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Urey Patrick's avatar

Serious stuff. Hopefully our senior commanders and government officials will begin to take it seriously. Too many trees obstruct too much forest… layers of bureaucracy, short-term career interests, political and social issues taking partisan precedence… the Constellation project is the ultimate damning case history of what is wrong, and its pernicious, insidious infection of every step and phase of acquisitions. I don’t know how to change that, but we really need to do so and the first step has to be breaking free from the current system. Suggestions abound - good ones here, for example - but somewhere someone has to act.

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Warmek's avatar

It is frankly astonishing to me just how bad the US has gotten at actually *building* stuff. Both in terms of numbers of things built, and building things that actually work.

LCS. DDG-1000. Ford class. Those are just the three that I know something about as a person not in the shipbuilding industry or the Navy itself, but I'm sure there are others.

At least the whopping three DDG-1000 ships they managed to build could be made to do something useful -- though I have no idea how much it would cost or how long it would take given how thoroughly incompetent the Navy and the shipbuilding industry seem to be -- if one were to rip out the Big Stupid Gun That Has No Ammo and replace the entire thing with rack after rack after rack of VLS pods. Seeing as how they are, y'know, Guided **MISSILE** Destroyers.

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