selves in such a way that they can pro­vide a solid bul­wark to the US Armed Forces, while oper­at­ing inde­pen­dently in a sin­gle the­ater, Falklands style sce­nario.
But, the back­bone of any British strat­egy –from the pre-​​Victorian age all the way up until the Labour Party vic­tory in the mid 1990s– has always been a pow­er­ful Royal Navy. The fleet’s demise over the past sev­eral years has been one of the great tragedies in recent mem­ory. There was a time when the Union Jack pro­tected every major sea lane and trade route on the globe — today the British can barely pro­tect their own coast­line. That’s a ter­ri­ble fall for what was once a mighty sea-​​faring empire.
What’s trou­bling about this report, to me at least, is that the Brits are shap­ing their fleet in such a way that it will be largely reliant on American pro­tec­tion. Instead of exist­ing as a pow­er­ful, inde­pen­dent ally that can oper­ate jointly or inde­pen­dently with its US coun­ter­part, the Royal Navy is becom­ing a wel­fare case — where sup­port­ing it with anti-​​sub and anti-​​air pro­tec­tion becomes more of a drain on our own resources than a ben­e­fit.
Watching the British lose con­fi­dence in them­selves, the oft-​​lamented “Suez Syndrome,” is ter­ri­ble. But, as much as it pains me to say so, per­haps it’s time we look for new, stronger allies for our spe­cial defense rela­tion­ship — per­haps in the Aussies or Japanese.
–John Noonan
HT - Goldfarb

Iran builds new sub­ma­rine –

Iranian tech­ni­cal uni­ver­sity stu­dent Hassan Sharifzadeh drafted a new recon­nais­sance sub­ma­rine that can avoid radar detec­tion, the Iranian Fars news agency said. 

Next up: an Iranian fighter jet that’s invis­i­ble to sonar!
–John Noonan
Update: via the com­ments, we’ll call this a ‘lost in trans­la­tion’ moment.

So with lit­toral com­bat being all the rage these days, what’s being done to pos­ture the fleet against the ris­ing threat of enemy bal­lis­tic mis­siles? Rear Admiral Thomas Marfiak says “not enough.”

Proceedings sends

With all the talk about the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and the next guided-​​missile destroyer, DDG-​​1000, no one has seen fit to dis­cuss the future of the next gen­er­a­tion of cruisers-​​the CG(X), the follow-​​on to the present class of Aegis cruis­ers. Because those remark­able ships will reach their 30th anniversaries-​​and beyond-​​in the mid­dle of the next decade, we need to con­front the issue of their suc­ces­sors now.

The Analysis of Alternatives for the CG(X) has been in the works for sev­eral months, but the out­come is far from cer­tain. And with the tar­get ini­tial oper­a­tional capa­bil­ity of the new cruiser class set for 2019, the present study of required capa­bil­i­ties and how to develop and fund them has reached the point of urgency.

A knotty prob­lem. Back dur­ing 2006’s Lebanon War, Hezzy bad­dies killed four Israeli sailors with a UAV packed with explo­sives. Granted, text­book def­i­n­i­tion doesn’t exactly qual­ify that as a bal­lis­tic mis­sile. But it does raise the larger point of poten­tial ene­mies like Iran, Syria, and North Korea — and what tech they’d employ as a means of knock­ing back our air and sea power. Seeing that every dic­ta­tor and his sweet mother have –at min­i­mum– a few medium range bal­lis­tic mis­siles and a whole mess of lighter ship/​aircraft killers, I’m think­ing that the good Admiral has a point here.

Furthermore, most of our ene­mies (and poten­tials) are eager cus­tomers of a boom­ing Russian defense indus­try. Taking into con­sid­er­a­tion the fact that Aegis was orig­i­nally designed to pro­tect our car­ri­ers from Russian mis­sile attack, logic would dic­tate that as the Russians upgrade their ship-​​killing kit, we upgrade our seaborne defense sys­tems as well.
–John Noonan

I wrote ear­lier this week about the appar­ent demise of the DDG 1000 in the Navy’s future bud­get plan­ning. Well, in an unusual step, two very key law­mak­ers have come out in favor of cur­tail­ing the program.

I am pleased with the Navys deci­sion to focus its resources on the DDG 51 destroyer, with its known costs and capa­bil­i­ties, rather than the increas­ingly expen­sive DDG 1000, said Chairman Ike Skelton (D-​​MO). Our com­mit­tee rec­om­mended this action in the fis­cal year 2009 Defense Authorization Act, and I am pleased to see the Navy heed our advice. It is a respon­si­ble deci­sion that will ben­e­fit both the Navy and the tax­payer for years to come. 

I believe this is the right thing for the men and women of our Navy and the cit­i­zens who pay for these ships, Subcommittee Chairman Gene Taylor (D-​​MS) com­mented. The DDG 51 class destroyer is the pre­mier destroyer in the world today. The ship has tremen­dous flex­i­bil­ity in a vari­ety of warfight­ing mis­sions, includ­ing the abil­ity to serve as a bal­lis­tic mis­sile defense plat­form. Just as impor­tant, the costs of these ships are well known. The Navy has built 62 of these superb ves­sels and our ship­yards know how to build them on bud­get and on schedule. 

Taylor con­tin­ued, The two DDG 1000s that our nation will build will be extremely capa­ble ships. However, vir­tu­ally every inde­pen­dent orga­ni­za­tion with exper­tise in ship cost analy­sis has pre­dicted the first two ships will cost up to $5 bil­lion each, or more than $1.5 bil­lion more than the Navy has bud­geted. Such cost over­runs would crip­ple the Navys plan to reach a 313-​​ship fleet. 

(more…)

It’s like the Navy’s ver­sion of the F-​​22 — a lin­ger­ing ves­tige of the “blue water” fight­ing force the ser­vice once was. But like the F-​​22, and despite the Navy’s best efforts to shift its empha­sis to sur­face fire sup­port (a con­cept that still clings to life despite air-​​to-​​ground and sur­face to sur­face mis­sile and artillery advance­ments) talk is that the DDG 1000 is slip­ping away. 

From today’s Military​.com head­lines:

The DDG 1000 series of ships would run on quiet and com­pact elec­tric motors, not today’s gas tur­bine engines. The ships would be unusu­ally large but built with a radar-​​evading pro­file to make them appear small, and they would carry a new gun able to hit pre­cisely tar­gets 50 miles or more inland. 

Most impor­tant for sailors, the destroy­ers would carry highly trained, computer-​​savvy crews half as large as the force on cur­rent destroyers. 

As recently as early June, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer reaf­firmed the Bush administration’s sup­port for the new ships. But as Congress refines spend­ing plans for 2009 this sum­mer, Navy lead­ers appear ready to aban­don the DDG 1000 pro­gram, build­ing only two destroy­ers for what once was seen as a force of two dozen or more. 

The House of Representatives already has voted for at least a pause in DDG 1000 pur­chases, cit­ing the cost — as much as $5 bil­lion each — of the first two ships in the series and their depen­dence on still-​​unproven technologies. 

In a state­ment released last week , the Navy seemed resigned to an early end for the pro­gram. “Even if we do not receive fund­ing … beyond the first two ships, the tech­nol­ogy embed­ded in DDG 1000 will advance the Navy’s future,” the state­ment asserted.

(more…)

Things are heat­ing up for the U.S. Navy’s first Littoral Combat Ship, after a long frozen win­ter in a Wisconsin shipyard.

The 377-​​foot Freedom is expected to head for open water once the ice melts. Prime con­trac­tor Lockheed Martin had hoped to set sail before the win­ter freeze, but ended up need­ing a few extra months for fur­ther development.

This week, the com­pany announced a new test­ing mile­stone, as the new warship’s elec­tric plant fired up for the first time. The so-​​called “light off” of four diesel gen­er­a­tors and a three-​​megawatt elec­tri­cal power plant involved putting the entire sys­tem through its paces, at full power.

“This marks a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone for Freedom as her elec­tric plant is com­pletely func­tional and able to sup­port all tests, eval­u­a­tions and oper­a­tions at sea,” Lockheed Martin said at this week’s Navy League conference.

Freedom will be deliv­ered to the U.S. Navy in 2008 and will be home­ported in San Diego. The new ships are intended to hunt mines, sub­marines and small boats in coastal waters. In addi­tion to the Lockheed Martin design, the Navy also is buy­ing a sep­a­rate LCS design from General Dynamics. Both prime con­trac­tors are work­ing with small U.S. ship­yards to build the new ships, which are a lot smaller than the Navy’s tra­di­tional car­ri­ers, cruis­ers and destroyers.

– Rebecca Christie

The newest mem­ber of the United States Navy, the amphibi­ous trans­port dock ship USS New York (LPD 21), was chris­tened today at Avondale Shipyard in Louisiana.
The fifth ship of the new San Antonio class, the New York already holds a spe­cial place in the hearts of Americans because the steel that makes up her bow sec­tion includes steel sal­vaged from the World Trade Center.
Even with the headaches that came along with the first ship in the class (sort of expected with a new design and pretty much ironed out now), these are impres­sive machines. Designed to bring the Navy and US Marine Corp expe­di­tionary com­bat capa­bil­ity into the 21st cen­tury, the ship was designed with low radar observ­ables and is the first ship fully designed from the CAD-​​screen up to sup­port all three of the Marine’s pri­mary mobil­ity capa­bil­i­ties — Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), Landing Craft, Air Cushioned (LCAC) and the MV-​​22 Osprey.
Welcome to the fleet!

Navy Ship With Steel From World Trade Center Ruins Christened USS New York
Associated Press
Avondale, LA
Thousands of peo­ple, includ­ing fam­i­lies of those who died in the Sept. 11, 2001 ter­ror attacks, gath­ered Saturday for an at-​​times chill­ing and ral­ly­ing ser­vice to chris­ten a Navy ship built with twisted steel from the ruins of the World Trade Center.
The hulk­ing grey USS New York, which abruptly rose from the hori­zon, bore a seal on the bow bear­ing 7.5 tons of steel from the site. The shield included two gray bars to symoblize the Twin Towers; a ban­ner over that declared “Never Forget.“
“May God bless this ship and all who sail on her,” ship spon­sor, Dotty England, said before smash­ing a bot­tle of cham­pagne against it, pro­duc­ing a loud thump to go with the spurt­ing liq­uid and fly­ing stream­ers.
Story after story of lives lost, and touched, by the attacks pep­pered the cer­e­mony, held under the blaz­ing sun and broad­cast on large screens.
“To New York, we say thank you for lend­ing your sacred seal, your name,” U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, D-​​La., said. More impor­tantly was that New York lent its spirit, he said.
Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England said ship names pro­vide a legacy, and for their crews, serve as a source of strength and inspi­ra­tion.
When the attacks occurred, the ship was planned but had no name. It was named the New York at the request of for­mer New York Gov. George Pataki. The steel from the World Trade Center site is in the part of the ship that splices through the water, lead­ing the way.
“It res­ur­rects the ashes, so to speak, to do great things for our nation,” said Bill Glenn, a spokesman for Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding, the ship builder.
The billion-​​dollar, 25,000-ton ves­sel is 684 feet long, 105 feet wide. It can carry about 360 sailors and 700 Marines who can be brought ashore via land­ing craft and heli­copter. Its prospec­tive com­mand­ing offi­cer is Commander F. Curtis Jones, a native New Yorker. It is to be com­mis­sioned next year, said England’s wife, Dotty England, before the chris­ten­ing.
Rep. Vito Fossella, R-N.Y., said Sept. 11th was a turn­ing point in the nation, and will never be for­got­ten because rem­nants of the dis­as­ter are part of the ship.
“If the USS New York has to fol­low Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, PCO Jones and his crew … have my full sup­port,” he said to a stand­ing ovation.

Photo credit: AVONDALE, La. (Mar. 1, 2008) Mrs. Dottty England, wife of Deputy Secretary of Defense The Hon. Gordon England, chris­tens the amphibi­ous trans­port dock Pre-​​Commissioning Unit New York (LPD 21) at Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding New Orleans. U. S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Tiffini M. Jones (Released)
–Pinch Paisley

Not exactly high tech news, but note­wor­thy nonethe­less. In another move that sig­nals how the machine is slowly sap­ping the ele­gance from the mil­i­tary expe­ri­ence, the Navy just released this message:

FM COMNAVAIRFOR SAN DIEGO CA/​/​N43/​/​

TO USS KITTY HAWK

USS ENTERPRISE

USS NIMITZ

USS DWIGHT D EISENHOWER

USS CARL VINSON

USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT

USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN

USS GEORGE WASHINGTON

USS JOHN C STENNIS

USS HARRY S TRUMAN

USS RONALD REAGAN

SUBJ/​REMOVAL OF CAPTAINS GIGS FROM ALL AIRCRAFT CARRIERS//

GENTEXT/​REMARKS/​1. OPNAV N88 APPROVED THE NAVAL AVIATION ENTERPRISE (NAE) CARRIER READINESS TEAM (CRT) REQUEST TO REMOVE THE CAPTAIN’S GIG FROM ALL CV/​CVNS. REMOVAL OF THE CAPTAIN’S GIG WILL REDUCE MAINTENANCE COSTS AND FREE UP VALUABLE HANGAR BAY SPACE.

2. PER REF A AND B, ALL CV/​CVNS ARE REQUESTED TO PREPARE THEIR CAPTAIN’S GIG FOR DISPOSITION WITHOUT REPLACEMENT IAW REF C. SHIPS SHOULD COORDINATE THESE EFFORTS WITH THEIR TYCOM N43 MAINTENANCE PROGRAM MANAGER (MPM).

3. THE FOLLOWING IS A LIST OF THE CAPTAIN’S GIGS ASSIGNED BY SHIP AND ACTION REQUIRED (READ IN THREE COLUMNS):

SHIP CAPTAIN’S GIG ACTION REQUIRED

CV 63 10MPE9319 COMPLETE REF C REQUIREMENTS

CVN 65 12MPE9203 NO FURTHER ACTION REQUIRED

CVN 68 12MPE9201 COMPLETE REF C REQUIREMENTS

CVN 69 40PE9004 NO FURTHER ACTION REQUIRED

CVN 70 40PE761 NO FURTHER ACTION REQUIRED 

CVN 71 40PE8514 COMPLETE REF C REQUIREMENTS 

CVN 72 33PE8701 COMPLETE REF C REQUIREMENTS 

CVN 73 13MPE9902 COMPLETE REF C REQUIREMENTS 

CVN 74 33PE9006 COMPLETE REF C REQUIREMENTS 

CVN 75 33PE9007 COMPLETE REF C REQUIREMENTS 

CVN 76 10MPE9308 COMPLETE REF C REQUIREMENTS 

4. REQUEST THAT CAPTAIN’S GIGS BE OFFLOADED AT THE EARLIEST OPPORTUNITY. 

5. CAPTAIN’S GIGS MUST BE OFFLOADED BY 30 JUN 09. 

6. UPON COMPLETION OF OFFLOAD, SHIPS SHALL NOTIFY THEIR TYCOM N43 MPM AND POC.// 

Ah, mem­o­ries … it seems like just yes­ter­day we’d join the old man for the ride to shore, full of the kind of excite­ment that always pre­ceded a great lib­erty call.

So it’s good­bye, trusty friend. Regardless of sea state, you always got us there and back.

– Ward

Here’s a rare look inside a Russian sub. Note the Jules Verne vibe sur­round­ing the design — all the tubes, wires, and pipes. This shows the clas­sic Cold War era Soviet approach to the prob­lem that stands in sharp con­trast to the rel­a­tively anti­cep­tic look of American sub­marines. And dig the sound of a mil­lion bees buzzing as the tor­pe­does trans­late for­ward.

(Gouge: CM)

– Ward