Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water

The Navy’s Smart Ship technology may not be as smart as the service contends.

Although PCs have reduced workloads for sailors aboard the Aegis missile cruiser USS Yorktown, software glitches resulted in system failures and crippled ship operations, according to Navy officials.

Navy brass have called the Yorktown Smart Ship pilot a success in reducing manpower, maintenance and costs. The Navy began running shipboard applications under Microsoft Windows NT so that fewer sailors would be needed to control key ship functions.

But the Navy last fall learned a difficult lesson about automation: The very information technology on which the ships depend also makes them vulnerable. The Yorktown last September suffered a systems failure when bad data was fed into its computers during maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, Va.

The ship had to be towed into the Naval base at Norfolk, Va., because a database overflow caused its propulsion system to fail, according to Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk.

“We are putting equipment in the engine room that we cannot maintain and, when it fails, results in a critical failure,” DiGiorgio said. It took two days of pierside maintenance to fix the problem.

The Yorktown has been towed into port after other systems failures, he said.

Atlantic Fleet officials acknowledged that the Yorktown last September experienced what they termed “an engineering local area network casualty,” but denied that the ship’s systems failure lasted as long as DiGiorgio said. The Yorktown was dead in the water for about two hours and 45 minutes, fleet officials said, and did not have to be towed in.

“This is the only time this casualty has occurred and the only propulsion casualty involved with the control system since May 2, 1997, when software configuration was frozen,” Vice Adm. Henry Giffin, commander of the Atlantic Fleet’s Naval Surface Force, reported in an Oct. 24, 1997, memorandum.

Giffin wrote the memo to describe “what really happened in hope of clearing the scuttlebutt” surrounding the incident, he noted.