U.S. naval shipbuilding is a mess. The Coast Guard’s large cutters are a disaster, nearly 100-percent over-budget. The Navy’s littoral corvette went from affordable to gold-plated in record time. At $3-5 billion a pop, the larger DDG-1000 battleship never even tried to be affordable. The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard have ambitious plans to grow and improve their fleets, but neither has managed to exercise design and budgetary restraint. In this morass there are a few bright spots. One is the Navy’s T-AKE cargo ship built by NASSCO in San Diego.
T-AKE is, in theory, just a replenishment ship, with the mission to haul supplies out to large “station ships” that are like one-stop shops for beans, bullets and fuel for Navy warships. For that mission, you just need big cargo holds and the cranes, elevators, flight deck and corridors to get the supplies off the T-AKE and onto the station ship in a reasonable amount of time. It ain’t rocket science, and T-AKE’s designers never acted like it was. They kept it simple, tweaking the traditional replenishment ship design with several modest improvements that, combined, represent a fairly significant boost in capability. These include:
* Wider corridors
* More elevators
* More deck space
* A bigger flight deck
With more space to move around in, cargo can be partially unloaded and reloaded, to get at what you need when you need it. The Navy calls this “selective offload,” and as boring as it sounds, it’s a big deal. If you can selectively unload a T-AKE, you can use the ship for all kinds of missions all during the same cruise. In addition to topping off a station ship, a T-AKE might divert to a sudden natural disaster zone to drop off food and medicine. Then, if a crisis flares up nearby, you can race over to deliver ammo to U.S. troops.
Selective offload also means the T-AKE will make a great addition to the Navy’s new “seabasing” concept, which envisions cargo vessels and amphibious ships creating a “floating forward operation base” off the coast of a contested country, linked to the ground by way of choppers, V-22s, landing craft and “lighterage.” Marines and soldiers — and their aircraft — can use the base to launch sorties inland, but only if they can get the supplies they need when they need it. T-AKE’s flexibility makes that possible.
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T-AKE is a hybrid vessel, in a sense. It combines military and civilian standards. You wouldn’t necessarily want to sail a T-AKE into a showdown with the Soviet Navy circa 1987, but for the 21st century, commercial standards are no problem. The benefit? Each T-AKE costs only $500 million, a steal by today’s standards. And as a result, the Navy has found that it can afford to keep buying them. The T-AKE program was planned to end at 12 ships, but it’s already at 14, with more possible.
So what can we learn from T-AKE?
* Modest improvements are safer than technological revolution
* Selective commercial standards help reduce cost
* Flexibility is a capability all its own
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The oldest operating replentishment ships in naval service are USNS….The oldest of those was commissioned just after WWII. NASCCO took a very vague Navy dream set of specs and adapted 40 years of building commercial ships and made the T-AKE. They also make a hospital ship(s) off the same hull. Great design specs had little to do with it! Great Britain, Italy, France, and the aussies also have equivalent ships manned by civilian or naval auxiliary crews doing the same job(s). They also inconspicuouly have areas of the focsle and after superstucture to fit point defense weapons and usually sale with stinger missiles on board and small arms available for anti-boarding problems. I watched the first two of these ships being built then sitting alongside the pier at NASSCO waiting for the Navy to figure out what to do with them. I watched the third be completed as a hospital ship. A little accessing civilian experience in building some things does help a lot…..
I´m glad to hear that America can still build some cargo ships.
This post will be included in Maritime Monday 102 (to be posted on 17 March) on gCaptain.
Thanks!
[...] * Directly replace all the current aircraft carriers, attack subs and amphibious and cargo ships with similar (albeit larger and more expensive) vessels. [...]
Excellent article. A few footnotes. The ship is constructed to civilian standards with some MILSPECs being used for a few systems such as its UNREP gear. But by and large the ship conforms to USCG regs and ABS rules. Both of which are significantly less expensive standards than NVR.
Another cost savings with this type of ship (MSC Naval Fleet Auxiliary Force) is that it is crewed by professional civil service mariner (CIVMARs) along with small units to support logisitics and aviation functions.
One point about the usefulness of the T-AKE in a seabased operation – this class of ship does not have a significant set of cargo gear to offload by Lo/Lo to lighterage alongside. Lots of UNREP yes, but I haven’t seen any UNREP gear on LCUs etc!! Cranes are needed to load LCACs alongside.
In a seabased sustainment operation, cargo throughput is what counts and the T-AKEs may not be as efficient at sealift ships in moving large amt of tonnage to the shore.
[...] 130 : CVN-21 Ford-class aircraft carrier 20 : SSN-774 Virginia-class submarine 50 : DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer 25 : DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyer 6 : Littoral Combat Ship 15 : LPD-17 San Antonio-class assault ship 40: LHA-6 America-class assault ship 5 : T-AKE Lewis and Clark-class logistics ship 2 : Joint High-Speed Vessel [...]
FooMan ha sit all wrong. NASSCO has not built a hospital ship in about 20 years. The first two ships did not sit at NASSCO waiting for the Navy to figure out what to do with them. They undergo an outfitting period and crew training, which may be at NASSCO or somewhere else. The 3rd ship, Shepard, has the same function as all other T-AKEs, in no way modified to be a hospital ship!