Posted on 01/22/2024 10:10:46 AM PST by Fish Speaker
WASHINGTON — A new survey conducted by a coalition of suppliers for US Navy aircraft carriers reports most vendors are facing increased challenges with inflation, material availability and workforce management.
The Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition survey [PDF], conducted in early November 2023 and published this week, received 150 voluntary responses. ACIBC is a trade association representing about 2,000 vendors across the country who make up the supply chain shipbuilder and prime contractor HII relies on to construct aircraft carriers at its Newport News Shipbuilding shipyard in Virginia.
Lisa Papini, ACIBC’s chairwoman, told Breaking Defense the results from the survey largely align with what vendors have told her anecdotally as recently as during the annual Surface Navy Association symposium last week.
According to a summary of the survey’s result, 95 percent of vendors have “faced challenges” due to inflation, 91 percent indicated they’ve had problems related to “material availability/delivery” and 85 percent have struggled “hiring, training and retaining their workforce.” A more comprehensive version of the survey is scheduled to be published in March.
(Excerpt) Read more at breakingdefense.com ...
Times change and it seems to me that aircraft carriers are increasingly vulnerable, which reduces their utility. We have 11 in active service already. Plus we have 2 America-class Amphibious Assault Ships and 7 Wasp-class Amphibious Assault Ships, all of which are more or less small aircraft carriers. I wonder if in this age of unmanned aircraft, drones and missiles we ought not transition away from our Navy being organized around these behemoths. Such as perhaps use the same money to build more submarines and scale up our missile and drone production (because as we see in Ukraine, it’s possible to burn thorugh a lot of these things awfully quickly and the US industrial base is not well-suited to quickly ramp up production after a war breaks out). These are just questions in my mind. What do our Freeper naval experts think?
BTW, the new Ford-class carriers are said to cost $13 billion a pop. Add in the cost of the air wing and escort ships and you could actually build The Wall for less than the cost of one carrier. Personally, I think that spending so much on the ‘forward defense’ capabilities that aircraft carriers provide makes very little sense when millions of invaders are streaming across the border with Mexico. Right now, we need border defense a lot more that we need the capability to intervene in foreign wars.
The price of chicken soup has gone up too. About $2 a can.
“You’re on the right track there. Public high schools once had vibrant trades programs. Wood shop, metal shop, etc. Most of those classes are gone now.”
Schools have no one to teach those subjects.
Did the DoD ever fix their imported zipper supply problem?
12 already built and maintained CSGs are not enough? They are very large targets, bluntly speaking. Better money spent on the new generation nuclear attack and missile submarines- properly staffed by nail chewing deadly US Navy war fighters. Not modern woke morons who have zero skillsets.
When will our carriers, and the carriers from other nations go the way of BattleShips?
> Schools have no one to teach those subjects. <
It all goes back to Bush II, as I noted in my post #7. I was teaching physics at a public high school when Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ law first took hold. The district quickly let all the trades instructors go. The trades teachers were there. They just weren’t “needed”.
This was not the fault of the district. NCLB forced their hand. NCLB was brutal in its scoring. Woe to the district that didn’t score well in math and English. This forced the districts to add more math and English classes. Something had to be eliminated to make room for those extra classes. It was the trades that went.
“aircraft carriers are increasingly vulnerable, which reduces their utility.”
They are welfare for defense contractors—white elephants and target practice in any future serious war against an enemy with modern missile and drone technology.
“If any of the three branches should go “full drone” first it probably should be the Navy...”
You don’t want drones launching Tridents or having the autonomous AI to make decisions to do so.
Here, 10th, 11th, and 12th graders can take courses at the local trade school, which also matriculates high school graduates as an alternative to the community college.
If the drones could be guided by humans, then great. If the technical challenges are too great and AI is required, then I guess this wouldn't be a complete replacement.
Even dumb drones can hit huge and slow moving aircraft carriers.
They are big sitting ducks.
The “new residents” pouring over the southern (and now Canadian) border bring none of these skills
—
But they’d be great for low end assembly manufacturing. If only there was some.
Trade classes vanished because parents wanted their kids to be internet millionaires rather than plumbers.
The USN’s future is NOT carriers, or any surface ships.
“The USN’s future is NOT carriers, or any surface ships.”
Step 1 is they have to figure it out....
Let us hope it won’t have to be the hard way.
It seems they plan to fix the problem by "off-shoring" the work force as well.. The Gen Z's & Y's won't swat at a fly, so I guess we're are like the Saudis now. If it's going to get done, we'll need to hire a foreigner to do it..
“we’re are like the Saudis now”
We are like the Saudis would be if they hated native Arabs.
I wonder how many carriers we could have built from the steel we had to use building that Wetback Wall?
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