THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 13, 1996 TAG: 9608130277
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 72 lines
Its schedule for the next few months is pretty standard stuff for a U.S. warship deploying in the Caribbean. There will be stops in south Florida, Puerto Rico and Martinique, among others, before returning to Norfolk in October.
But when the Yorktown, a 12-year-old guided-missile cruiser, pulled away from the pier at Norfolk Naval Base on Monday, it began what could be a voyage into the future for all of the Navy.
An array of electronic equipment installed this spring has begun to transform the Yorktown into the Navy's first ``smart ship.'' As it sailed off the Virginia capes Monday night, computers were steering the ship, controlling its speed, and assessing the condition and performance of its gas turbine engines.
Other computers aboard the Yorktown are programmed to take over vital parts of its damage-control effort, should it come under attack or be crippled in an accident.
``We've basically unplugged the nervous system of Yorktown and plugged in a new one,'' said Rear Adm. Daniel J. Murphy, the Navy's director of surface warfare programs.
The ``Integrated Control System,'' a package of computers and software put together by Sperry Marine Systems of Charlottesville, already enables three sailors on Yorktown's bridge to monitor, from computer terminals, systems that previously would have occupied up to 10 people.
During a test in June, the bridge system guided the ship to a rendezvous at sea with a Navy oiler, then steered it to within 50 yards of a pre-set location for a ``precision anchoring'' exercise.
That performance is equivalent to what the Navy demands when a sailor is at the controls for the same exercise, Murphy indicated.
If all its components perform as advertised, the Yorktown's new nervous system could do jobs that now occupy up to 50 sailors. The ship was carrying the normal complement of about 350 when it left Norfolk on Monday, but Cmdr. Rick Rushton, the captain, expects to put about 50 ashore in Florida in December, after a shakedown cruise to check the new equipment and a stop in Pascagoula, Miss., to install some more computers and software.
Murphy, who is overseeing the project, said the equipment aboard the Yorktown is the forerunner of electronic and mechanical systems that one day will do the work of hundreds of sailors on other ships.
Ultimately, the Navy wants those systems to do many of the most menial tasks on its ships, permitting sailors to concentrate on fighting. The new equipment on Yorktown changes major systems and operations; the Navy also is working on labor-saving machines and electronic systems for such tasks as cleaning passageways and baking bread.
An ``arsenal ship'' the Navy hopes to deploy by the end of the decade could get by with a crew of 50 or fewer, thanks to such systems, Navy planners think - but with 500 missile tubes would be the most heavily armed warship in history.
Driving the changes, in part, is the military's expectation that already-tight defense budgets are going to get tighter as the Cold War recedes further into memory. Personnel costs are the services' largest expense.
The Navy has transformed the Yorktown by spending about $6 million on the new nervous system Rushton and his crew will test. If the system can replace 50 sailors, it will pay for itself in just three years, Murphy said.
The smart ship's pricetag has been kept relatively low and the work done in only about eight months, Murphy said, by relying on computers and software already developed for use by commercial ships and aircraft.
If the Navy tried to write specifications for new systems, as it historically has done when developing new classes of warships, the cost could have gone as high as $100 million and the project might have taken 10 years, he added. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
The guided-missile cruiser's new nervous system could do the work of
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