Confession Is Good for the Soul...

Discussion...
(Source)

It is?

All kidding aside, another title for this post could have been "Things I Suck At" but it would have to be part 1 of 10²⁶, so yeah, I picked a different title, I simply don't have time to go into all of the things I suck at. For instance...

The Missus Herself: We should take up golf.

Your Humble Scribe: Uh, no thanks. I already have a number of sports I suck at, I don't need to add another.

The list of sports I suck at is a very long one. Some I only semi-suck at, in other words I was seldom the last guy picked when choosing up sides in grade school. (Seldom as in it did happen occasionally.) Some people sucked at every athletic endeavor known to mankind, most of them grew up to be multi-millionaires or better. They sucked at sports so they studied.

Anyhoo, the point of all this is that I am not very good with discussions. There are times that I wish to throttle the people I'm discussing things with, it's not that they're wrong, it's just that they tend to be smug about being right. (What's worse are the smug ones who are absolutely wrong, but are still smug about it. They tend to be politicians.)

So the topic of the Zumwalt-class of ships came up over at koobecaF t'other day. A buddy of mine had a link to a nearly year old article regarding some of the problems the class has had. Well, okay, mostly the gun system. As usually happens, a number of folks began to chime in with their thoughts/opinions/arguments - mostly against the class.

So yeah, I work for a defense contractor, won't say which one, and have been involved with the Zumwalt class for a number of years. Too many years probably. It's been an on and off sort of thing. The Navy is like a kid with a paper route (or so it seems to me, having been there and done that as well, I only semi-sucked at that), they don't always have the money they need to pay for stuff. In the early days of this project that meant that the work would stop, often for months at a time, then pick back up again.

When the work stops one of two things happen, I mean if you don't have work on a project you need to find those people other work, or you have to let them go. (Those being the two things I mentioned.) Now unless the timing is perfect, those sent to work on other projects don't automatically come back to Zumwalt when the money spigot is turned back on. Nope, the bosses on that other project don't want to let those folks go until their project is done.

So unless the return of Zumwalt coincides with other projects being done (or their money getting turned off - hey, it's what happens when contractors "miscalculate" and/or Congress doesn't pass a budget) then you have to find new people to work Zumwalt. Often people fresh out of college or people with zero experience on a military project. So in some ways you have to start from scratch. All of which adds to the cost of a project and the time it takes to complete it.

So I've been at this Zumwalt thing for a while, I've seen many stupid decisions made (by us, by other contractors, by the government, and yes, even by the Navy). I've also seen some brilliant work go into this thing. Yes, it's big, it's expensive and yes, probably could have been done better. But it is what it is. A lot of money has been spent on this thing.

Point being, do we just say "fire truck it" and drop everything, realizing that a lot of money has already been spent and just say "Oh well, that didn't work." Or do we suck it up, spend a bit more (that bit having a quite a few zeroes after it) and get those three ships finished and useful?

After all, we've already spent a lot of money on the LCS program (the gift that keeps on giving precisely nothing) a "ship" which can't do anything and probably never will. Zumwalt, at the very least, has a useful radar and sonar system and the capability to carry a whole bunch of missiles. Something LCS is incapable of.

I vote for finish it, learn the right lessons and move on. Some of the Zumwalt technology is pretty slick, far more complex and interesting than some dumb ass writing articles for UPI will ever understand. A lot of the stuff is also classified and not something well known even inside the Navy. If you don't work Zumwalt, you don't know, and if you do know and aren't in the Zumwalt world, someone has committed a serious security violation.

But I shied away from further discussion over on koobecaF as I really do suck at discussions and don't want to piss anybody off (especially friends) over a "tilting at windmills" scenario. In other words, some of us know things, some of us don't. I am actually required by law to keep it that way.

So if my departure from that discussion seems odd, well, I like my job and really, really want to keep it. So I have to stop talking.

In other news...

I've added The Gormogons to the blogroll, been reading them for a while, figured I'd share. It's what I do. (Okay, I suck at sharing, but you probably knew that.)

At any rate this recent post of theirs I found very educational, it's about taverns, bars, saloons, beer halls, and the like. Good stuff.

I had no ideer...

And for what it's worth, I suck at drinking.