Posted on 12/16/2016 3:48:40 AM PST by sukhoi-30mki
The ‘Independence’-class Littoral Combat Ship USS ‘Coronado’ in October 2016. U.S. Navy photo
The Navy’s $29 billion Littoral Combat Ship program provides a step-by-step case study in acquisition failures and the costs and risks of unacceptable levels of concurrency.
Its design requirements were poorly conceived, the manpower planning was wildly unrealistic, Navy leadership and program managers repeatedly circumvented acquisition rules — increasing concurrency and cost risk — and production was approved despite poor and rushed analysis.
Production milestones were approved despite glaring program failures. Moreover, the program is an example of how unwilling Congress is to step in and hold defense acquisition programs accountable. Congress repeatedly failed to intervene despite warnings from the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service and experienced independent analysts that this program was grossly off track.
Now the Navy has announced that it is abandoning the LCS’s radically new manning concept as well as the fundamental concept of a multi-mission ship with swappable mission modules, completely overhauling the justification and total concept for this program.
This necessitates large increases in crew size and a significant redesign of crew spaces and weapons installations, almost certain to significantly increase acquisition and operational costs.
In response to the mounting storm of criticism, on Dec. 16, 2015, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced that the original buy of 55 LCSs, already cut to 52, would be cut to 32 ships plus an additional eight “frigate” versions of the original LCS. The Navy prefers to go even further by cutting the LCS buy to 28 ships plus 12 “frigate” LCSs — and is requesting approval of a 12 ship block buy to lock in the program’s production commitment with a concomitant large increase in concurrency.
(Excerpt) Read more at warisboring.com ...
The LCS may be worthless as a fighting vessel but for the purposes of pumping huge sums of taxpayer money into the hands of the right corporate cronies it is a huge success.
I doubt that the huge entire fleet in World War II came close to costing $29 billion. And we had over 100 aircraft carriers.
The LCS may be worthless as a fighting vessel but for the purposes of pumping huge sums of taxpayer money into the hands of the right corporate cronies it is a huge success.
Pierre Sprey has long been a hero in my eyes. I didn’t realize he was in cahoots with POGO, but I suppose it was inevitable. When I first knew him, he was a member of the credentialed acolytes of the late John Boyd, along with the boys from Elgin. POGO are flyweight cage-rattlers in comparison. You can generally take Sprey’s theses to the bank, if you allow for his penchant for inflammatory language.
TC
Trump wants a 350 ship Navy. Going to get interesting to see what they do with the budget.
And we had over 100 aircraft carriers.
The movie Pentagon Wars is an excellent example of what happens in DC and at the Pentagon.
Another program President Trump will scrap. Is it a problem with the Navy brass or the ship builder?
During WWII you could get lunch served on real china for $0.35. What would that cost today?
I worked on that project of about 5 years and this kind of information should have come out years ago. The people evaluating the program were the head of the divisions whose jobs depended on it. If they failed the program, they and everyone who worked for them all lost their jobs.
The whole concurrent design and construction thing was a bust. Can you imagine designing a house as you’re building it?
The crew was so small that there was no redundancy. In a wartime scenario there was no plan for casualties or for people to do battle damage repair.
The weight of the ship was so critical that they only carried enough projected spares for a normal week of mission operations. Anything above that had to come from another ship or port.
The hardware and software issues were monumental.
That was the only Navy ship program that I ever worked on, so I had nothing to compare it to. It just seemed really disorganized and poorly planned to me.
Defense acquisition is a mess period and I don’t blame the big defense companies I blame the government period. Doesn’t matter the program or the program size it’s just a broken system.
If you need a new ship or aircraft (or whatever) you start with a need, define what you want with requirements based on that need and then select a source to build that ship or aircraft that best meets those needs. This is where it goes to hell because there’s constant leadership/management turnovers everyone wants their stamp on it so they change and modify requirements constantly so nothing gets done on time and the money pours in.
Kind of like building a single story 3 bedroom home, changing to two story 4 bedroom, then remove the 4th bedroom and make a playroom, add a garage, put the kitchen where one of the other bedrooms was get almost done and you forgot bathrooms so you start over and decide you want a convenience store.
As a builder... you just keep going because “they” keep giving you money to make all these changes.
These new modern ships really seem quite ugly to me. I realize that a naval vessel is supposed to be a fighting machine, not a cruise ship; but would it have killed the architects to at least make it look a little bit appealing? In terms of aesthetics, these tubs have nothing on the great World War II ships.
It’s a “floater!”
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