How are those follow-on units coming along, and what improvements and additions are you looking at to include in them in the years ahead?

Well, the Navy continues to work through the different technologies of their warfare systems and communications plans and things that they typically do that are on a parallel track to the shipbuilding plan. What we’re working hard on is to get these ships into as much of a series production mode as we can. Shipbuilders can do incredible things, but when they get a chance to do it over and over again, they really take a lot of the costs out. When you’re building one-of-a-kind ships, they can become very expensive. For a lot of reasons these ships [the LPD 17 amphibious transport dock ships] have been a class run in two shipyards, and there have been different build strategies at each facility.

What we’re doing now is focusing on creating a single-class build plan, because we can see where this class is going. The functionality and capability of the San Antonio-class carries it far beyond the existing LPD requirement. We see having a class plan, a series production plan, and being able to work through a common process as a way for us to take some significant costs out of building them. To the extent that we’re able to take the cost out of it, we’re able to determine our future.

And of course it has a lot of utility in it, as you pointed out. There is significant volume in there, and if you don’t need a well deck or other things, you can stuff a lot of other things in there. For example, it’s no secret that CNO and NAVSEA are openly talking about the LPD 17 design being the basis for a new class of command ships.

There may be some command ship opportunities that follow LPD 17 as the next replacement in the expeditionary-type ship side of the shipbuilding business, as well as the replacement for the LSDs [the Whidbey Island-class (LSD 41) landing ship docks]. The LSDs are getting to be particularly old, and there’s a follow-on program, the LSD (X) as it’s called right now. But from a shipbuilder’s perspective, if you could step back and say, “You’re going to be building these at a periodic rate, not just for the next two or three years, but out until 2025 or 2030, and then you’re going to have some rhythm to that.” Then where you’re going to be is that you’re really going to be able to invest in the program, and take some big costs out of it.

Now, if you can take some of those big costs out of it, then you have a greater likelihood that you might actually get to execute the entire U.S. Navy amphibious shipbuilding plan. The CNO has spoken about a common hull form between the current LPD 17s being built and the replacement LSDs. So the question is, how do you get from here to there? Maybe building the command ships on an LPD 17 platform is the way to bridge the gap and get us there. Maybe there’s an acceleration of one program or another. I’m not sure that I’m clairvoyant enough to know how it’s all going to work out. What I do know is that if we are able to create a serious production line for this ship, and that we are able to show the kind of learning curves on the costs that you can get out of series production, then we will create its future.

From a naval architecture point of view, do you feel like you can go ahead and convert this design to have the necessary storage cube and other factors that are necessary to actually replace the LSD 41 successfully?

Actually, we think that’s a pretty straightforward engineering proposition. This is one of those cases where at some level you have to step back and say, “Do we want to optimize every aspect of the design, or do we want to allow ourselves to have some parts of the design, like the hull form, be the same as what we’ve done before?” LPD 17 may not be precisely the optimal hull form for an LSD-type design, but it might fall into the category of “sufficient,” which would then save us the cost of design and production facilitation for a whole new kind of hull form. If that’s what you’re going to do, then you can take advantage of some other technologies to reconfigure the inside if you had to create the capabilities to meet the mission requirements of an LSD, command ship, or whatever else you wanted to do.

Much like Pascagoula did with the Spruance-class (DD 963) destroyers, which evolved into three separate classes of warships?

And a lot like Newport News is doing with the Ford–class (CVN 78) aircraft carriers. The Ford–class hull uses the same hull as the Nimitz–class (CVN 68) hull. Now, the flight deck internals are different, but the hull design itself is the same. So, those are some of the ways that we talk with the Navy about how to take some of the cost out of building these extremely complex warships.