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The map above (and below) depicts part of the Kennebec River, that above shows where Bath Iron Works sits in relation to where the opening photo was shot. On the map below you can see the distinctive curve of the waterway flowing into the Kennebec as USS Zumwalt is about to pass down the river with Fiddler Ledge on her starboard side.
It's a lovely photo of the Maine countryside with the mist upon the waterways. By the angle of the sun, I'd guess it was early morning. (Also one of the more likely times to see fog upon the water.)
I can't find the original source of the photo, I got it from a buddy at work, but it's an awfully pretty picture, innit?
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My gut says, "No, it should not." But having been in on this project from the ground floor, I've seen a lot of changes made over the life of this contract (multiple contracts really) not all of which made sense. Let's just say, if you ask the Navy what they want, they'll tell you. They might change their minds eighty-eight times, but at least you should have a pretty good idea of what they want.
Thing is, too many decisions were made by folks who won't ever be on those ships. Too many decisions were made by people who have never been on a warship. Nor had any of them ever worked on, operated, or seen an actual combat system.
You read that right.
When you read, or hear, of a government project going off the rails, there's a reason. Usually it's letting incompetent/inexperienced people (sometimes both) make critical decisions.
But hey, throw another billion dollars at it, that'll fix things.
Sigh ...
Retirement beckons.
¹ Written on Monday, published on Tuesday.
"the fact that it's been twenty plus years kinda sticks in my craw. Should it really take that long to design, build, test, and deploy a modern warship"
ReplyDeleteStuff like this makes me think that "they" don't really give a rat's solid waste evacuation orifice about the results. The only concerns are keeping their jobs, keeping their political patrons happy, and keeping the backers of those political patrons happy by funneling huge government contracts their way.
Top photo....on my phone at first I thought it was some post-WWII submarine running on the surface.
Many of them don't give a rat's ass because they're not smart enough to actually understand that it's a problem. If they think it's not a problem we're in Alfred E. Neuman territory - "What, me worry?"
Delete"An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications"
ReplyDeleteSome observations about said mouse...
1. What does the elephant sized mouse do?
Nothing constructive, mainly just sit around and look unique.
2. How do you keep an elephant sized mouse fed?
Feed it A LOT of what ever it eats, this particular unique sized mouse eats money, LOTS and LOTS of money.
MSG Grumpy
Great analogy.
DeleteAnd who will pay the cost of the "process" keeping such a boondoggle alive? Those sailors manning those ships when the balloon goes up.
ReplyDeleteYup.
DeleteX2
DeleteTaxpayers will be paying whether these ships go to war or not.
DeleteARE paying, Sarge! One of the costs that is unmentioned is the lost opportunity to have built useful WARSHIPS instead of these things .
DeleteDruther have however many Perry-class FFG's that money woulda bought.
Boat Guy
Sigh ...
DeleteToo true.
Sarge, that is a beautiful picture. Maine remains on my list of "states I have not visited but would like to go to"; some of Wyeth's pictures from there are stunning.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I cannot definitively speak to military projects, I have spent well over twenty years in the biopharmaceutical/medical device space and have seen the same sort of project scope creep and extension of ideas (with the associated cash outlay, of course) which eventually go nowhere and waste millions of dollars. Simple human concepts like hubris and pride become something that are clung to and projects are forced to fit the idea that "we cannot give up", even in the face of data and information that suggests "Yes, yes you should give up".
It is different for government spending of course; there is no inherent stop to bad projects and any suggestion of the cessation of any such thing will be the wailing and gnashing of teeth and so billions more are spent - or as Benjamin Franklin stated, "The King's cheese is half wasted in parings; But no matter, 'tis made of the people's milk".
I do like that Franklin quote. I'd like to add: remember "government funded" just means the taxpayers paid for it, the government does not make money, they only have what they took from us, the taxpayers.
DeleteWhile the Burke and San Antonio classes seem to be doing well, several others are not- and we're better at building bad than we are at building well.
ReplyDeleteAt least we stopped the Zumwalt build at 3, unlike 30+ of LCS.
DeleteTuna #1 - They seem like good ships. Not sure how they'd do in a big fight, but at least their weapons systems work.
DeleteWe build just fine, we just can't design to save our lives.
Tuna #2 - Yup, that was a good call. One of the ways I can sleep at night is that I had nothing to do with LCS.
DeleteThe people who inflicted the LCS upon us should be sleeping - with the fishes. Every damn one of them.
DeleteBG
Concur.
DeleteWhat gurfs me and chaps me thighs like riding bareback on a horse in wet hot weather is that we have both the very successful Ticonderoga class and the very successful Arleigh Burke class, with lots of data on the respective hull designs and all sorts of such. We could have done next-gen Ticos and Burkes and, yes, San Antonios, with plenty of room for new weapon systems and such.
ReplyDeleteBut, no, we had to screw everything up. Including screwing up the very successful FREMM from Europe.
And the stupid gun. We had 155mm gun systems that were pert near automatic and used all the varieties of 155mm NATO compatible rounds and the Army's guided munitions and the Army's rocket rounds and we couldn't fully auto and navalize them? Instead we went with a wunderwaffen that was too expensive to fire.
So now we're going to yank all the gun systems and the magazines and everything else and put in VLS? And there's not even a 76mm mount on the dumb things so someone in a powerboat can pull up with RPGs and sink the turds.
Here's the key thing about that Zumwalt gun system, it wasn't really a gun. It was a tube used to "fire" a missile which cost more than a Tomahawk. When they were first touting the system a big selling point it was that they could use existing 155 ammo. Not. It fired a missile, an effing missile. Very capable? Yes. Cheap? No.
DeleteYeah, they took a proven design from Europe and effed it up. Argh.
Actually, there are two guns mounted aft, 40mm I think. So the guy on the jet ski needs to be really fast.
BeansOctober 8, 2024 at 11:25 AM
DeleteLong ago when the world was new, I had a sideline as a writer for various defense journals. As part of that sideline, I had the privilege of being a guest at the Ingalls Pascagoula Shipyard for the post-shakedown yard availability for the USS YORKTOWN [CG-48]. For non-naval types, the post-shakedown yard availability is when the ship comes back after the shakedown cruise and they put it in the yard to fix whatever did not work the way it was supposed to. YORKTOWN came back from her shakedown cruise, and every single thing and system worked like it was supposed to. The Navy was more than passing shocked, and had to get her ready for her first deployment early. We used to be able to do things like that. Not anymore.
Subotai Bahadur
And that goes beyond sad, all the way into a troublesome future for our way of life.
DeleteA new one on me: "to gurf". The action of eating fast and gulping at the same time.
DeleteSounds positively disgusting. So why do I like it?
Delete👍
DeleteYou too, Mary?
DeleteJust a question from a dame, who has never served in the military at all, regarding how long it takes to manufacture ships/boats as well as other equipment...I'm thinking planes and tanks here...do you think that it takes as long as it has to design and then build this equipment because we are not currently in a world war? In other words there is no urgency or big push to get it done. In WWII once the design was arrived at, the end product rolled off the production line pretty darn quickly, whether it was a plane, a tank or a ship or a boat. We were at war, the main push was to get the equipment out the door to the Brits, and then to our boys PDQ, so there wasn't as much fiddle-farting around with changes until the reports/requests came back from the front lines. Or am I just way off base here?
ReplyDeleteSuz
You are dead on target, Suz. Not only is there a lack of urgency, there is also a lack of integrity on both sides of the contract.
DeleteI used to think that we can do much better than this. Now? I'm not so sure.
I've never served either, but my uneducated gut feeling is:
Delete1.) People unwilling to take chances/responsibility for anything.
2.) Complexity of some of the new systems.
3.) People not willing to take responsibility.
4.) Powers that be wanting to add every bell and whistle so their posteriors are covered.
5.) Officialdom adding more bells and whistles to pad expenses so they can go to Congress and say "We need more money."
6.) Capons in power paying off political backers with open ended contracts.
7.) All of the above.
DeleteSuz, I think that once a design was accepted, it was "locked in" as good enough. There would be incremental improvements and retrofits, but nothing that would require starting over, retooling and interrupting the mass production. I have a soft spot for the Bath Iron Works. Duri ng WW2, that single shipyard built more destroyers than did the entire Empire of Japan. The US production effort was staggering. The Kaiser shipyard in Vancouver WA had been a swamp six months before Pearl Harbor. It would launch a light escort aircraft carrier (CVE) every week for a year. Submarines were being built in Mackinaw, MI and did their "sea trials" in Lake Michigan. At Savage, MN on the head of navigation of the Minnesota River, Cargill (a grain company) was building Navy tankers to be floated down the Mississippi and the superstructures added later. In CA, a Kaiser yard (for publicity) built a 10,000-ton Liberty freighter - from the keel laying to launch in 4 days, 15 hours, 34 minutes. At week's end, the Robert E. Perry was standing out to sea with crew and cargo. In LA, there was a profane alcoholic named Higgens that was also a genius at designing small boats, like the ubiquitous Higgens LCVP landing craft. His company built half of the vessels in the US Navy (by number, not tonnage) in WW2. And strangest of all was a shipyard in Denver, CO, 700 hundred miles from the sea and a mile above it building destroyer escorts (there was an available workforce). In pieces. They would be shipped by rail to the west coast and the jigsaw puzzle pieces welded together into a ship.
DeleteHow times have changed ...
DeleteThat urgency to field was the reason there were so many models of a design in a relatively short time. A model then right down through the alphabet (U.S.) or Mk I, Mk II, MkIII ... (UK).
DeleteThen there were the variants of any particular model. There were also field modifications, approved or unapproved. Some of those field mods were incorporated by the original mfg in later models.
That is war time footing.
But more to Suz's brilliant question, that is why NACA, DARPA, and others existed. Somewhere along the way there was a bumper crop of too many Admirals and flag officers. The crop exceeded the work demand so rather than *only* finger fiddling they stuck their nose in design. The Pentagon Wars is a favorite example of that.
Bumper crop of too many admirals, hhmm, Clinton era?
DeleteThe Zumwalt wouldn't even make a good artificial reef. That's saying something considering that is best use.
ReplyDeleteI figured that is an older photo. Its been ages since I'd seen an Island class USCG WPG.
Imagine years spent slaving away on projects such as Zumwalt, Starliner, F-35 and others knowing you gave your good years for caca.
Zumwalt did introduce a number of innovative things, so it wasn't a complete waste of money. But in reality, you only need one test bed, not three. Especially as they cost so damned much.
DeleteSubs were built in Mantowoc Wi on Lake Michigan. They have a sub on display there now.
ReplyDeleteI knew that, I wonder how many people don't realize that you can get to the Atlantic from the Great Lakes.
DeleteMy apologies, Anom. I meant "Manitowoc" WI. Indeed, Sarge. Duluth MN is a seaport a long way from the Atlantic. Actually, the WW2 subs built in WI transited the Chicago Ship Canal to the Illinois River and thence to the Mississippi to New Orleans and the Gulf (assisted by pontoons to raise their draft). Much safer than taking a new ship down the Atlantic seaboard at the time.
DeleteA protected inland route makes sense.
DeleteProcurement 'cock ups' are a feature of life in the UK. As a non-military person it never ceases to amaze me how many projects come in over time and over budget. Who is to blame? The military will try to blame the civil servants but the military don't help by changing the specs after a project has started and rotating staff around frequently, is it to box tick on a CV? I don't know. For an example of a badly managed project look at the 'Ajax' IFV, I think it's some 30-40 years in development and the trial vehicles deafened their crews. The French and Italians have modernised their forces with much less fuss. The merry-go-round between senior officers and defence companies probably means no one has an incentive to fix the problem. The problem is I have an ominous feeling we are in a pre conflict phase and should be looking to field kit that is 'good enough' instead of trying to tweak perfection the whole time.
ReplyDeleteRetired
Spot on in my experience.
DeleteWe live in dangerous times and there seem to be no adults in charge.
Sadly, I have an information update for mine of October 8, 2024. Things are not as good as they used to be when the world was new.
Deletehttps://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/07/navy-says-26-ships-affected-faulty-welds-newport-news-shipyard-virginia.html
Newport News is where all of our nuc's are built. 26 ships being built or repaired including the CVN GEORGE WASHINGTON and a couple of SSN's have faulty welds. From the report, some of the faulty welds are deliberate. It is noteworthy too that they were not caught by inspectors but were only found out by a confession. My ancestors had some prolonged and unpleasant means of execution that might be ripe for revival.
Subotai Bahadur
Concur.
DeleteThe race to produce the atomic bomb had prodigies of Federal mishaps. The diffusion plant at Oak Ridge was begun (two buildings each a half mile long that they had to have ready) with the piping going in. What they were to handle was uranium hexafluoride, a radioactive, toxic and viciously corrosive gas. The barrier filters (thousands needed) existed only in postage-stamp size in a couple labs, and the leakproof pumps to move the gas had not been designed, and there was worry that they never could be. Allis Chalmers came through with magnetically coupled pumps. Neither filters nor pumps were compatible with the plumbing. One day the workers arrived and started ripping everything out again and replacing it. All top secret of course. An old TN native quit his job noting "Whatever the Government is making, they could buy it cheaper"...
DeleteBig difference here is that the Manhattan Project had never been done before, we've been building ships for a very long time. Screwing that up now is unforgiveable.
Delete