"This is a computer simulation of what would happen to the command center if a depth charge exploded in close proximity to the sub," says Fred Harris, 55, VP of programs at Electric Boat Corp.(EB), the primary contractor that is designing and constructing the U.S. Navy's new nuclear fast-attack submarine. On a giant screen at the front of the room at EB's Connecticut headquarters, the sub's 250-ton command center gives a nightmarish lurch as it begins to rock back and forth. "It's not the explosion that kills you," Harris explains. "It's the shock wave. In this case, the ship is whipsawing around, experiencing 100 Gs of force. But inside these structures, the equipment and the people feel only 15 Gs maximum -- about what a PC experiences during shipping."

Imagine a sub that is practically as upgradable as a desktop computer: a sub with joysticks, instead of steering wheels; with high-tech photonics masts, instead of mirror-and-lens periscopes; with a central-information hub, instead of disparate sonar, weapons, and radio-control rooms; and with touch-screen stations that give everyone in the command center access to information from all systems, interchangeably. Imagine a sub where the infrastructure is designed to support better, faster, group decision making by maximizing the flow of onboard information and by offering the captain and the crew the right data at the right time.

If everything goes according to schedule, the Navy will have such a sub -- dubbed the Virginia -- come 2004. The Navy has contracted with EB, the General Dynamics subsidiary that builds nuclear-powered subs, to produce a total of four Virginia-class subs, two of which have been authorized by Congress and are now under construction. At a projected cost of $1.7 billion apiece -- plus additional research-and-development expenses -- these machines don't come cheap. Yet even in the world of government contractors and cost overruns, new-economy principles steer the ship. In fact, they do much more than steer it. They design it, manufacture it, maintain it, and will ultimately disassemble it. Says Harris: "We not only changed the ship itself, but we also changed the philosophy of how we go about designing and building the ship."

Thinking Outside the Tube

A submarine is made up of tens of millions of components. In the case of the Virginia class -- the very first submarine to be designed entirely by computer -- every nut, bolt, valve, and mount has been modeled virtually. There's even a virtual sailor named Jack, who changes color if you try to cram one of his hands into a too-tight workspace.

Twice a week, EB ships a backup of the mammoth database -- a couple of terabytes big -- to Iron Mountain, a high-security storage facility in Rhode Island. "The database is the jewel," says Harris. For him, the database represents a revolution not only in technology but also in the way that work is conceived and organized.

In the past, the Navy used what were conventional Industrial Age techniques: Engineers would use pencil, paper, and wood models to design submarines and then "throw the plans over the wall" to the shipbuilder. The shipbuilder would then execute the plans, parceling them out according to department -- electrical, piping, air conditioning, and so on. Each department would install its system through the length of the tube. If the shipbuilder needed to alter the ship's design even minutely, that change had to go through a laborious approval process. No one who actually worked on the boat day-to-day had any authority over its design.