LCS (Littoral Combat Ship) aluminum alloy redesign

Post-Cold-War shift from Sea Wolf submarines to high-speed aluminum littoral combat craft; Navy's pendulum swing back to aluminum after the 1980s steel program.

So they were trying to get rid of the aluminum so they wouldn't have aluminum fires, and trying to keep the weight down. The next thing I know, by early 2000, after the World Trade Center fires and so on, they basically decided — and peace had broken out with the former Soviet Union and you didn't need a Sea Wolf submarine anymore, you needed littoral craft. I never heard the word "littoral" before; most people hadn't. And so now they're high-speed aluminum craft. But the problem with aluminum is it's a lot more difficult to weld than steel. It doesn't corrode as well. It can catch fire — but the Navy has sort of given up worrying about whether it catches fire. If it catches fire, it does.

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Navy's pivot to high-speed aluminum ships for the littoral battlefield. Tom notes that fatigue cracking and welded-construction design differences from steel create a learning curve for larger aluminum hulls.

So that's another important point. The faster something goes, the more you're going to pay to use it. We don't care about nuclear reactors — hopefully they don't go very fast at all, and when they do go fast we don't want to be around them. Ships don't go very fast, except now the Navy is interested in higher speed ships for the littoral battlefield. The littoral battlefield is anything within about 100 miles of the coast. Because of terrorism and stuff, they don't need the same number of great big aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines that are pretty slow and ponderous. They want some ship that can go at 60 miles an hour and go catch those pirates off Somalia. So they have to go to aluminum ships. There are all kinds of problems — even though we know how to use aluminum in a lot of applications and we've been using it for ships, when we start putting it in these bigger ships we start running into problems.