US Navy gets PC makeover — while its ships fall apart
Well, so much for our "military might"...At least they will all be good military PC correct drones, even though they may not have any ships that work.
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Besides being underarmored, the LCS is underarmed, with a single rapid fire five inch gun. If that weapon fails, the LCS is unarmed. On top of all that, it's incredibly expensive, running into the multiple billions of dollars a copy.
After I finish my rant about what's wrong with the LCS, people ask me what I would have done instead. I would have given the big battle wagons another refit. They can't get as close to the shore as the LCS, but they don't have to, thanks to drones that can give them the long range eyes.
The big ships are about as invulnerable as anything that's ever put to sea, and modern antiship missiles would bounce off of the 18" belt armor like airgun pellets. Sabots would allow the 16" cannon to send four of the five inch smart rounds down range with each shot, and the existing five inch guns could be upgraded to the LCS configuration. The big ships already have vertical launch tubes for Tomahawks, with plenty of real estate for anti-aircraft, anti-missile weapons.
Further automation would serve to reduce the shipboard population from 1,500 to about 300. I'm betting we could have revamped the old ships like the USS New Jersey for a lot less than the cost of the newer more fragile ships favored by Navy brass these days. Match that with unmanned swarms of even smaller, faster torpedo boats, and our force projection would be something to reckon with.
I'm with you on upgrading the old Iowa Class. Those are great ships. The armor is a little irrelevant these days for symmetric warfare, but certainly help when Iranians point 50 cal machine guns at them (will shoot a hole in a DDG51, but not one of these). I know a lot about Navy ships and subs, but not so much about airplanes. I do NOT understand why they don't just upgrade the F16 with new electronics, and make a new series. Those are great and cheap. Does anyone know a real technical reason some of these old airframes can not be reworked, instead of designing a new platform?
A day before the offer's expiration, both Lockheed Martin and Austal USA received Navy contracts for an additional ten ships of their designs; two ships of each design being built each year between 2011 and 2015. Lockheed Martin's LCS-5 had a contractual price of $437 million, Austal USA's contractual price for LCS-6 was $432 million. On 29 December 2010, Department of Navy Undersecretary Sean Stackley noted that the program was well within the Congressional cost cap of $480 million per ship. The average per-ship target price for Lockheed ships is $362 million, Stackley said, with a goal of $352 million for each Austal USA ships. Government-furnished equipment (GFE), such as weapons, add about $25 million per ship; another $20 million for change orders, and "management reserve" is also included. Stackley declared the average cost to buy an LCS should be between $430 million and $440 million.[113] In the fiscal year 2011, the unit cost was $1.8 billion and the program cost $3.7 billion.[114]
However, here is a different perspective:
The cost is currently about $358 million for the Freedom version and headed down to a low of $348.5 million. (Note these figures are for the ship itself and don’t include military equipment, such as weapons, that the government purchases separately, which can add over $100 million). The price has dropped steeply since the mismanaged early days of the program, when the Navy changed the design of LCS-1 and -2 midway through construction. Now the price is starting to level out. Costs will eventually climb back up slightly: After years of making LCS manufacture more efficient, the shipyard is reaching diminishing returns, while inflation in labor and materials is beginning to catch up.
http://breakingdefense.com/2015/07/lc...
Either way, pretty pricey for something no one seems to want, and they are sort of making up missions as they go. So, the cost could be lesser. BTW, I last heard Gerald Fords cost was 14.2 Billion to get commissioned, and that has been delayed until 2017.
So That would be strike one. Reason is not helpful when money is no object.
As far as the massive ships a Bob Dylan lyric comes to mind "may you have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift".
When I was a project manager in the Air Force, our procurement staff were almost all military engineers or scientists. We depended on civilian government accountants to keep an eye on budgets. Since then, because of an inability to attract technical personnel, program management has been almost exclusively by money management. As a contractor I was horrified to see projects that were failing miserably technically receiving awards because their budgets were on schedule. I also saw good contractor program managers that were right on the money technically being harshly criticized because they weren't spending the program money exactly on schedule.
One reason we don't build or refurbish many big warships is because only the Norfolk, Virginia shipyard can handle them, and they're kept busy building aircraft carriers. We used to have several yards that could build big ships. When they weren't building warships, they were building big merchant vessels. Thanks to overregulation and outrageous union demands, we no longer build or have under the U.S. flag any merchant ships, relying entirely on foreign-flagged shipping to transport U.S. goods. Government mismanagement at its worst.
Now, let us get serious. What is the reason for governments at all? It is to PROTECT ITS CITIZENS. That is job #1. If we err by paying too much for our military, we err for the good. Total up all the financial disasters the government make by funding nonsense and put those funds toward reality. Never gonna happen with Obama and further with Mrs. Clinton. It would take too much away from their needle work lining their pockets.
I love biblical quotes. You can find one for any topic.
You are conflating two different story threads in order to say "queers cannot fight", which denies the unit cohesion of those 300 Spartans. (In case you forgot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNa3C... )
First and foremost, the Littoral Combat Ships are not just new machines (which would still need field testing) but a new concept different from the "big seas / big ships" ideas of the previous 350 years. In some ways, we are now like the Romans facing the Carthaginians. They both inherited naval warfare as known for 300 years from the days of the Triremes. Rome changed the ramming contest naval encounter into a "land battle" by using grappling irons, boarding planks, and infantry-on-board ("marines"). So, too, now, is the US Navy ahead of the other fleets of the nations of the world in thinking of littoral combat, getting in close, going into bays, harbors, and rivers, by ship to deliver air cavalry and "land marines."
Foxtrots will happen. And it will take years to find even the basic ones.
Meanwhile, the Navy is forthright about the failures. They are called "engineering fatalities." When a power drive fails, it is as though a sailor has died. Make no mistake: they take it seriously. The ship goes back to port and the reverse engineering of the failure leads to an improvement. We do this. China cannot, Russia cannot.
Here' the thing. Little Big Horn has always been a study point. In the American military, you are allowed to fail, as long as you learn from your mistakes. You are not rewarded for failure, true enough, but the military history of the American Revolution is all about failures that resulted in an ultimate success. That's us. No one takes Americans seriously ... until we kick their ass.
As for gender, you may be one of the millions of traditionalist role-embracers who deny not just male-on-female rape, but also male-on-male rape. Rape is not about sex: it is about power.
The US military is in uncharted territory with gender. The entire society is. I believe that we are moving toward a time when gender is as irrelevant as "race" (so-called) and for the same reasons. (It was the case that blood was segregated by "race" lest some white guy be given "colored' blood and thereby be made in to a Negro (the end of life as he knew it...). We are past that, both by biology and by sociology. (Would you rather be Black or dead, even if that were an issue.) So, too, with gender.
Rifleperson... rifler... rifleist... who knows? Myself, I have no problem with "man" for all humans but only because we have no better common noun. I look to Star Trek where in all officers are called "sir" because with aliens, you never know the gender... and here we are today in the same place... But whatever is worked out (and it may take two or three iterations) will be better than what we have.
I am as sorry as you may be to see the ratings be dropped. Now, no longer are you an engineer's mate, but a petty officer or seaman. However, I point to two facts: This brings the Navy into alignment with the other services, wherein you are addressed by rank (grade), not by job title (MOS). Also, I point out that at least in the Ohio Naval Militia (if not New York), the ratings continue. The feds do their thing; the states do theirs. Funny, you know, that a seeming libertarian or conservative like you focusses on the federal and appears ignorant of the state militias. (Dated but relevant: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20... )
Myself, my problem is more with the fact that officers are a better class of people, with more rights, than mere enlisteds. Invitations to social events go out to "officers and their ladies, sailors and their wives." Why not just say "sailors and their sluts" because that's what they mean, isn't it? We inherited that from the British. They are a class-based society. We are not. Colonel David Crockett came to Texas with the Tennessee volunteers under the command of a captain. Think about that.
So, I don't know where this all is leading, but I am not wringing my hands with Weltschmerz and Angst because the future might not be like the past.
Mike Marotta PO2 (TX)
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...
(To read others, enter "military" in the search box.)
Worrying about restructuring to make it more "generic" is a bad thing at a time when they are still floundering with trying to make 75% of what they need go 100%.
Their record of "innovation" is not good, and their control of costs has been, and is getting worse. Throw more money at it, is the cry of the day. I have found military development to be long on promises, and very short on budgets.
The Gerald Ford is a prime example of this, several new technologies attempted to be melded at once. Bad idea. Perfect one, install it on a pilot ship, perfect it under real conditions, then proliferate.
I have no faith in the "college system" nor the military insistence that college grads are smart and sailors dumb. Had that issue when on active duty and several run ins with a Div O who thought trying to kill us to look good was a brilliant idea. The CO did not quite agree. Thank goodness.
Gerald Ford status:
http://kdvr.com/2016/07/25/us-navys-n...
Littoral ship issues: If you cannot design a carrier for 12-14 billion that works, don't also try to play magician with an idea that is suspect at the same time. The Littoral ship is a case of total breakdown of any useful, logical process. The idea sounds good, except they tried to make a jack of all trades out of it, and ended up short in many ways. Their "mission modules" have got some issues, and the thin skin design is subject to many frailties. The engineering was also an issue, with many engineering issues having happened. They also went with several designs and keep making more, with none of the optimum, and some barely workable, probably due to politics.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-...
Diesel submarines have always been an optimum, shallow water tool if built correctly and used wisely. Because of the nuclear "emphasis" maintained by the nuclear officer group, no diesel will ever see the light of day, despite the fact the same people you are defending against use them. Your acoustic issues in shallow water are the same for submarine or surface, but it is hard to attack a submarine in a dinghy, when submerged. Also, unmanned drones and other tools can allow the same force projection from a single well defended platform ( a whole new design) that might have been a better idea.
The Navy has the same issues that the Army does, there is a loss of competency in the middle grades, as politics takes over from competence, and I have spoken to several officers who got out who were Army, Navy and Marines who said the politics, especially in the mid grades is horrible. Failures are covered up, systems that don't work are proliferated, with contracts let to "fix them", and there is really bad morale.
I do not see a SecNav more worried about what sailors call each other, than ship and weapons systems to be a sign of competency and reassurance.
You obviously know a lot about naval warfare. I do not. So, I am not going to try to contradict any of your technical points above.
I will offer that your opinions on the sociology of the military are not much different than I would share about General Motors, Ford, Kawasaki, or Honda. GM was the worst of them. (I only worked tangentially with Chrysler as a client of my employer, but I would never buy one of their vehicles on a dare.)Organizations are what they are and physical laws about scale (square-cube; inverse square; etc.) pretty much dictated that the brontosaurus had two brains, one of them in its ass.
Yet, they continue. Every army, navy, corporation, company, co-operative, or collective has the same kinds of weaknesses. But they continue because they also have survival traits. I do not know what an "individualist army" would look like. I do know that the trader ethos is more flexible and resilient than the guardian ethos. I have tried to outline how the commercial morality would be applied to private security.
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...
Respectfully,
MEM
(PS: I just removed from my cache a snapshot of a bumpersticker I took in front of the Texas Military Museum: "American by birth. Submariner by choice." I sent it to someone I worked with this summer.)
I also am not sure of the relationship with the real Navy, the reserve navy and the Naval Militias I am unfamiliar with. The rating thing was good because it ensured you got the right guy for the job. When you go to the MOS system you get a person, and hope he is related to what is needed. Maybe they are so generic today they can get away with it, but a good submarine sonar man was a lot better than an excellent firecontrol tech at fixing and using their equipment. My son, an E7 in the Army, says you never know who shows up, as they get the MOS things wrong consistently and he gets a baker assigned to a tank repair unit because of it...
Before that...
VIRGINIA Class Submarine...lovely, adult development, with controlled costs and great technology... Let ignore that "successful outlier"! We can't have people seeing government and industry cooperation again. They (pick your subject) are the enemy! ...Before that, SEAWOLF, techically awesome, but everyone is out of business/we have no idea why it works...Before that TRIDENT, great program partnership with industry and the government... what have we learned here? Nothing.
Please do support your assertion with specific examples of the Navy admitting failures. They are a little better than the others, but ANY could be crushed by a business developing real equipment for real needs, like they do every day!
http://nextnavy.com/virginia-class-su...
Again, analyizing problems and solving them is not a new art, there is Lean 6 Sigma (of which I am a green belt), as well as various Lean tools recognized as simple problem solving (such as the 5 Why method). Since we cannot get a large civilian company to adopt them (they give lip service only), I doubt we will get the military or polticos too, too much pressure to skim money and votes. It also goes back to many theories about how many pressures are exherted by the military-industrial complex and it's pieces on a specific program. The "we will go out of business" threat is powerful in certain circumstances.
SHT is a PITA. It has given shipbuilders trouble for a long time. I was actually serious about VA Class and TRIDENT being model acquisition programs. TRIDENT had IP everywhere and sole-sourced components after the competition. Every single TRIDENT took less manhours to build than the previous one. The last one took one-half the manhours of the first. VA has a good learning curve too. The Navy abandoned these acquisition models, in favor of pretend Sec 845 DDG1000 and LCS. No one ever goes back and reconsiders successes and failures.
RADM Jabley is the head of PEO Subs. He has nothing to do with Surface Ships acq. PEO Ships is RADM Galinis now, taking over for Dave Gale (great guy). To get to the guy responsible for all Navy acq, you have to go to ASN RDA, Sean Stackley, or his chief of staff, VADM Dave Johnson (really great guy). If you are a submariner, you know there is another subtle (ish) big voice in the mix, rarely heard from directly, NR, ADM Caldwell now.
In my experience, the military industrial complex pressures are often better for the taxpayer than the decisions of bureaucrats. I can site several great technologies that required industry to go get congressional support because the Navy leadership lacked the vision and intestinal fortitude.
The PC issue is complete rubbish and Secnav should be ashamed.