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Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?
- Thread starter Randy Daytona
- Start date
No no no it’s duct tape for making something not move.
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Future DOR statistic
Technically, if you're a moron, that's entirely within the realm of possibility. The consequences would be horrendous but it's doable. They essentially just drop it from a crane and weld it.
Maybe they can sneak some dry ice special effects into EMALS and tell him it's steam. Problem solved.President Dunning-Kruger is entering Mad King territory.
I'm sure changing the island, cats, and weapons elevators is super easy from a design and build perspective......
These days, there is more money in admiring problems than actually solving them. I’m sure there is a burgeoning contract for switching back and forth between steam and electric every four years and never finishing CVN-81.
Meanwhile, our adversaries lick their lips at our repeated own goals.
FFG saga is looking similar. Lot of valid gripes about delays and issues with Constellation but it was probably nearing the back end of the design delays.
The cancellation and pivot to the new FFG (which is basically the USCG cutter) is certainly a valid way to get more hulls going sooner…but they’re also going to have to do another Constellation level of effort to get the follow on hulls to even remotely approach where Constellation was in terms of capability.
Also wild to look back and realize this thread was started 10 years ago…and we’re still not substantially any closer to being on a path that gets us to 350.
Why does it take 10 years to get from a clean sheet to “nearing the back end of the design”? I know we have a host of industrial output problems, but this is a self-inflicted wound.
Wasn’t exactly clean sheet, and it was more like 5 years and not 10.
I still don’t know what the smoking gun was, but from what I’ve heard from those who were involved, it sounds like multiple organizations have blame to go around.
Congress reversed course during the middle of the program and flipped on Buy American exemptions, so they had to change a lot more of its planned platform components from European to US ones.
Fincantieri screwed up by bidding and winning on something they did not have the workforce to do. They had a naval architect shortage they couldn’t hire their way out of and so could not actually perform their contract to design the ship. It was so bad the Navy literally was sending their own NavArchs to the yard to do some of the design work for them.
On top of the Congrrssionally mandated changes, there were also some more unplanned changes. This is why the Navy Tech Warrant Holder community is getting shit on so hard lately, because they demanded substantial structural design changes to the platform despite it starting from a proven European design - which had major program cost and schedule implications without much real technical/operational benefit.
My takeaway was the root was the contractor bit off way more than they could chew (supposedly they didn’t think they would actually win the bid), but the government then gave them plenty of excuses for their underperformance.
In my limited experience dealing with these folks, they can get a little out of hand with the amount of rigor they expect on the HM&E stuff.
They have their lane, and don’t try and get in it. They are always right.
And that lane leads to an ever-growing rice bowl.
Yup.
Thats the whole point of the acquisition reform. They’re now still allowed to give recommendations but NOT actually make the decisions. The thing to watch is whether acquisition executive leadership will exercise their authority, or let it slowly creep back to the tech warrants.
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Future DOR statistic
There's a worse third option where neither party is willing to own design authority and we keep working programs whose designs never stabilize until somebody pulls the plug. The interesting thing will be how messed up FF(X) ends up being. A lot of the same issues as FFG(X), only this time we're betting on the loser.
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