Navy’s Stealth Ship Debut Stirs Up Questions : Defense: The Sea Shadow, like the F-117A fighter jet a design of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, had its test launch last month. But the craft may be dismantled, analysts say.
After a decade of secrecy, the Navy last month unveiled its seafaring version of the Stealth fighter plane, called the Sea Shadow.
The 160-foot-long ship was engineered by Lockheed Corp.’s Advanced Development Projects unit in Burbank, better known as the Skunk Works, which also designed the F-117A Stealth fighter. Indeed, analysts say Sea Shadow looks like the F-117A on pontoons, having the same angular shape intended to make it invisible to radar.
“It’s an important program,” said Norman Polmar, a naval analyst and author in Alexandria, Va. “With an increasing number of countries having advanced sensors and weapons, you want to make your ship as stealthy as possible.”
Sea Shadow, though, isn’t a prototype for a future fleet of ships. Rather, the Navy says it’s only a single ship and was built to test a variety of technologies, including sea-keeping, automation and control of a boat’s many “signatures”--characteristics that lend themselves to detection.
The Skunk Works, which has since moved to Palmdale, developed the basic design of the ship. Lockheed’s Missiles & Space unit in Sunnyvale began building the Sea Shadow in 1983. The ship first ran in 1985, and soon after that the Navy conducted preliminary testing at night. But in 1986 the vessel was stored away in a covered floating dry dock moored at Redwood City in the San Francisco Bay area.
Then on Easter Sunday last month, the Sea Shadow burst onto the scene. The black-painted ship emerged from its hide-out for three weeks of daytime testing off Santa Cruz Island before journalists and other observers.
“Funding limitations precluded additional testing until recently,” said Lt. Conrad C. Chun, the Navy’s officer in charge of Sea Shadow inquiries. Chun said the Sea Shadow program cost $195 million over 10 years, including $50 million for making the ship.
The unveiling, however, left some questions about the program unanswered.
Asked why the Navy lifted the veil of secrecy on the Sea Shadow, Chun said, “It looks like they were going to do some daytime testing and it was going to be seen by people.” But he quickly added: “I can’t confirm that.”
The Sea Shadow remains highly classified, although the Navy has released color photos and an 18-minute videotape of the ship gliding on calm seas. For the Navy, the exposure brings some positive news for a change.
The unveiling could be the Navy saying, “Look at us, we had this way back 10 years ago,” said Scott Truver, director of studies and analysis at Techmatics Inc., a naval engineering firm based in Fairfax, Va.
Some of the technologies from Sea Shadow have already been incorporated in other ships, notably on some destroyers. “A lot of the stealth characteristics are being applied to modern ships and will likely be used for future ships as well,” said Ben Rich, retired president of the Lockheed Skunk Works who worked on the project.
Some analysts, however, criticized the program’s expenses for maintaining secrecy. Like other secret projects, funding for the Sea Shadow came from the Pentagon’s so-called black, or secret, budget. The Navy declined to say how much of the program’s budget went for maintaining secrecy as opposed to building and testing.
“The secrecy has been stupid,” said Norman Friedman, a naval analyst in New York, who thinks congressional pressure helped unveil the Sea Shadow. “In general black programs are in trouble and they’re trying to bring them out in the public.”
“That could very well be,” said a congressional aide familiar with the Sea Shadow. But he said, “I suspect it was because of a lack of priorities and a lack of funding.”
Navy officials declined to comment on what is next for the Sea Shadow. Since completing its daytime testing last month, Sea Shadow has been sent back to its Quonset-shaped barge in Redwood City, and it’s likely that the ship will be dismantled, analysts said.
For Lockheed, based in Calabasas, the Sea Shadow was probably a one-time contract, said Lockheed spokesman Don Bane. Lockheed got out of shipbuilding years ago, he said, and “it’s not an area that Lockheed is interested in getting back into.”
The Navy wouldn’t release results from the three-week test in April, and it said Monday that the brief window of open information on the Sea Shadow is now closed. But Michael Dornheim, an editor at Aviation Week & Space Technology who watched radar of the Sea Shadow, reported that the ship “has been demonstrated to be essentially invisible on radar, although the ship’s presence can be detected by its wake in calm seas.” A ship’s wake refers to the trail or track left in water by a moving boat.
“As far as I know, the tests were successful,” said Rich, the retired Lockheed executive.
Although the Navy declined to elaborate on the tests it did, analysts said an important part of the program was testing the boat’s various signature controls. Its main radar-avoidance feature is its sloping, angular shape, much like the stealth aircraft, which are designed to deflect radar signals up or down, and away from the radar source.
Stealth experts who worked on Sea Shadow said much work was put into controlling the wake and the infrared signatures. Other signatures that probably were tested were the ship’s magnetic and acoustic controls, which are important in avoiding explosive mines.
Besides its angular appearance, the Sea Shadow’s operating area looks like the cockpit of the F-117A. The ship has a crew of four, and can be operated with a remote control box while standing outside the top hatch. Sea Shadow is made of welded steel, and is 160 feet long, 70 feet wide and displaces 560 tons. Its maximum speed is about 13 knots, or about 15 miles per hour.
Future warships, however, aren’t likely to look like Sea Shadow, analysts say. For one thing, Sea Shadow employs a small waterplane-area twin-hull design, that does not lend itself to high speeds. Sea Shadow was also built without weapons and other equipment that usually protrudes from warships.
Nonetheless, the Sea Shadow program reflects the “realization that many people feel stealth is an important requirement for warships even though the Cold War is over,” said Ron O’Rourke, a naval analyst at the Congressional Research Service in Washington. “Naval operations in coastal areas remain a potentially high-threat environment,” he said, noting that during the Persian Gulf war two U.S. ships were hit by mines. Some mines are triggered by sounds or magnetic signals a boat emits.
O’Rourke said a few other countries have been working on stealth ships, including the Swedish navy, which in early 1991 unveiled a 100-foot experimental stealth ship. But analysts say there’s no evidence that the U.S. Navy is lagging behind any other country in stealth ship technology.
Truver, the naval analyst at Techmatics, said the Sea Shadow represents the Navy’s focus toward “passive protection systems”--or stealth--as opposed to missiles or rockets.
Even with the Pentagon’s budget shrinking, he said, the Navy’s stealth program is likely to remain important. “As the Navy is pointing more and more toward operations in nearby coastal areas of the world, this type of passive protection system is going to be very necessary to complement the active component.”
