Navy starts work on next class of carriers: CVN 21 said to offer biggest changes in decades, seeking a 'leap ahead' in technology.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

The U.S. Navy is moving ahead with plans for its much-debated, next-generation aircraft carrier, now called CVN 21. The service has requested $1.5 billion in its fiscal year 2004 budget for research, development and engineering and advanced procurement for the ship.

CVN 21 is scheduled to begin construction in 2007 and to be delivered in 2014, according to Rear Adm. Dennis M. Dwyer, the Navy's program executive officer for aircraft carriers.

The budget for the entire project "now stands at $11.7 billion," Dwyer told a press briefing in Washington, D.C.

Of that amount, he said, $5 billion is a onetime, non-recurring cost" of the design for the entire class of ships. "The actual construction cost of the first ship of the class is $6.7 billion in fiscal '07 dollars," he said. Some estimates had put the cost as high as $10 billion, which Dwyer dismissed as "a good myth we'd like to debunk."

CVN 21 will reflect the first major changes in carrier design since work began on the USS Nimitz, almost half a century ago, Dwyer told reporters. The Nimitz, CVN 68, was deployed in 1975, but work on her began much earlier, he said.

"Actually, the early design for the Nimitz was done in the late 1950s" Dwyer said. "If you take the time period between Nimitiz and CVN-21, it's the same time period between [the USS] Langley--the first carrier--and Nimitz." The Langley, CV 1, was commissioned in 1922.

"You can see the challenge," Dwyer said. "If anybody's got to go design a new carrier, I'm glad I'm the one.

The redesign is necessary, the admiral explained, for two major reasons. "One of them is sheer weight," he said. "We need to get newer, lighter systems that reduce the weight that's on the ships." The other factor is the need for increased electrical power, he said.

A lighter, more powerful ship will save "a tremendous amount of money in total ownership costs over the life of the ship," Dwyer said. "You can make up that R&D expense pretty quickly."

The Navy originally had planned to introduce design enhancements gradually to its class of carriers, building first a CVNX 1 and later an improved CVNX 2.

But Defense Department officials decided that planned improvements for CVNX 1 were not dramatic enough to justify the expense. Instead, they chose to meet the president's stated goal to "skip a generation" of technology. They combined the CVNX 1 and 2 steps "into a single, transformational ship design that accommodates continuous evolution through the life of the class," Hansford T. Johnson, acting Navy secretary, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The result, CVN 21, is providing an opportunity to reexamine "the way that we build and design ships and to set the baseline for the rest of the family of ships" that are in the works, including the littoral combat ship, DD(X) destroyer and Virginia-class submarine, Dwyer said. Plans for CVN 21 include dozens of new technologies.

A redesigned nuclear reactor, for example, supplies 25 percent more power for propulsion, with half the maintenance costs and half of the...