US NAVY Early tests are raising worries that the USS Gerald R. Ford may not meet the Navy’s goal of significantly increasing the number of warplanes it can quickly launch — and could even be less effective than older vessels.
US NAVY Early tests are raising worries that the USS Gerald R. Ford may not meet the Navy’s goal of significantly increasing the number of warplanes it can quickly launch — and could even be less effective than older vessels.
Having spent over 30 years in the military industrial complex I can tell you that the emphasis is no longer on producing effective highly reliable weapons. The number one goal of any company is complying with EOE requirements, diversity requirements, gay friendliness and ludicrous environmental edicts that decrease the reliability of the hardware they produce. (No cadmium plating, no lead solder, not buying from any company that uses banned processes, etc.)
When you’re hiring engineers by color or sex you’re necessarily dropping your requirements for competence.
At a former ITT division where I was on contract, I applied for a regular full-time position. I wanted to know from the HR lady if they actually used the self-identification of race for anything. She said that they needed a highly compensated black so badly that the first thing she did each morning was check to see if one had applied. I asked what would happen if I left that section blank. She said, “Then we automatically assume you’re white.”
I’ll bet you can trace every problem to a non-weapons requirement put on the contractor.
The military decline of America is picking up steam.
Did a friend of the First Lady’s company build it, like they did for the Obamacare web site? A web site that costs 1/12 that of a huge aircraft carrier. LOL. Theft in plain sight and no one held to account. No wonder the country is broke.
Tie Obama into a chair and lock him onto one electro magnetic catapult, and do the same for Holder on the other. Point the ship right at the UN building in New York and launch from a distance of 100 yards.
[USS] Gerald R Ford stumbles out of the gate, film at 11.
People are hyperventilating about this. It is a new ship, with millions of components, more than a few making their debut.
I would be astonished beyond belief if it DIDN’T have teething problems.
The M-1 Abrams tank was the worst government boondoggle of the military industrial concept ever conceived and would have Soviet tanks crushing their dead carcasses under their treads.
Funny how that turned out.
$12 Billion = 4 days of QE spending. Chicken feed.
This strikes me as a repeat of what happened with the USS San Antonio. Which a lot of people still don’t consider fully capable, given all the bugs and flaws resulting from the cutting edge aspects of its design.
The USN used to take a pretty evolutionary approach with ships. In the early part of the 20th Century it only built Battleships two at a time (sometimes three) to allow the technology to evolve. It should be noted that the eight Battleships at Pearl Harbor represented four different classes in and of themselves. The of the seven other Battleships that weren’t there, six of them represented ANOTHER three classes.
This continued until recently. The first nuke carrier - Enterprise, leveraged a lot of existing technologies so the only real issue was in integrating them. She was a modified Kitty Hawk class ship that was powered by eight small submarine-style reactors. She used existing arrestor and catapult designs, etc. The only real “revolutionary” aspect of her individual systems were her fixed phased-array radars ... which never really worked properly and were replaced during her late 1970s/early 80s refit.
Heck, even the first Aegis ships, the Ticonderoga-class, used the earlier Spruance-class hull.
It seems to me that, these days, there’s just so much of a gap between new ship designs that the designers go hog-wild to incorporate every new technology they can think of. So you end up with both new-tech teething problems AND integration issues. Rather than trying to mitigate the risk of one or the other. This is what happened with the San Antonio ...
What is the name of the 11th carrier?
Fraud, cronysim, and waste, donor hand greasing
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/wasted-military.html
I wouldn’t be surprised if after 5 years of trying to fix all its problems it is abandoned and fed to the fishes.