Tom Clancy: Let's talk a little about the material side of the Navy these days. All the ships, aircraft, and other things that were bought during the Reagan Administration are now almost fifteen years old. Military spending has been significantly reduced in recent years. Are you having problems modernizing and reconstituting the Navy for the 21 st century?
Admiral Johnson: I would not categorize the Navy's needs at this stage as problems. I think of them as opportunities, and I would say that the future looks promising. I'm just sorry that I'm not going to be a JO [junior officer] to take advantage of all the things we're going to be getting in the future.If you look at the programs that we've got on the boards for the next decade, it's a long list. There are the DDG-51-class Aegis destroyers, which we are continuing to build at a rate of between three and four a year. We're getting those ships at between $800 and $900 million a copy, depending upon whose numbers you use, which is quite a bargain. I know that sounds like a lot of money for a tin can [the traditional nickname for destroyers], but it's a pretty impressive tin can!After the Aegis, the next class of surface combatant will be the Surface Combatant-21 [SC-21], which we're just coming to clarity on right now. The first phase of that program will give us what we call a "land attack" destroyer or "DD-21." Downstream from that will probably be a group of those ships that will begin to replace the early units of the Aegis fleet.We can be sure of one thing-SC-21 is going to have to be much more affordable than the DDG-51's. That's the bottom-line challenge in all this. That's why we're invested in something called "Smart Ship" [the USS Yorktown [CG-48], which is being outfitted]. We want to see what we can learn about making these ships not only less expensive to buy, but to operate and maintain as well.But they'll never be cheap. You have to remember that Navy combatants are not cruise ships. They need to have combat capability all the time. How you make the different trade-offs for crew size, displacement, engineering plants, weapons, sensors, and other things is very, very important. One day, lives may depend on how well we make our decisions now.
Tom Clancy: What other new classes of warships do you have on the horizon? I know that the first of the new-generation ships will be the San Antonio-class [LPD-17] amphibious ships, which are under construction right now.
Admiral Johnson: The San Antonio-class [LPD-17] amphibious ship replaces four different classes of older ships in just one hull. It's an important ship to me, as well as to Chuck Krulak [the Commandant of the Marine Corps]. As you know, the ARG [Amphibious Ready Group] of the 21st century is going to be a three-ship force. There will be a big deck aviation/amphibious ship like a Tarawa [LHA-1] or Wasp [LHD-1], one of the Whidbey Island [LSD-41] or Harpers Ferry-class [LSD-49] dock ships, and a San Antonio. That San Antonio-class ship is going to be the inshore fighter, which will launch the new AAAV amphibious tractors, as well as air-cushioned landing craft and helicopters.The design and mix of the ARG and these new ships will give us the ability to fight both in the littorals and in the "blue water" of the open oceans. It's going to be an awesome platform. That ship is coming along well, as well as CVN-77, which we see as a transition carrier to take us to some technological developments on our way to the next generation of carrier, the CVX.
Tom Clancy: Tell us some more about the CVN-77, if you would.
Admiral Johnson: Some of the improvements we contemplate for it are not unlike what we're doing with the Aegis cruiser Yorktown, which we're adding a number of different automation systems to for things like assistance on the bridge, damage control monitoring, and a fiber-optic local area network [LAN] backbone. These improvements are designed to reduce the manning of the Aegis platforms, if it proves practical. We want to see what technology can do for us as a practical matter on future combatants. Once we've been to school on that, then we will do the same kinds of things with CVN-77.We think technological improvements will help us a lot on the road to our future carrier designs, especially with regards to things like size, shape, and manning, which are some of the critical design factors that determine the costs of new ships. So the plan right now is that CVN-77 will indeed be a transition ship to take us to CVX. We feel that it is the right thing to do. We're going to make it just different enough through a "Smart Ship/Smart Buy" concept. What we're trying to do is to leverage technology to do things differently and with fewer people, and let technology make the Naval platforms of the next century even smarter and better than the ones we have right now.
Tom Clancy: If you were going to sit here today and describe what CVX will become, what would be your vision of that carrier when it arrives sometime in the 21st century?
Admiral Johnson: Let me do this based upon my own experience. I started on the Orisknay [CV-34, a modernized World War II-era Essex-class (CV-9/SCB-27C) carrier], and I've flown on and off of everything from the Midway [CVA-41] to a number of the Nimitz-class [CVN-68] nuclear carriers. I would tell you that what I want CVX to provide is the same kind of flexibility as you can get out of a Nimitz-class carrier. I also want it to be able to deliver many of the same kinds of services and benefits that we already get from carriers right now. I especially want it to be able to move around the same way.This ship has implications from the strategic level all the way down to tactical implications-like whether I can crank up enough wind over the deck to be able to land an aircraft with the flaps stuck in the "up" position. So we need tremendous flexibility out of this platform, including areas like berthing, data networks, sensors, and tactical systems.The CVX will also need to be an "open architecture" ship, so that we can "net" it into the new kinds of "network centric" battle forces that we want to build in the 21st century. We will want to have distributed sensor and firepower capabilities spread throughout the battle group in ways that allow us to have situational awareness on every platform, both ships and aircraft, and not just the carrier. The carrier is still going to be the core ship of the CVBG. Therefore, it will still need to have flexibility on the flight deck, in the systems that it carries, and in habitability, to ensure a decent quality of life for the crew that will man it. I believe that the Navy in the 21st century will continue to be a forward-deployed force, and given that reality, this ship is a blank sheet of paper in every way.
Tom Clancy: Does that mean that you see every feature of the CVX as being open for new ideas?
Admiral Johnson: As far as I'm concerned, yes. Propulsion, sensors, catapult systems-they are all open to new and innovative ideas, should they be offered or presented. Now, when we talk about a CVX-type carrier, we're talking about a ship that will arrive at a time where the dominant aircraft it will carry will be the new Joint Strike Fighter [JSF], the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, and something we call the Common Support Aircraft [CSA]. So this ship will have to be optimized to our vision for operating those future aircraft, none of which are operational today.