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.
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.
I mean, it isn't *that* hard to accept, because I've seen it, and I try to accept reality. That said, it still astonishes me that we've ended up in this place. Every system for accountability, every system for vetting effective design, every system for actual construction; All of them subverted. We spend more and more, proportionally, to achieve less and less. It's like we learned all the wrong lessons from victory in WWII and the Cold War, and we looked at all the Third World Kleptocracies and said "Let's emulate *that*."
Yes, emulation of peak bureaucracy (USSR) exactly what they did all along. Forrestal sensed it and denounced them as “communists” just before he went window diving.
Truth is just soviet bureaucrats, we went Brezhnev before they did.
Most Americans are too trusting. Too much of a good thing- Trust in this case - is the American way. Now of course we’re going the other way, may gods have mercy on those who betrayed our trust, we shall have none.
In response to the USA (The alliance) focusing on the icebreakers, I assume they noted the price level of the Canadian icebreaker contracts which indicate much better profit margins and revenue for shipyards, compared to navy vessels.
Look at page numbered page 32 where I talk about "leveraging finance to regain operational capability." Just recapitalize MSC wholesale using private financing (with the finance company taking designs and contracting with shipbuilders on a most-efficient production basis instead of waiting for appropriated funds on a catch-as-catch-can basis) and then Navy/MSC/TRANSCOM can either buy-out at delivery or lease (with a built-in maintenance and modernization). Maximizes multiyear-contracting cost and outcome effcicencies. Thank You Henry J. Kaiser.
8 NSMs on the bow of the LCS’s, and flight decks full of MK70 launchers. No deployed air helo squadron, now you have a usable frigate, in the short term.
We need a real frigate. Cheap, repeatable, and lighter than the Constellation class. We put too much stock in survivability. In a real surface to surface war, we are going to need and want an expendable low value unit.
This isn’t rocket science, but we are unwilling to make a ship without a radar that requires more power than the propulsion system needs and 32 VLS cells.
We arn’t far off from distributed systems with an autonomous platform with a bunch of missiles being controlled by a DDG, but there’s a gap that needs to be filled before we get there.
Austal’s gonna start building OPCs soon for the CG, maybe a derivative of it for the USN, or a new design on their aluminum line as LCS comes to a close.
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.
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.
They’re not building ships, they’re building retirement my fellow American.
Yes. Hard to accept.
I mean, it isn't *that* hard to accept, because I've seen it, and I try to accept reality. That said, it still astonishes me that we've ended up in this place. Every system for accountability, every system for vetting effective design, every system for actual construction; All of them subverted. We spend more and more, proportionally, to achieve less and less. It's like we learned all the wrong lessons from victory in WWII and the Cold War, and we looked at all the Third World Kleptocracies and said "Let's emulate *that*."
Yes, emulation of peak bureaucracy (USSR) exactly what they did all along. Forrestal sensed it and denounced them as “communists” just before he went window diving.
Truth is just soviet bureaucrats, we went Brezhnev before they did.
Most Americans are too trusting. Too much of a good thing- Trust in this case - is the American way. Now of course we’re going the other way, may gods have mercy on those who betrayed our trust, we shall have none.
The Turn of the Screw …
… yes, they did
In response to the USA (The alliance) focusing on the icebreakers, I assume they noted the price level of the Canadian icebreaker contracts which indicate much better profit margins and revenue for shipyards, compared to navy vessels.
I just wrote this article for Armed Forces Comptroller on fixing the DoD end-to-end PPBE resourcing process: https://www.flipsnack.com/5DAED858B7A/sodfm-vol-70-no-2/full-view.html.
Look at page numbered page 32 where I talk about "leveraging finance to regain operational capability." Just recapitalize MSC wholesale using private financing (with the finance company taking designs and contracting with shipbuilders on a most-efficient production basis instead of waiting for appropriated funds on a catch-as-catch-can basis) and then Navy/MSC/TRANSCOM can either buy-out at delivery or lease (with a built-in maintenance and modernization). Maximizes multiyear-contracting cost and outcome effcicencies. Thank You Henry J. Kaiser.
8 NSMs on the bow of the LCS’s, and flight decks full of MK70 launchers. No deployed air helo squadron, now you have a usable frigate, in the short term.
We need a real frigate. Cheap, repeatable, and lighter than the Constellation class. We put too much stock in survivability. In a real surface to surface war, we are going to need and want an expendable low value unit.
This isn’t rocket science, but we are unwilling to make a ship without a radar that requires more power than the propulsion system needs and 32 VLS cells.
We arn’t far off from distributed systems with an autonomous platform with a bunch of missiles being controlled by a DDG, but there’s a gap that needs to be filled before we get there.
Austal’s gonna start building OPCs soon for the CG, maybe a derivative of it for the USN, or a new design on their aluminum line as LCS comes to a close.
They’re not programs, they’re Trust Funds.