Recently, Brian Potter of Construction Physics (whose work I am generally a fan of) and Austin Vernon (who I met in person two days ago and liked) have released a a blueprint for fixing US naval shipbuilding. I have mixed thoughts on their three points:
1. Instead of complex, multi-role ships which have expensive and often unnecessary features, the Navy should focus on simpler ships with narrower use cases.
2. Rather than outsourcing design to third parties, ship design should be brought in-house, and NAVSEA should expand its staff of Naval Architects from around 300 to closer to 1200.
3. Production on ships should not begin until design is substantially completed.
Now, 2 is a position I've held for a long time, and really should write about more. I think they do a decent job of arguing for it, and I believe this is the thing they emphasized most in their policy paper, so I have no quibble at all here. 3 is patently obvious to everyone, and has been since forever. Unfortunately, this means that we'll need to go beyond simply pointing out that the problem exists, because if it was that easy to solve, someone would have solved it. The people who do this work are not stupid. I suspect political pressures are to blame here, but actually tracking down the drivers and providing solutions for them is not something I'm going to get into here.
But of course that leaves their first point, which makes up the bulk of the article. The fundamental thesis, that we need to build more small, single-role ships, doesn't really make sense given the details of building modern warships. First, there are really sharp economies of scale in ship design. For anything which you can call an ocean-going warship with a straight face, you already need a lot of systems, even if the only armament is a manually-trained gun. Adding, say, an anti-submarine system to an air-defense ship is likely to be a lot cheaper than building a second ship, and has been since the 60s. Also, it lets you save on design and tooling, which can have substantial costs in time and money.
Second, and even more importantly, there are a lot of natural synergies between the systems on various ships. For instance, a modern VLS can carry missiles for air defense (both point and long-range), land attack, ballistic missile defense and ASW. So if you're planning on making a land-attack destroyer, giving it a decent radar and combat system means it's also a good air defense platform. And it could do anti-ship duties, too, if we bought an ASM that fit in a VLS. We haven't, but certifying LRASM for that is a lot cheaper than designing an entirely new ship. For that matter, it can also hunt pirates when you don't need it firing Tomahawks or doing air defense, and it's not like you need either of those jobs all the time.
Third, warships are expensive and long-lived, which means that versatility can be extremely important. When Arleigh Burke was first ordered, she was primarily expected to face the Soviet air and submarine threat. That went away pretty quickly, but it was easy to turn her into a land-attack platform by filling her VLS with Tomahawks. And she's since reoriented to the escort mission, while also carrying out missile defense duties off Israel. Contrast this to the Zumwalt, which is much closer to the single-purpose vision proposed here. Even leaving aside the obvious programmatic issues, the simple fact is that the world the Zumwalt was built for, where we would primarily need to worry about projecting power ashore in low to medium threat environments, is gone, and we are going to have to do quite a bit of work to make the ships useful in the modern world.
Then they turn to listing a series of cases of "scope bloat", starting with the radar on the Ford class. I will fully admit that the SPY-3/4 dual-band radar on Ford herself was a disaster, but the SPY-6 planned for later units of the class is the 9-module version that we're fitting to everything where a decent radar would be helpful. Also, emissions concerns on the radar are easily addressed by switching it off, and it's not like it's the only emitter on the carrier, either. Then there's the Burke: "Recent Burke-class1 destroyers have extensive helicopter facilities, despite their main role being vehicles for offensive and defensive missiles." It's worth noting that the navy went to the trouble of fitting helicopters to the Flight IIA Burkes, which they probably wouldn't have done if they didn't think it was a good idea.2 There's also criticism of the LCS, which I can't really argue with because that whole program was a complete mess, and a discussion of the Constellation class, which is complicated and hasn't been going well, but which I don't have a great picture of.
But then we get a really baffling statement. "A likely cause for this scope bloat is the adherence to the “Distributed Maritime Operations” doctrine, or DMO." Now, the mechanism they propose (the Navy expects to distribute its ships in war, and wants each to be able to fight on its own) seems plausible, except that it violates the fundamental laws of physics. The Ford, Burke and LCS designs were all pretty much set 15 years ago, while DMO didn't show up until about 5 or 6 years ago, so unless its proponents have invented time travel and are using it in the worst possible way, it cannot possibly be responsible for whatever problems there are with the bulk of the current fleet. Also, the ships that DMO wants are smaller and less general-purpose than the current fleet, which more or less aligns with the thesis of the piece.
T-AGOS USNS Able
Then they call out a couple of ships that they think worked quite well, first the Perry class frigates and then the T-AGOS SURTASS surveillance ships. The Perrys are the best case for them, relatively minimalist ships that gave good service for several decades, although they weren't exactly top-end warships for most of it. The T-AGOS is a very different kettle of fish. Yes, there are some cases where single-purpose ships make sense, and navies will use them for that. But picking out a non-warship design intended for a single-purpose doesn't mean that we should start trying to separate ASW and AAW missions for our surface combatants. Also, it's worth noting that the T-AGOS buy was cut dramatically at the end of the Cold War, because while the ships were good for one thing, they weren't that useful in other roles.
Then they start sketching their ideal fleet, beginning with "A modern, pared down escort frigate without the bells and whistles". Now, this is the one I have the least objection to, although it's rather dependent on figuring out what is necessary and what is "bells and whistles". I'd even agree that something like an American version of the British Type 31 would be potentially very useful, although this seems a bit higher-end than that. The specific criticism of the Constellation class, that it has a high-powered AEGIS radar, rather misunderstands both what Aegis is today and how modern radars work. Yes, you theoretically need 16x the power to double range, but your range might be set by things other than the range of your missiles, such as the desire to understand the battlespace around you, the ability to detect stealthy contacts or the need to burn through jamming. The Constellation has a 9-module phased array, while the Flight III Burkes have a 37-module version of the same radar architecture. Trying to cut range even further is likely to cause problems.
Then we have "A guided missile destroyer without helicopters or upsized ballistic missile capable radars and only limited sonar". Obviously, I disagree with the lack of a helicopter, which is a very useful thing, and as above, the radar range issue isn't so clear-cut as it looks. Nor is substituting ESSM for some of the Standards. Although a fantastically capable missile, it still has less range and less energy at almost any range than an SM-2. There are already plans to put it aboard Burkes, and I don't think that this will really change that at all. Nor does the proposed diesel-electric powertrain make much sense. IEP might, although it raises a host of engineering issues of its own.
And then there's the "Surface warfare focused destroyer", which will have "an 8 inch gun, offensive missiles, long-range torpedoes, etc." none of which will play well together. There's a theoretical case for the 8" gun as a shore bombardment weapon, but it's a pretty niche capability, and the long history of failed gun development would make me reluctant to try versus developing something like VL-SDB. "Offensive missiles", presumably either land-attack or anti-ship, are going to involve using the ship in a very different way, and could just as easily be in the VLS aboard a Burke. As for "long-range torpedoes", these make the least sense. Torpedoes are limited in range by a number of factors, most notably that they aren't that much faster than their target, so running away works quite well. Also, if you're in even the longest torpedo range, you've been in missile range for ages. They're only useful for submarines, which can sneak in in a way that a surface ship definitely can't.
There are similar problems with a "Ford-class carriers pared down to focus on flight operations". All the force in the world isn't that useful if you don't know what's going on, and yet the proposal is "To some extent the Navy is already trying to simplify follow-on ships of the Ford-class, but much more can be done, such as deleting much of the centralized information processing capabilities." Those capabilities aren't just there to keep electronics techs busy and provide the ship's cat a warm place to sleep. They are in many ways the beating heart of the carrier, keeping track of everything going on around the ship. Without them combat effectiveness, which is what we actually care about, goes way down. There's also a proposal to reduce automation and make it up with more crew, which would have been reasonable 10-15 years ago, but would be pretty silly today, as we've already dealt with a lot of the bugs. I'll simply say I disagree with the proposal to bring back dinosaur-burning carriers, but don't want to get into it at length now.
Then there's proposals for the use of commercial hulls for ballistic missile defense (BMD) and as drone carriers. The BMD proposal would make a lot of sense if you needed to provide coverage for areas with no atmospheric threat where you couldn't just use Aegis Ashore for some reason. But geometry limits how far forward you can engage targets, thanks to a combination of picking up the incoming warhead later and the need to get the interceptor to the warhead before it hits the ground, so you do really want the BMD platform reasonably far forward.3 As for drone carriers, "Drones" covers a wide variety of possible vehicles, and I'd really like more specifics on exactly what types of drones and what they're supposed to do. Are we talking about fixed-wing or rotary wing? Something small like ScanEagle or big like Mojave? I've thought about this a fair bit, and haven't figured out a case where I think it makes sense for the US to invest in a dedicated drone carrier instead of just flying from land bases and existing ships. Other countries may have different situations, and I could be missing something, but I'd like someone to actually lay out the case instead of just talking about "drones" as some sort of unified category.
A drone mine
After this comes auxiliaries, the first of which is "a drone-based minesweeper platform". Now, I will be the first to agree that the US has shamefully underinvested in mine warfare work, and that this is an area where unmanned platforms are definitely the future, and have the potential to pay real dividends. But this isn't news to anyone who has been paying attention for the last 30-40 years. And the focus on sweeping as opposed to minehunting seems dubious at best, given that it requires figuring out what the mines are actually looking for instead of just finding them and blowing them up.
And finally, there's a proposal for "Pared-down LSTs and troop ships". The authors think that modern amphibious warfare doctrine, focused on going around defenses (and which dates back more like 70 years than 40 years) is a mistake and we should more or less return to traditional beaching craft, on the grounds that it's too expensive for the volume we'd need in a great power war and helicopters are too vulnerable. I find this puzzling. The basic drivers of the over-the-horizon amphibious doctrine, the vulnerability of massed fleets of landing ships to attack, haven't really gone away. If you're planning to put a lot of very vulnerable ships in a small area, I really hope you have good air defenses. And it's really not clear who they're planning to use a massed amphibious landing against anyway.
I think I will wrap things up here. It's an interesting take on problems by a pair of outsiders to the naval procurement world, but I don't think that the prescriptions would produce good ships. More broadly, I would urge an attitude of conservatism (not in the political sense) towards military procurement, as more thought has usually gone into existing systems than is obvious to outsiders, and it's easy to miss things if you aren't deep in that world.
1 Lack of italics in the original. ⇑
2 Why are helicopters worthwhile? Well, a naval helicopter is an extremely useful sensor/weapons platform, much faster than the ship itself and capable of doing everything from hunting submarines to slinging Hellfires at FACs to surface surveillance to search and rescue. Drones can do some of this, but that's a very recent development. The early Burkes were expected to get helicopter support from other ships in the fleet, and as those began to retire, the Flight IIAs were fitted for them. ⇑
3 I ran a test of this in CMO, and a Flight III Burke with SM-3 Blk IIAs was unable to intercept a DF-21C aimed at a target 130 nm closer to the launcher than it was. This looked to be mostly a radar limitation, but now you are fighting the 1/r4 the other way. ⇑
Comments
One thing is long overdue in gun development: a no-frills 155 mm naval gun based on a modern howitzer, capable of using standard ammunition.
That would be an excellent idea were the US capable of producing such a thing. But our system has no idea what "no-frills" means. (And to be clear, I'm not entirely sure it would be wrong in this case. Does land-based 155mm ammo meet naval safety standards? Could we not get a lot more capability by spending a bit more money? Not saying either is true, but they are reasonable questions to ask, but also carry risks.) Oh, and while I'm not saying there's a curse on naval guns bigger than 130 mm these days, I'm not sure there isn't, either.
Bean,
Thanks for the feedback and conversation.
I wanted to link to our actual policy proposal that went out, which is much shorter and more conservative (below). We did not specify any possible ship designs. Though you might still have some disagreement with the more focused design wording.
https://www.rebuilding.tech/posts/reforming-naval-shipbuilding
The post on Brian's blog was more for fun and I wrote the section that is most of what is discussed in this post. One of the fun things about writing on the internet is how much you can learn after you write.
The obvious things are the SPY-6 being modular and able to scale up or down power is a clever way to do things. Also that DMO as done today couldn't have influenced some earlier ship designs.
I can't find where you have mentioned the blog Navy Matters or that they have mentioned yours, but there were several discussions there that made me lean toward minesweeping because the productivity of mine hunting was so low. Though maybe this another area where a small disposable drone could be useful that wasn't possible even a year or two ago.
Some topics I'd definitely be interested in discussing further, and it doesn't have to be now or in the comments:
To what extent command and control should be centralized? I disagree with DMO always spreading ships out, but I do worry about centralized command and control. I think this shows up with our views on AEW, as well. The AWACS is very effective as long as its there, but that is why our adversaries are trying so hard to limit its capability.
Is there a barbell effect on ships where we should have one class of generic super destroyer/cruiser like you discuss? Then a series of small auxiliary and basic ships that are very focused on minesweeping, logistics, ASW, pirates, etc.?
At a strategic level, what should our alarm level be in regards to our ship building disadvantage with China and our massive budget deficit? Is it high enough that we need to be cutting nice to haves like helicopter-based amphib? Are there cheaper ways to accomplish tasks like scaring second rate powers or humanitarian aid?
I have some disagreements with the thing as written, but not to the same degree.
Re minesweeping vs minehunting, I don't have specific numbers, but am somewhat skeptical of the ability of a sweeper to duplicate the exact signature a modern high-end mine is looking for. I could be wrong on that, but given the low priority mine warfare tends to get and the improvements in relevant technologies in the last 10-20 years, I'd bet on hunting, because it's an area where "flood the zone with battery-operated drones" actually makes a ton of sense.
Good question. The problem with decentralizing is that you generally lose capability, and are entirely at the mercy of your comms, which are always worse than you'd like.
That's probably the way I'd go, although it does remind me that I left out StanFlex, which could help bridge the gap between single and multi-role ships and which the US should definitely adopt. It's a Danish system that mounts various pieces of equipment in basically specialized shipping containers, and allows them to be swapped out in the yard. So they were able to design and build one class of ships that could be set up to do multiple jobs (mine warfare, pollution control, patrol, etc). The big difference between this and the LCS is that the LCS was intended to have quick-change capability, which causes a lot of problems both with crew and equipment, while this doesn't really do that. The ship has one job, but a ship built to the same plans can have a different job because of what you put in it. It's also useful in maintenance and overhauls because you can pull a module out and put a new one in. I might look at trying to StanFlex the Type 31 equivalent to let it do the other LCS missions, but I'd need a lot more study before I was sure that would work.
High but not infinite. Some of the more alarming claims have been about merchant ships specifically, which isn't quite the same as naval production, where we do better, although still not great.
Some of my take on this is based on the political economy of the US, where the Marine Corps has an extremely strong lobbying arm, and a strength set by statute in a way that other branches don't. Also, we can't wave a magic wand and turn the LHDs into destroyers. I'd be curious about cutting procurement to focus Ingalls on other things, but even that probably sparks some fun fights.
...Infrastructure needs to have at least as much - if not more - priority as shipbuilding. As it stands now, even if we could prevail in a peer conflict, the US Navy would be crippled for decades due to an inability to build replacements or repair those that could be.
Every time I go home to Ohio, I see the yards where my Dad worked while I was growing up. Closed in 1983 due to a deranged union and the USN's utter refusal to consider giving them contracts - we could handle anything that could get through the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Following on the mine-hunter vs. mine-sweeper question, and drones:
Bean, do you have a source you like that describes the difficulties of detecting a ship signature well?
The signature-matching question makes it seem like a swarm of undersea drones that are literally just modern mine triggers with propulsion and guidance would be a good idea.
Reviewing the mine warfare posts, I notice the picture of the modern mine hunter looks suspiciously close to fitting into a torpedo tube. If we could build mine hunter drones that can launch out of a standard torpedo tube, the whole submarine fleet could plausibly pick up anti-mine as a secondary mission.
Maybe adapting the ballistic missile launch bay on a submarine would also work? Naively it seems like releasing a drone would be a much less exacting task than launching a missile, so the reduced constraints might buy a bigger zone of release, and/or recapture ability.
This question feels silly, but I am compelled - what about a modern deepwater fishing vessel for mine clearance? I ask because the situation there has changed a lot since the last major mine clearance operations in a war: influence mines are specific enough that a civilian metal hull doesn't present the same risk it did then; they can drag a huge area, and go all the way down to the bottom; they have radar and sonar sensor suites; they can have helicopter pads, for all the value helicopters can provide; they have extended duration deep water operational capabilities.
Also the fishing industry is in a tight spot, so they can frequently be had for (relatively) cheap when a company downsizes or goes bust. They could probably be given updated software for shifting targets from fish to mines, or retrofitted with military-grade sensors. They have on-board processing plants now, which implies quite a lot of flexibility with respect to power requirements. It would probably be possible to design a specialized form of netting for the purpose of picking up mines.
It seems like everything that has happened with mine development makes using a civilian ship lower risk, and everything that happened with commercial fishing made them plausibly better at the job.
Not specifically. I'm going off intuition here, but there are a couple of problems. First, you need to accurately guess what the mine is set to trigger on, and then you need to replicate it accurately. Even if the second part is relatively straightforward (and I could see mine fuze designers getting really creative with modern computers to make it hard), the first isn't, and influence mines are notorious for having features like "wait for two days, then go off after the 17th ship", which means you need to sweep constantly in a way you don't for contact mines. Targeting specific ships means they're less likely to do long hit counters, but less likely doesn't mean never.
Is this CAPTOR, or are you thinking of something else?
I believe there has been some discussion of this kind of thing. Exact details are obviously not public, but it's not outlandish. There are some obvious issues with the exact techniques (mines being blow up may draw attention) but it is potentially very useful to be able to clear a minefield without anyone being able to shoot at you.
I'd rather have a dedicated minehunter, but if you built a modular system, I suppose that would be a reasonable platform for it. I wouldn't count on immunity to mines, as the bad guys could easily set some mines which are on simpler fuzes to try and get stuff like this. But you could probably design a launch/retrieval system that is easy to install/makes use of the fishing vessel's capabilities, and otherwise have it stand off a reasonable distance. Wouldn't want to rely on its sonar, which might be not completely terrible at seeing moored mines, but won't have the fine bottom-mapping capability you need against influence mines.
Re narrow mission sets, I think the steel-man argument is that building a ship that does one thing well mitigates scope creep, and if it's a really excellent platform, ends up being repurposed for other roles in a way that doesn't happen with designs that start out as a jack of all trades. Plus, they're more likely to make it into service in a timely fashion.
Like, the original Flight I Burkes were designed as a less capable compliment to the Ticonderogas, and they've been incrementally improved to eventually replace the Ticonderogas. But I think it's not necessarily clear that they would have been as successful if the Flight Is had jumped straight to the Flight III configuration and role set.
I would comment every point
That is complete and absolute bullshit. Even ASW frigate need at least mediocre radar and ESSM, because submarines have anti-ship missiles. AAW destroyer still needs at least basic sonar and torpedo tubes. Every ship needs a helicopter. From Falkland wars it is pretty obvoious that ships should have CIWS. And everything is fired from VLS...
This sounds like most logical plan and it works great for some countries e.g. France and used to work in US. But and this is important: France is France, US in 2025 is US in 2025 and US in 1960 was US in 1960. US in the 1950s has far stronger institutions, more regulated and state was controling bigger part of economy than many countries in Europe. I do not want to say what is better, but you can not have completely privatised economy and then have ships designed by state. It works in France, but also every major French defense company is at least partially government owned.
That is political decision you can definitely go for, but then you have to start far earlier.
"You can't have ships designed by the state in a fully privatized economy" is tautologically true, but we could just admit that state-designed warships seem to work better and not insist on privatizing everything. Ideological hostility to government was basically what killed the British equivalent to NAVSEA's in-house design capability, but nobody has to do that. Warship design is a weird enough edge case that making it run by the government probably won't make many things worse.
@bean
But that is the main thing. For proper working of state-owned enterprise you need strong and independent state servants, you need bipartisian support, you need ideological support, you need public opinion on your side, most importantly you need competitive wages to private sector and you also need to be popular to work for state so you get the young talent.
In US nowadays most higher level public servants change every 4 years. Both parties definitely do not support sentence: "Some things are better made by state". In the US there is different income equality than in Europe, IT developer at Thales makes two times more than teacher, his manager will make the same. The head of the department with 50 developers would make 4 times the teachers sallary. Than it is pretty easy for state to be competetive with wages even in high level management. And also e.g. in France it is extremely prestigious to be in state service and many times the best students at university goes to government run development.
In the US the state would not pay the same wage as Lockheed to the developers and definitely not to the managers. Dream of everyone at that institution would be to make connections here and start work for private sector. There would be the worst students that were not hired by any start-up or major military contractor. The head of the institution would be changed every 4 years and Republicans would cut its budget in half after first major flop to prove inefficiency of public sector.
I do not want to say by it that US system is worse than French, I only want to show that the French system would not work in the US.
the Republicans would slash their budget
The difference in civil service wages and private sector wages is a problem, but I don’t think an insurmountable one. People are motivated by things other than money, and “I get to do this really cool job” is definitely one of those things. For that matter, they don’t have to be actual civil servants to get the benefits we’re looking for. I would point to the Aerospace Corporation as a model. It’s a nonprofit that basically serves to provide in-house expertise to the Air Force by being able to pay industry-standard wages. Something like that for shipbuilding could do quite well, and the fact that it’s not a for-profit company with shareholders means it’s easier to keep people on staff for when they’re actually needed.
And no, the people at this level don't change with each election. There are, as best I can tell, a grand total of 7 political appointees in the Department of the Navy. NAVSEA is led by a Vice Admiral, and this is going to be a level or two down from that.
I agree that many people are motivated by other things that just money, but that is the problem, actually even for private military contractors (and traditional industry at general).
The thing of "cool" completely shifted. Even 30 years ago the biggest dream for everyone after Caltech was to work at NASA, or DARPA. The best young students nowadays usually do not want to work at military development and if they want to they usually do it at start-ups. Now, everyone in rocketry after Caltech wants to work for SpaceX, not NASA. So I kind of do not believe that the few students that actually want to work in military industry would choose NAVSEA instead of Anduril (or safe money at Lockheed).
And I did not want to say that NAVSEA is directed by some political figure. The thing I was trying to show is that instability. Every 4 years you have 7 new politicians at ministry of navy. Every 3 years the new director of NAVSEA is picked by some polititian (who do not know anything about shipbuilding)
And you still do not change the biggest problem, after the first major flop there would be hearing at Congress, media would be talking abou inefective state enterprises, the budget would be cut in half and whole development work would be outsourced to some private companies.
I'm not sure that cool has shifted so much you couldn't staff that agency. If I'd found Norman Friedman a few years earlier, there's a pretty good chance I'd be one of the people who would be quite happy to take the pay cut to go and do warship design. And speaking as someone at a traditional military contractor, recruiting isn't that much of a problem.
I would bet against this. Even a decade ago and well away from California, SpaceX was well known to be a sweatshop in my rocketry program. Not to say that nobody went there (I had a friend there for a year or so), but I don't think it would have been even the modal first choice.
Given the curve that current shipbuilding projects are graded on, I think avoiding this would be entirely feasible.
Submarines are famously allergic to the flaming datum; but in at least some of the cases, why not take a page from the minelayer's handbook and leave the countermine in place on a timer long enough to permit the sub to be elsewhere when the countermine goes off?
Another (theoretical) "funniest thing" the sub could do is to mine the safe corridor...
I was mostly suggesting that I didn't think submarine-based mine clearance would be standard, not that it wouldn't be useful at all. Delayed clearing charges could be useful, although there's always the risk that the area gets mined again, either between when they get placed and set off, or after they get set off.
A pretty standard tactic, although usually executed from the air for obvious reasons. Then again, SLMM is a thing, and probably for exactly that reason.
Any discussion on USN shipbuilding needs to acknowledge the elephant in the room; the impact of Covid19 on inflation, wages, and therefore ship costs. All too often I read commentary, professional and amateur, that blames the woes of e.g. the Constellation programme on this and that, and suggests solutions of e.g. designing in-house, or buying BAe, or narrower-scoped ships, or whatever, which are all irrelevant as they do not address the problem of inflation and wages. However the US Navy sourced the design, Covid19 would have impacted its progress all the same.
Separately, on the subject of feature creep and use cases, commentators ought to please bear in mind that antiship weapons have advanced and proliferated considerably. In WW1, a couple of pompoms was adequate air defence protection; in WW2, a battery of 40mms; in the early Cold War, 3" radar-guided proximity-fuzed; by the late Cold War, a ship without Seawolf or RIM-116 and similar had slim hopes against a couple of antiship cruise missiles. In the 2020s, the benchmark threat is now the hypersonic ballistic missile and flocks of swarming drones. Giving any warship the AA fit of the 80s as a result of FFG7-inspired specialisation is the modern equivalent of the light machine-guns both Allied and Axis warships found themselves fitted with in the early years of WW2 - obsolescent and designed to fight the air threat of the last war.
@Matt C, Covid obviously didn't help but it is not the "elephant in the room". The Zumwalt, LCS, and Ford classes were all designed and started building years before Covid. There may have been some impact on the various changes, glitch fixes, and rebuilds; but the underlying problems were not caused by Covid.
Thinking on this a bit more, I wonder if the success of existing designs, combined with the Pentagonal desire to gold plate everything, ends up driving the platforms towards stagnation, because the existing platforms are good enough and the R&D risk isn’t borne out for the incremental gain.
The Air Force has basically already done this with the C-130, and there Army with the H-46. The Fords are like a half step up from the Nimitz (the J version of the C-130?), and if DDG(X) doesn’t live up to its promise you wonder if they just keep evolving the Burke into a Block V configuration eventually.
I think "success of existing designs" explains 90% of the problem, including the tendency towards gold-plating. The fundamental problem is that the new platform needs to be better than the old one, and as we pick all of the low-hanging fruit exposed by our current technology, things get harder and harder to improve. So you need to gold-plate to deliver new capability, and have a ton of requirements to make sure you aren't making it worse in some important dimension that some stakeholder really cares about. You can only get away with that if the overall system is clearly better. Our system was built in an era where that was typically the case, but it isn't any more, which means we need to squeeze harder to get the improvements we expect. Occasionally, there's some willingness to move in less dramatic ways, but we haven't seen much of that since the 90s.
(Worked example of slowing pace of improvements: the F-35 first flew 18 years ago. 18 years after the P-51 first flew, the F-4 Phantom made its first flight. It's really easy to tell someone who prefers the Mustang to the Phantom in some way that you don't really care because the Phantom is so obviously better. This is much less true with the F-35 and the F-16.)
@Matt C said
I do not think that elephant in the room is COVID, I would even said that US shipbuilding ia at the same situation as it was.
I would say that there is only one elefant in the room and if US solved it, every other problem (gold-plating, politics, private contractors) would be managable just by how massive US naval budget is. The real problem of US MILITARY shipbuilding is a lack of US CIVILIAN shipbuilding. And I do not necessary mean oilers and cargo ships, but things like big Yachts, cruise ships, platform supply vessels etc. These are the things that are far closer to frigates and military ships than Oilers.
The the problem is that there is no depth in knowledge, skilled engeneers, skilled workers, not enought subconstractors etc. If you are EU (or Japan, South Korea, China) and you have 25 billion USD civilian shipping industry and you build 1000+ ocean-going ship (even some bigger fishering boats counts), you design 100+ new ships (mostly yachts), there is huge amount of engeneers, huge amount of skilled workers and also there are lot of universities where you can learn it, there are lot of professors that know lot about shipbuilding. Then from this huge pool of skilled workforce you pick best 10% and give them double the sallary for military shipbuilding.
And that is the elpehant in the room, military procurement is not perfect in any country, but with strong enought shipbuilding industry and lot of highly experienced workforce and engeneers you can go through it. The Trieste landing helicopter dock (equivalent of America-class) was extremely complicated and it was type of ship that was newer constructed in Italy. Has completely new propulsin with electrical engines. It was completely designed in less than two years, build in two year, came on time, exactly on the budget and it was bloody cheap, because Italy military budget is broke. Everything is easy with strong enough shipbuilding industry.
PS: And you really do not want to say there is more mess and corruption in US than in Italy :D
There are so many gramatical mistakes that I feel ashamed :D
If that were the case why has the US also been having trouble with making military aircraft? Even ones based on US designed and manufactured airliners?
@bean - The past 30 years has been like living in the interwar period of European war weariness, with the same reluctance to spend on tech development and army recruitment both. Taxpayers and leadership have been reluctant to spend on developing e.g. the F-35 and other future military tech for similar reasons why they were reluctant to develop military tech in the 1920s and 1930s. The rearmament period from 1937ish to 1941 saw massive leaps that could have been taken in the preceding years if there had been more political will (which also means grassroots support), and which might have saved the world a war.
@Fisher - The Zumwalts, I believe, were essentially sound but defeated by peace dividends and unexpected missile proliferation. The Fords are only undergoing the usual issues with any first-of-type vessel with regards to EMALS. The LCS I agree was a disaster all around, but the underlying issue of shipbuilding production and manning right now is mainly Covid-related.
@Stupidbro - Trieste appears to have taken ten years to design and build. Adjusted for exchange rate, inflation, size, and purchasing power*, it is just 20-25% cheaper than, say, LHA-9, without discussing differences in equipment fit. *The median monthly Italian salary is currently about €3,700, but they pay about 30% income tax on that. The median US salary is about US$ 5,500, and they pay about 25% income tax. Furthermore, the Italian VAT rate is double that of American sales tax. What all this means is that American shipyards have to pay much more than Italian shipyards, because American shipyards must compete for manpower with other industries who can offer much higher salaries.
@Matt C said
I would be really interested where you got that Trieste was designed for 10 years. Because I am pretty sure, that by the Italian naval laws there was never a plan for the second carrier in fleet after Garibaldi would had been decomisioned and long term plan was to have just Cavour. And it was overturned when Democratic party got into office at 2014. The official contract for design and build was awarded at 2015 and first steel was cut in 2017. So unless Fincantieri designed it on their own before it was designed in 2-3 years. And since first steel cut it was less than two years than it was oficially launched.
If you do the purchasing power parity then it do not make any sense to argue by higher salaries in the US, that was effectively negated by purchasing power parity. And I have found that development cost for America was 2.4 billion USD (in 2009 dollars), which would be 2.7 in 2015 dollars, price for one America was 3.4 billion USD (in 2015 dollars), so total of 6.1 billion and price for Trieste development was 1.2 billion euros in 2019 euros, which was about 1.1 in 2015 euros, which was about 1.2 billion USD.
I am pretty lazy for finding of purchasing power parity between Italy and US in 2015, but I am pretty sure that 1.2b USD vs 6.1b USD is too big difference for explaining it by lower wages and prices in Italy.
I'm not sure the difference is as big as you think. Even if no design work was done before 2015 (and I am very not sure this was the case) she was laid down in 2018, launched in 2019 (15 months later) and didn't commission for another 4.5 years. America was awarded in 2007, laid down in 2009, launched in 2012 and commissioned in 2014. The plank owners were starting to rotate off when I visited two years later. So if we go from award/order to commissioning, America comes out better. I have no idea why Trieste took 4.5 years from launch to commissioning, or why the designers took inspiration from office buildings for the islands.
As for price, we are again in "are you sure you don't want to abolish money?" territory. Maybe StupidBro is familiar enough with Italian military accounting practices to be sure that the costs reported are roughly comparable, but I'm definitely not. I could believe the Italians are somewhat more efficient. If you told me 2x, I'd probably be willing to buy that. But not 6x. That number is wrong, either because there's missing costs on the Italian side or because Trieste is way less capable than America.
@bean
I am not really familiar with Italian navy accounting, because I am not Italian, and I have not worked in shipbuilding (I used to work for MBDA, now I work in finance), but some of my friends from university did.
And I have heard about that from people who work in UK military shipbuilding and they said that it cost quater of what would it cost in UK. No one in Italian Navy was prepared for it and new government kinda came to Italian navy and was like: "Hey, do you want a second carrier?" and Italian navy was so shocked that they went to Fincantieri and just told them that they need large LHD for 1 billion Euros in 4 years. In my opinion that was the reason why it took 4,5 years to commission it, because it was first large LHD in Italian navy and they got it 4 years after they find out that they will get one.
And I have heard more crazier stories. Italian navy allegedly ordered OPVs and then upgunned them so much that they basically became frigates and then when they were already building the ship, the Navy find out that they would want for them to not only havecells for AD, but also far longer cells for European equivalent of Tomahawk which would b. That would be manageable but the Italian navy said that they need one universal cell, so completely new Sylver A-70 NG was developed. And after all of this the ship was delayed for less than a year.
What I have tried to say is that if you have strong enought shipbuilding industrial base, enough naval engineers, naval workers, lot of know-how on how to build a ship and most importantly strong and effective management structure forged by civilian shipbuilding (where you can easily find out if something is effective or ineffective) than all that goldplating, changing requirements, unrealistic dedlines are are minor unplesanties that delay the ship by year and the budget surge 10% not the crazy problem we can see in US navy today.
So that is in my humble opinion the real elphant in the room, US need to have stronger civilian shipbuilding again. It is not coincidence that all these problems started decade after the US civilian shippbuilding went belly up and before all these things were not major problem.
StupidBro:
Myself (earlier):
Try not ignoring evidence to the contrary.
Do you think that civilian aircarft manufacturing in US is in good shape?
And I would also say that US military aircraft manufacturing is in pretty decent shape (except Boeing, that is completely different story). Huge delays and cost overruns are expected if you are developing completely new capabilities and weapons. I personally do not know any USAF military procurement that would be failure and problematic outside media (again, except Boeing and even their civilian planes are literally falling from the sky).
And that is the thing. When USN has a problem with EMALS catapult that is completely OK, but if you are unable to build a frigate with off the shelf military systems, where there is not a single new military capacity (except sonar you bought from France) then you have a problem in that "making a ship" part.
OK, I have to take exception to this. If you’re talking about the MAX MCAS debacle, then that is (a) solved and (b) the result of a combination of, yes, oversights from Boeing along with some spectacularly terrible piloting from the flight crews. The problem that occurred, a trim runaway, should be a fairly straightforward and known problem for flight crews to solve. Instead, the crews both screwed up their checklists and crashed the planes. Note that the NTSB actually went so far as to file a separate opinion in the Ethiopian case adding pilot error because the Ethiopian authorities weren’t willing to. Yes, Boeing screwed up, but it shouldn’t have been nearly as bad as it was, and they get all the blame because it’s easier for everyone else to blame them and they are hampered in fighting back. (If this is about the door, then yes, that was their fault, but also pretty clearly a one-off.)
On the whole, I don’t think Boeing Defense is much worse (or better) than anyone else. Except the bid team who got overly aggressive back in 2018 or so.
Re Italian shipbuilding, I simply don't buy it. There's a bit of overlap between civilian and defense, and I could easily see Italy having a relatively healthier marine engineering sector because there are lots of civilian employers and it's seen as a good place to work, but I absolutely do not believe any amount of good engineering could deliver an LHD with similar characteristics to America in four years with a sixth of the budget. Either the reported budget isn't the actual budget or the ship is somehow different. ("Make something big with a flat top and a well deck." "OK, but it will burn furiously if hit by a missile." "We can live with that.")
I suspect you have fallen victim to sea stories. Note that the only ship fitted with the Sylver A-70 is the French ASW FREMM variant. The Italians don't use it, or the MdCN, at all.
Re: Italian shipbuilding
I have looked and based on that I know it from guy that should have known this and that i found sources for it in European journals it is propable that Thaon di Revel in full configuration should have Sylver A-70. For instane this is very prestigious source in French defence:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.areion24.news/2021/03/09/paolo-thaon-di-revel-le-patrouilleur-camoufle-en-fregate/amp/
I think you should be also able to put Tomahawks into Sylver-70.
But I do not know anything about to what standards was Trieste made. I honestly even do not know what are the standards for military warships.
Re: Boeing
The thing with planes literally falling from the sky was more like a pun.
I always thought that Boeing problem was their corporate and management structure completely crumbled after they hired MBA CEO who thought that you can run high-level engineering company in a McKinsey fashion. It (as always) brutally backfired and it end up with MAX, manufacturing, Air force one and KC-46 disasters.
OK. Best I can tell, there are reports that the units the Italians are buying to replace the ones they sold to Indonesia may have A70 VLS, but the A70 has been around for a while, so it's not evidence of miraculous Italian engineering capabilities. (Also, that's a really interesting ship, and I will have to dig into it more. It says OPV, but it's clearly a frigate. I wonder if this is designation engineering for political reasons.)
Physically, who knows, but nobody has done the integration, nor are they likely to.
Re Boeing, that's a common view, but I think tends to oversimplify things. Worth noting that while the MAX was largely developed under McNerney (MBA), the AF1 contracts were let under Muilenburg (no MBA, MS in Aerospace). I am fairly sure that the basic idea behind the MAX is sound, and the AF1 issue is mostly due to bad project management at a lower level. Not quite sure of details on the KC-46.
Re:Sylver A-70
I am sure from my own knowledge of Aster missiles that original A-70 was unable to fire them from various reasons. So if Italy wanted something capable of firing cruise missiles, Aster 30 and quadpacked CAMM-ER they had to design a new one (and I have heard the name was Sylver A-70 NG).
And Thaon di Revel class are one of the most fascinating ships NOW, because they are OPVs. Their main mission is to be OPV. Only Italians during the process realized that even asymetric threads now have anti-ship and balistic missiles and that countering assymetric threads require cruise missiles. They were basically designed for fighting houtis, only they still do not have CAMM-ER.
Re: Boeing
In my personal opinion if you destroy company culture with this McKineyism (which work in many cases, but not within high level engineering companies) it will take a while (even decades) until everything heals back even under capable CEO. But again, I have newer worked in Boeing.
StupidBro:
Do you think there is anything wrong with civilian manufacturing of the 767?
@Anonymous: The contrast is exactly the point. 737NG, 757+767, 777 as opposed to the litany of delays and other embarrassments of the 787, 737MAX, 777X. Is some of this the old phenomenon of "now that I've noticed it once, I see it everywhere"? You bet. But clearly not all of it; comparing the time the 777 took to the 777X is an obligatory talking point as a result. Likewise the 737 -- let's ignore the Jurassic and even Classic by claiming that attitudes (both public and regulatory) to aviation safety were different back then -- and compare the NG to the MAX.
The VC-25 ("Air Force One") project is singularly visited by the Good Idea Fairy with "hey we already have two assembled 747s we don't know what to do with". Somehow, an institution badly forgot that confined-space rework after final assembly is order-of-magnitude less efficient than work on subcomponents before assembly.
@bean: no, there are no "miraculous Italian engineering capabilities" the A70 is part of the original design of the Sylver system, we simply told the French that the Sylver system should also accept Standard and Tomahawk missiles.
@Basil Martre
As above, the MAX's main problem was who was flying it, along with changing attitudes towards aviation safety. The 787 was doing a bunch of new stuff, and wasn't well-managed, but has turned into an obvious success story. And the 777X suffered from increased scrutiny after the MAX fiasco.
There are two main problems with the VC-25. First, the original deal signed under Obama was for two new airframes, but Trump didn't like it when he got elected and forced through a new deal to convert two existing planes. That's not Boeing's fault at all. Then the planes were put behind security too early (Ian Argent characterized it on the Discord as "an SF-86 for each bolt" and he's not wrong) which caused massive delays. I'm not sure who is responsible for that, but it looks like they're coming back out to shorten timelines.
@bean
This is silly given the current constellation debacle, which is entirely caused by the USN's insistence on re-designing the thing. This would be exactly as much of a problem no matter how much of the shipping industry was nationalized.
I’m much less certain of that. There are very real effects on programs based on how much the people running the program trust the engineers doing the design work, and a lot of stupid decisions have been made because the engineers were in a different organization and didn’t feel empowered to push back on bad ideas. My go-to example is probably the F-111, which had an Air Force requirement for low-level supersonic performance to avoid them getting an upgraded F-105 or an A-6 foisted on them. Nobody seems to have realized just what this was going to do to the size of the plane, because the Air Force didn’t have any in-house design team who could do some studies and tell management “are you sure about this?” (Ref is Fighters over the Fleet.)
In this case, I could very easily see a stronger in-house design team being able to tell NAVSEA "no" a lot more effectively. Speaking as someone who is the supplier to the government, pushing back is hard and ultimately not really our job.