Builders vie to replace war-worn boatsBullard is head of Navy Expeditionary Combat Command and oversees the progress of the reconstituted, conventional riverine force, which deployed its first squadron to Iraq in March. Stood up in a hurry, the force inherited 20 boats known as Small Unit Riverine Craft from the Marines.
But after years of hard use in desert combat, those boats are worn out.
“We don’t have a big stockpile of engines over there and guess what — these engines are old and they’re failing, so we are building engines in theater for the boats right now,” Bullard told an audience June 7 at the Multi-Agency Craft Conference, a boat show for the military in Little Creek, Va.
The riverine force has been upgrading its SURCs with new communications gear and other add-ons, but the Navy’s concept for its riverine and coastal warfare units goes far beyond current needs in Iraq and the Middle East.
When Navy leaders talk about the places NECC units will go — South America, Africa and other parts of Asia come up time and again — they invariably mention places with shallow water where the gray-hull Navy can’t operate.
And Bullard has said that means NECC will need more than one type of boat. A small boat such as the SURC, effective in constricted rivers, may not be the best vessel for big, wide-open rivers with strong currents.
He says his formula for the new boats must balance speed and agility, force protection, “accurate” firepower, and cost.
“If you’ve ever ridden a 30-knot boat in a 3g turn, holding a .50-cal., trying to shoot everything, it isn’t easy,” he said. “But if you stop, they’ve got a pretty good bead with an RPG that we don’t have.”
Vying to fill that need for the next generation of riverine combat craft are boatmakers and defense contractors who converged on Little Creek to show off the latest craft.
One boat that has caught the Navy’s eye is the CB90 series. Built by Safeboat, of Port Orchard, Wash., it’s based on a Swedish design that has proven very popular with military forces around the world.
Painted in a geometric brown, tan and gray camouflage, the Riverine Command Boat on display at Little Creek was configured as an armed troop transport with 18 seats in an air-conditioned cabin that can be sealed off from chemical, nuclear and biological contamination. The cabin can be reconfigured as a floating command post, a waterborne ambulance or, as one military has done, a mortar pit.
“It’s basically a pickup truck back there,” company President Scott Peterson said, driving the RCB from an airy, aircraftlike cockpit. “We’re trying to make it as plug-and-play as possible.”
It can do 40 knots and carries enough fuel to go 430 miles. It has a bow ramp for putting troops ashore quickly. It’s controlled by joystick and has a video monitoring system that provides several views from outside the boat on screens in the cockpit and the cabin. It has a remote-operated .50-caliber machine gun and a Long Range Acoustic Device on the aft deck that can be used to hail another vessel in a variety of preprogrammed languages. The LRAD also can focus a powerful beam of sound as a weapon, if need be, to deafen and disorient an enemy crew.
Peterson said Navy Sea Systems Command is “scrubbing” the designs, and a commitment of some kind from the Navy is “in the process.”
Asked if Naval Special Warfare was interested in the boat as well as the conventional riverine force, Peterson said, “There’s a lot of interest from all different facets.”
Another vessel getting a look in Little Creek is a prototype of the Joint Multimission Expeditionary Craft, constructed by Aluminum Chambered Boats and weaponized by Northrop Grumman.
Also intended for reconfiguration depending on the mission, it has a bow ramp, twin diesel engines, three crew members and room for 13 passengers. It can do 42 knots. The prototype at Little Creek was armed with a remote controlled minigun, but the boat is intended for an array of uses.
Scott Clanton spent 24 years in the Marines. He retired last year as a master sergeant in a force reconnaissance unit. Now, he works in sales for Aluminum Chambered Boats.
“A gunboat is just a gunboat, that’s all it is,” he said. “You might have a Seabee unit with the same boat. It’s just like the Humvee is a multipurpose vehicle. It’s like a Humvee on the water.”
A JMEC hull costs about $700,000; kitted out with weapons and electronics, it costs $2.6 million.
If the Navy is looking to the future for its riverine and coastal warfare craft, a relic of its not-so-distant past was also at Little Creek.
Tied up to the pier with all the newest boats was a Vietnam-era mini-ATC, or armored troop carrier. Low-slung, squared off, flat-bottomed and armed to the gills, the mini-ATC has been out-of-service with the U.S. for years, but a Virginia-based company has rebuilt 10 of the 36-knot boats for the Columbian military.
Bill Shabot worked on the mini-ATCs. He retired from the Navy as a chief electronics technician in 2000 after 23 years. The boats have been entirely rebuilt and up-armored with titanium plates. Shabot’s been to Colombia and says the riverine forces there run their mini-ATCs hard. But the American Navy will be moving on to something much more fancy.
“They used to have these,” he said. “There are so many new boats, I don’t know why they’d want one of these.”
