DATE: Saturday, November 22, 1997           TAG: 9711220348

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A3   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   70 lines

BUILDING NEW NAVY SHIPS REQUIRES LOCAL TECHNOLOGY

A draft report commissioned by the Navy has welcome news for thousands of Hampton Roads shipbuilders, recommending that the next generation of aircraft carriers have a combination of features that currently can be provided by only one U.S. company: Newport News Shipbuilding.

The study prepared by the Naval Research Advisory Committee says the future flattops should be nuclear-powered and roughly the size of today's Nimitz-class carriers.

Those two characteristics have been the key to Newport News' ability to maintain its monopoly on carrier contracts.

The Peninsula shipyard is the only one in the U.S. with a drydock large enough to accommodate the 100,000-ton Nimitz-class ships. One other yard, Electric Boat of Groton, Conn., also supplies the Navy with nuclear-powered vessels, but can build only submarines.

Newport News currently is now finishing one carrier, the Harry Truman; preparing to start building another, the Ronald Reagan; and planning a third, now designated only as CVN-77. Construction on the last ship is to begin in 2002, if Congress provides the roughly $5 billion needed to build it.

A spokesman for the yard said he had not seen the draft. The Virginian-Pilot obtained a copy of the document Friday.

The advisory committee, a group of independent consultants brought together by the Navy, was asked to consider what carriers beyond CVN-77 should look like.

The committee has been at work since January, though work on the next-generation ship - dubbed ``CVX'' - is not expected to start until 2008, and its unveiling is not expected until around 2013.

The group's report says nuclear power is essential if the new carriers are to be able to sprint at high speeds to areas where American interests are threatened. A fossil-fueled carrier leaving from Norfolk and sailing around the southern coast of Africa to the Persian Gulf could take 32 days to make the trip, twice as long as a nuclear ship, the consultants concluded.

Though some independent naval analysts have suggested that the Navy point toward a new generation of carriers that would be smaller and cheaper than the Nimitz ships, the Navy study concluded that ``CVX must be large to be effective.

``The large size is critical to successful execution of the most demanding missions since it provides the ability to conduct flight operations in high sea(s),'' the group's report said. And only such a large ship will be able to rapidly accommodate new missions, it added.

The group recommended that CVX be designed so that all its systems, including the engines that push it through the sea and the catapults that fling jets off its deck, are run by electric motors. The use of electric power would make it easy for the Navy to remove outmoded systems and install their replacements during the ship's 50-year life, the committee said.

Today's catapults, as well as the turbines that drive carriers, are powered by steam that is produced by the ships' reactors.

``The all-electric ship, with its common source of power for all systems (also) can be rapidly reconfigured in case of damage,'' the group's study said. ``Power can be redirected to undamaged propulsion systems or mission-critical combat systems.''

The study said the new carrier also should be designed to sail with a crew far smaller than the 5,000-plus who go to sea on today's flattops. It did not recommend a specific crew size, however, saying the service should conduct detailed studies to determine how many airmen and sailors can be replaced by automated systems.

Personnel costs are the largest single expense on today's Navy ships. Shrinking the crew size would generate money for new ship purchases. The Navy's overall budget is expected to be frozen for the forseeable future, but if the service is to maintain a 330-ship fleet it must find a way to afford more than the four to six ships annually it has been buying in recent years. KEYWORDS: U.S. NAVY REPORT

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