Electric Boat has bead on future of submarines

Nearly everyone at Electric Boat is focused on current submarine programs. Three people are not.

They are the concept formulation group, or in EB lingo, CONFORM. Their sole job is to figure out how today's submarines can be made to do more and how future submarines should be made for what they may be called on to do.

"We're the ones charged with maintaining that focus," said John Biederka, director of the group.

This is the group that developed the early concept for a system of tubes that allows Los Angeles-class attack submarines to launch Tomahawk missiles vertically.

Team members came up with the idea for a module with missile tubes to boost firepower on the newest attack submarines, the Virginia class.

Also, they found a way to tweak the last submarine in the Seawolf class so it could be tasked with highly classified missions involving special forces and could test new systems.

Not all engineers enjoy concept development; they are used to knowing every detail of a particular task at hand. The three men of CONFORM -- who, combined, have a century of experience at EB -- are the most futuristic thinkers of the engineering force. They are the visionaries.

The core group of three -- Biederka, Pat Bevins and Steve Menno -- provides continuity, but they fan out across EB, Biederka said, to "bring the ideas of the whole company to bear.

"We've got a huge resource of ideas here in the folks that are at Electric Boat," Biederka said. CONFORM "allows those ideas to come together and get sorted out so we can find the good ones."

Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, the chief of naval operations, said in a recent interview that the Navy has to dominate the undersea domain, to "own it," and "the centerpiece of it is the submarine."

Submarines of the future, he said, will have to be stealthy "of course" and "be able to (connect) with other sensors, platforms and payloads."

The military works across areas of warfare known as domains -- air, land, sea, space and now cyberspace. Submarines will have to operate across the domains, Greenert said. There is research into missiles that submarines could launch at aircraft, while submarines, using antennas, could be an instrument in the cyber domain, he added.

"They're stealthy and they can be in places that other things can't, so how do we use that to great effect?" he said.

"They can deliver a Tomahawk cruise missile," he said. "We're familiar with that. So what else? What other kind of system or weapon can they deliver? We will have to see what is the over-arching potential in special warfare."

Sometimes the members of CONFORM see the need for a capability and then approach the Navy. Other times the Navy poses a straightforward question: "Can you put this missile on this boat?," for example.

Franz Edson, a past director of CONFORM, recalled when Navy officials visited the shipyard in the 1990s because they needed a submarine with enhanced war-fighting capabilities that was big enough to accommodate advanced technology for classified research -- and they needed it right away.

"It was an emergent need to perform a mission," said Edson, who is now EB's director of mission systems and business development. "They came to us with their hair on fire, just about literally."

EB had a narrow window since the USS Jimmy Carter would be the third and last ship of the Seawolf class. But CONFORM already had hundreds of ideas. The group narrowed the field to three, and EB extended the hull of the Jimmy Carter by 100 feet.

Edson, who works closely with Biederka, said EB is "never satisfied with the status quo.

"We always want to make it more capable, more cost- effective, safer," he said. "CONFORM feeds that need. People want a venue to do that."