Page 26: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (September 2023)

NATIONAL SECURITY MULTI-MISSION VESSEL (NSMV) aptain Morgan McManus has a long and var- ied maritime career spanning nearly 30 years, sailing on everything from tankers to deepwater drill ships, returning in 2019 to his alma mater

CSUNY Maritime to serve as the captain on the schools training ship, Empire State VI.

“When I joined the college in 2019, they were still in the phases of designing and reviewing the [new] ship,” said Cap- tain McManus. Designed from the ground up, NSMV is the ? rst completely new-design ship for the U.S. Maritime Ad- ministration (MarAd) in decades, and the project has widely been hailed for taking a commercial – ie. more cost-ef? cient – approach to a government shipbuilding contract.

Five ships will be built for ? ve maritime academies – Em- pire State VII for SUNY Maritime; Patriot State for Mas- sachusetts Maritime Academy; State of Maine for Maine

Maritime Academy; Lone Star State for Texas A&M Maritime

Academy; and Golden State for California State University

Maritime Academy – and each had input on the design, from the size and con? gu- ration of classrooms and berthing areas, all the way down to the mess deck. “They received a lot of our input from all the schools as to what it should look like and what was needed,” said Captain

McManus. “We said what we thought we needed to make a training ship a training ship.”

It’s safe to say that any ‘? rst-in-class’ ship comes with am- ple design changes and challenges, and Empire State VII is certainly no exception. Perhaps the biggest challenge though, out the state maritime academy training ships, there would had nothing to do with ship design itself, as ? rst steel for Em- be a long-term negative impact on national security, reducing pire State VII was cut in mid-December 2020, squarely at the number of credentialed mariners available to operate U.S. the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and shutdown, a situation vessels during war, national emergencies, and for domestic which slowed, but never stopped the process. and international commerce.” “It made it dif? cult as far as meetings and project review; That same year, MARAD began work with Herbert Engi- a lot was done by Zoom and Teams meetings, and the yard neering to develop a design for what would eventually become was doing everything they could to keep work going,” said the NSMV. The demands on the design would be signi? cant.

Captain McManus. “That made it challenging, trying to build In addition to have to physically ? t in the berths available at a ? rst-in-class ship with a pandemic going on.” the state maritime academies, and serve as a state-of-the-art training platform for up to 600 cadets at sea, the vessel design

NSMV: A Short History would also have to accommodate use as a humanitarian aid and

The NSMV program has a long history, as Jeff R. Vogel, disaster relief (HA/DR) platform. State maritime academy ves-

Member, Cozen O’Connor, wrote in the August 2023 edition sels being used to support HA/DR missions was, of course, not of sister-publication MarineNews. The program has tran- a new concept. For example, in 2012, the TS Kennedy from scended Presidential administrations and Congressional lead- the Massachusetts Maritime Academy and the TS Empire State ers. In 2015, MARAD engaged with the U.S. Department of VI from SUNY Maritime College were used to house disas-

Transportation’s Volpe Center to make the business case for ter relief workers during the Hurricane Sandy clean-up effort. the recapitalization of the state maritime academy training The difference, of course, is that the NSMV was designed to ? eet. The results of the study indicated that if the government speci? cally support HA/DR operations, incorporating a roll- failed to take action by 2025, three of the existing training on/roll-off side ramp, container space, onboard cargo handling vessels would be inoperable. Volpe’s Principal Technical Ad- equipment, a helipad and berthing for up to a 1,000 people.

visor for Transportation Logistics and Security summarized The result was a mature design, which together with the the critical importance of ? nding a solution, stating, “With- business case from Volpe, allowed MARAD to receive Con- 26 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • September 2023

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