THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, February 7, 1996 TAG: 9602070402
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long : 122 lines
It's the answer to a young sailor's dreams, a machine that each night moves down ship passageways doing some of the more unpleasant chores of life at sea: vacuuming, scrubbing and polishing floors.
One man, walking along with it, steers the contraption. The squad of sailors who used to do its work have other jobs now, or are out of a navy that no longer needs unskilled laborers.
It's not a dream - at least not in the Netherlands. The Dutch navy has several ships equipped with such robot custodians, manufactured by Electrolux and similar to machines used every day to clean office buildings. The Dutch even designed some ships with the mechanized helpers in mind, making passageways wide enough to accommodate them and rounding rather than squaring off corners to make turning easier.
Now the U.S. Navy, which has some of the world's most advanced armaments, is looking to use high technology to ease the everyday burdens of its sailors.
Later this year, the Norfolk-based cruiser Yorktown will become the Navy's first ``smart ship,'' a floating proving ground for mechanical and electronic labor-saving devices that could become standard equipment on future generations of destroyers, aircraft carriers and submarines.
Urged on by Adm. Mike Boorda, the first American to go from seaman recruit to chief of naval operations, the sea service is looking to develop new technologies and personnel policies that could eliminate many menial shipboard jobs. Through a home page on the Internet's World Wide Web, the Navy is soliciting proposals from technology companies, management consultants and anyone else who might have a helpful idea.
``We want to take that work the sailor has been doing and transfer that task to a machine,'' said Rear Adm. Alexander Krekich, who as the Navy's director of surface warfare programs is leading the effort.
The Navy has tried before to reduce manpower aboard its ships, Krekich acknowledged in an interview. But those efforts generally involved looking for ways to redistribute a fixed amount of work among fewer sailors, essentially giving each person more to do.
That approach ``won't get far with this CNO,'' Krekich said. Instead, Boorda wants jobs that sailors are now doing to be transferred to machines or computers. ``Or, if you've got a policy that requires you to do a job that no one should be doing - change the policy,'' Krekich said.
The more than 100 proposals that have come in so far involve changes in dozens of shipboard systems. One firm suggested equipping each ship with jet skis to help rescue sailors who fall overboard, a Navy spokesman said. Another proposed special corrosion-resistant coatings on equipment to reduce the need for repainting. There also have been proposals for new fire sensor systems and computer-aided navigation controls, among others.
The first of the changes probably won't be seen aboard the Yorktown for another six months, Krekich said, and probably won't be felt around the Navy for years. Boorda wants the new machines and policies thoroughly tested and proven before they start replacing sailors.
While the emphasis is on saving sailors work, Krekich also said the Navy is trying to save money. Personnel expenses will eat up about $24 billion this year - one-third of the service's budget - and the Pentagon is pushing all the military branches to economize so some of that money can be freed up to buy more sophisticated weapons.
One of those weapons could be a new surface combatant, now known only as SC-21, that the Navy wants to begin putting in operation around 2009. Another could be the ``arsenal ship,'' a sort of weapons barge that some Navy planners suggest could be manned by as few as 20 sailors but would carry up to 500 launch tubes for land attack, anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles. Krekich said lessons learned with the smart ship should show up in development of both vessels.
Though American sailors and politicians boast that the nation already has the world's most advanced fleet, Krekich unabashedly admits that he's looking to steal ideas from other navies, particularly the Canadians and the Dutch.
Innovations like the Dutch cleaning machine can save ``an army of people,'' said Lt. Cmdr. Karel A. Heemskerk, a Canadian naval engineer who has worked on the development of an array of labor-saving technologies for his own navy.
Canada's navy has made a giant leap forward in shipboard technology since the mid-1980s, Heemskerk said, building 12 new frigates and refitting four destroyers already in its fleet with an array of new electronic systems.
On their new patrol frigates, ships slightly larger than American frigates but smaller than U.S. destroyers, the Canadians now go to sea with crews of around 200, about one-fourth smaller than they used on earlier, similar-sized ships.
Canada spent $10 billion on the frigates, and the new software required to run all their systems pushed the bill higher than it would have been for a simpler design. But the Canadians figure that with each person cut from their crews, they save about $1 million over the 20-year life cycle of the ship.
The key to saving all that manpower was integrating a variety of mechanical and electronic systems, Heemskerk said, so they can be monitored and run by just a few people. From any console in the operations room of one of Canada's new frigates, a single sailor can drive the ship, launch torpedoes or anti-aircraft missiles, activate foam dispensers that will put out a fire below, seal bulkheads around an area that's been hit, and do a variety of other jobs.
``We have achieved complete remote operation of machinery throughout the ship,'' said Capt. Anthony J. Goode, who retired last month as the Canadian naval attache in Washington. ``Utilities, pumps, main machinery. . . . We do not need anybody at any station on the ship. It's all operated by software.''
And if the master control fails, or is knocked out by an enemy attack, the system is designed for ``graceful degradation'' - meaning each system operates on its own, from separate terminals in the operations room or elsewhere on the ship.
Goode, who last summer gave Krekich and the U.S. smart ship team a detailed briefing on the Canadian advances, said he's concluded that ``the biggest barrier to saving people is cultural, not technical. It has nothing to do with the actual operational capabilities of technology today. . . .
``Sailors are incredibly conservative, and naval engineers are more conservative than sailors,'' he said. All are nervous about the risks, which Goode insists are often minimal, of entrusting shipboard tasks to machines and computer controls.
In his navy's case, the cultural barriers to change are so strong that they keep sailors from taking full advantage of some of the new technologies the country has placed aboard their frigates, Goode said.
``There are people who wander around the ship doing nothing but checking for fires'' and other problems, he said. ``The technology exists and it is in our ships today to do that completely remotely, through temperature sensors, smoke detectors. . . . But we still have two guys who do nothing but wander the ship because they're not willing to accept the risk.'' ILLUSTRATION: JANET SHAUGHNESSY/The Virginian-Pilot
by CNB