Members of the Air Force will recognize a lot of what I have to say this morning because the Navy operated in a very cost-effective mode for the taxpayer. We made extensive use of technology originally developed by the Air Force and I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Major J. Frichett and Messrs. H. Wood and N. Tupper. Also, we had contact with NASA, specifically Mr. C. C. Poe, Jr., and we took some information from the B-1 paper that was published a few years ago. Consequently, a number of people in the audience this morning should have an acquaintance with the material I want to present to you.

What I am going to be talking about is design philosophy in the Navy. These are not necessarily programs that are fully developed at this point, however.

First of all, I'll give some background describing what a high-performance ship is. Around the mountains here at the Science Center you may have some trouble visualizing high performance ships, but use your imagination. Next, I'll describe what fatigue and fracture analysis is all about; I am going to use a simple example for those of you who are not familiar with it. Thirdly, I'll describe the structure that you might typically find on a high-performance ship, and the type of technology that we have currently available which we can draw from to institute the fatigue and fracture control for high-performance ships.