I like Sal's suggestion of Ernest E. Evans as a ship name. He was a Native American and, unlike most of the DEI-based ship names, a true naval hero. If you don't know his story, google it - Taffy 3, Battle off Samar, Leyte Gulf.
"the destroyer Yukikaze (under Lieutenant Commander Masamichi Terauchi) closed to point blank range, not for an attack, but to salute both Johnston and the crew for their bravery." wiki
I've read every book on that series of battles. An officer on another destroyer who was the last to see Evans alive said he saw him bloodied, but still on the fantail (the bridge had been shot away) shouting down orders to aux steering. The ship disappeared into the smoke and was never seen again. He told the crew at commissioning that he intended to sail into harm's way and meant it.
While we're talking ship names, can we call the cruisers Ticos? It's a sad Navy when there's no Saratoga, Bunker Hill or Lexington in the fleet. Instead, we name our carriers after more worthless than warm spit politicians like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The Chimp and the Slick Willy. It makes me ill, just like Truman killing the USS United States, once as president and once thanks to Clinton renaming the USS United States after the most anti-Navy president of the 20th century.
Time for another USS Evans! The historic book Tin Can Sailors captures why many of us like CDR Evans, you did not even know of his ethnic background until digging deeper..he was a hero first! Great Naval Officer.
My brief time in a shipyard had a lot of contact with the repair of the USS Cole. New (for the time) DDG, she still had a lot of empty space in the below decks. That was the only thing that saved her from total destruction, as the blast (somewhat) funneled through the empty spaces and out through various funnels and trunks. That space is full in today's new DDGs. The Ticonderoga class CG used the Spruance hull with an extension. The Tico's filled the empty space AND the extension. Very valid premise to overbuild size (and power generation capability!) to allow for upgrades during service life. However, due to constant timeline shifts to the right and design revisits, it seems we fill the empty space before we ever put a rivet in metal. Which highlights the total inability of our procurement system to actually...procure anything. Epic (not just everyday) failure that is unrecognizably due to procurement process and personnel failure that results in accountability is seemingly the only thing that is going to change / improve this situation. Just hope it isn't calamitous for the nation.
I thoroughly thank you for continuing to flog this horse, however I fully believe the best part of beating your head against the wall is when you stop. I think it’s time to jack up the TACAN and drive another ship underneath this failure known as NAVSEA. If a single person attached to the Tiffany design philosophy of the terrible 20’s is still employed there EVERYTHING is doomed to abject failure,flawed thinking and dreaming has rotted the entire thinking process, which is what isn’t working - no one is held responsible for PowerPoint fairy dust, everything is late and risks are never retired - full stop.
My days on sub optimal Knox classs frigates, pre-VLS sprucans, and launcher less fig7s told me that at least the platform was sound, even if the weapons, sensors and living conditions weren’t. (I’ll leave the ABs out of the discussion as I’m still hurt Sonar Control was relegated to the bilges is a major flaw, but I’m overly obsessed with ASW -natch).
To further your point on “morphing” hulls from Sprus to Ticos, look what that platform morphed into - (DD963, Kidd class, CG47/52) 2 guns, a box launcher and a sea chicken all the way to 2 guns, twin arm bandits, VLS, ABL tomahawks, one helo, 2 helos, chain guns, you name it, we strapped anything and everything onto that hull and it pretty much worked - sound thinking got us here, not what came out of the “process”.
Keep giving em hell, I’m just too jaded to even think about the nonsense anymore.
If you are using "NAVSEA" as a synonym for ASN RDA and the PEO/PM structure, then I agree. And don't forget the mind virus in OPNAV that confuses the power of the purse with technical competence.
I will go so far as to say that uniformed personnal with the power of the purse understand how many of what kind of ships we need for operations today. Tomorrow is a new land, and we need some serious no-holds-barred war games conducted by people who don't mind throwing away the rules of the game in order to get to what might be just over the horizon. We also need to acknolwege that those same people have done a completely piss-poor job of picking the program managers for our acquisition programs. I give the perpetual cost and schedule overruns as my evidence.
More than sixty years ago, when Admiral Rickover was engaged in bureaucratic battle with SECDEF Robert McNamara and his Whiz Kids, he clearly recognized that the acquisition reforms McNamara was pushing would eventually replace warrior-technologist managers with paralysis-by-analysis box checker managers. Over time, that is just what actually happened, for the most part.
Not only replaced them, but replaced them with people who don't even know how to do the analysis. See my rant about risk management. The *right* way to run things would be to do realistic knock-someone-in-the-head war games based on an actual national strategy, and *then* decide what we need to build, followed by hard-headed acquisition management - refusing to take any wooden nickles. Back in the early 80's I was assigned duty at David Taylor Model Basin. In that time period, the Naval War College held war games in which senior civilian technology managers could get an idea of how their "things" would impact the real world. Although in uniform, I was allowed to attend since I was at the lab. My assignment, as an LCDR EDO was to be the surface warfare commander for my task group defending against a Soviet combined naval and air force attack, set in the mid-1990's. No experience in doing that and totally out of my league, but here we go. Using satellite imagery, we obtained an actionable position on Kirov and company. I talked with the aviator who dealt with pushing the forces around and rolling the dice behind the curtain, and using comething that had never been done before, sank the Kirov and damaged several of her escorts. Effectively, on Day 2, we had won the war, but Red Fleet was re-constituted behind the scenes to continue the game. The point of the story is not to brag (too much) but to show that allowing for the unexpected can sometimes produce useful results.
We need to embrace the "unexpected" of the next USN CG will be named something like "Long March of Victory". About the same time you were at DT I was at NavSea as flag aide. We'd have the DARPA boys come in once a month with some new ideas. One I clearly remember was an ASM that would cross the engagement horizon and drop a small torpedo with a warhead of 75-100 lbs, a bubble jet nose cone, 30-40 ft run depth with acoustic homing. They figured that every ship in anyone's navy was gonna have more than 2 "CIWS" so the chances of an ASM getting thru was decreasing. So, change the dynamics - some threats above the sea, some below it. Never saw it come to fruition but the discussion was interesting when the technology was not the short pole in the tent.
It is amazing what out of the box thinking can do to screw up the "Known Facts."
Yeah, sometimes it gets you killed, but sometimes doing the odd thing that nobody thinks of wins the day.
But that's why we wargame. And that's why it's good to open them up to people who aren't the normal decision makers and trigger pullers. I'd bet there were a lot of useful tactics developed back in the day by random people playing Harpoon.
I saw on Steam that Microprose is getting ready to re-release Harpoon 97 for modern platforms. I hope someone somewhere retained that work of love that was the WW2 database.
There are three tribes in play - NAVSEA, RDA/PEO/PM, and OPNAV. Not surprising that the two dominant ones turned on NAVSEA and starved the source of design expertise required to make Naval shipbuilding succeed. LCS and Frigate are Exhibits A & B. I'm not in the NAVSEA booster club, but if fixing NAVSEA is on the critical path back to shipbuilding success, then count me in.
Sal is right...again. As someone involved in the construction of large complex industrial buildings and systems, trouble happens (huge $$ overruns, schedule slippage, technical failures) when engineering and design is incomplete before construction begins. So, for Heaven's sake, save some $$ and aggravation and test and prove the IPS first, then complete the ship's engineering design and quash all but benign changes during the process of building this beast.
And, *do* rename all ships named after politicians. We have plenty of *actual* heroes who deserve head of the line privileges.
My experience is in smaller design/build stuff, but I can tell you there is always the risk of cost overruns and schedule slips if your design supervision is not on it like a hawk...and can reign in the sales & marketing or senior management who always want to add just one more feature, or tweak the form, or....whatever.
I've had both success and failure, and I can tell you it largely depends on the organization. In one case once we had it down, projects rolled out with minimal issues. In another it was always FUBAR.
You can go back to the civil war. When the Monitor had success in Hampton Roads, the decision was taken to use it as the design basis for several classes of warship. The Chief Constructor and Chief Engineer were considered too conservative, so a program office was created to manage the program and report directly the Asst SecNav. The program office had two major problems: first, the shipbuilding industry had experience in ship and boat building, but little to none in steam propulsion so had to contract out the propulsion plants resulting in integration issues. But the bigger problem is the that the program office contract design left most details unresolved. The shipbuilders didn't have the capability to produce detail designs; that was left to the program office and there weren't enough draftsmen available to actually produce the detailed drawings when required by the shipbuilders.
The predictable result is that the river monitors were a total failure. Even the Passaics, which were nominally serial production on the original Monitor had issues.
But maybe a better case history to study would be the transition from triple-expansion reciprocating engines to turbines/turbo-electric/geared turbines and accompanying move from coal to oil. It seems like all navies were willing to experiment much more than today.
What!? Good-Idea Cutoff? Sal, have a heart, shipmate! How will those poor staff weenies ever pump up a fitrep if they can't claim to have contributed a good idea?
This program needs a Wayne Meyer stand down until the points that CDR Sal raises are sorted. Otherwise the camel with his nose back to his rump already inside the tent will make it all "too late." Time for SECNAV to take a stand.
The term is “concurrency” and it was a HUGE issue on F-35. If you hear the acquisition guys use that word, interrupt them and make them explain ALL the perceived risk. Then double that because there are always things they never thought of and the warfighter is typically at the top of that list.
If you hear the acquisition guys use that word, fire them and ban them from any further government work as an example. That has been the bane of every Navy program for years.
My experience is that no matter how experienced your designers are, no matter how much research is done, there's always going to be a way that wasn't thought of for the user to break it.
It just never works in real life like it did in the lab.
Agreed. Concurrency in small doses with a deep and functional risk management plan can be fine. But it doesn’t scale up well in high-complexity scenarios. And while you may get a product faster, you’re gonna pay for it down the line.
And last note and I’ll shut up. DoD programs are all inherently far too complex to do concurrency effectively. You can’t get there from here-there’s just too much uncertainty, from annual budgets, to technical optimism (deliberate understatement. Too often the plan is “And here, a miracle occurs”), poor management both in the government and industry, divided chains of command, requirements creep, &tc.
The reasons AGAINST concurrency are many, the arguments for are illusory (“it’s faster” is NEVER the case). Count me in the “AGAINST IT” camp.
CDR, I love your bottom line, which is let's get to "cutting steel." Until we reach that point all of this "planning" is nothing more than the Navy's version of a bull session among poly sci majors who pretend they understand the real world. Could just as easily replace them with grad students in gender studies.
Sal, Given your incredible foresight and knowledge, have you ever been asked to present your thoughts and ideas before any congressional or Naval planning group, or committee?
MAGA2024 brings up a good point. There is an incredible wealth of knowledge in this chat room. I am constantly learning things about other parts of the Navy. Why hasn’t Hegseth et al tapped into this knowledge?
If Ernest Evans does not deserve another ship named for him, nobody does. And speaking of nobodies, the Navy actually named three Burkes for political hacks Danzig, Mullen, and Mabus? WTF.
I like Sal's suggestion of Ernest E. Evans as a ship name. He was a Native American and, unlike most of the DEI-based ship names, a true naval hero. If you don't know his story, google it - Taffy 3, Battle off Samar, Leyte Gulf.
A little beaver I might add, us DESRON weenies hold that dear!
Name second ship for Richard Best.
Yes, we should actually name a carrier after Dick Best, Richard Bong was also an amazing aviator in the pacific
"the destroyer Yukikaze (under Lieutenant Commander Masamichi Terauchi) closed to point blank range, not for an attack, but to salute both Johnston and the crew for their bravery." wiki
That deserves a Fullbore Friday.
I've read every book on that series of battles. An officer on another destroyer who was the last to see Evans alive said he saw him bloodied, but still on the fantail (the bridge had been shot away) shouting down orders to aux steering. The ship disappeared into the smoke and was never seen again. He told the crew at commissioning that he intended to sail into harm's way and meant it.
While we're talking ship names, can we call the cruisers Ticos? It's a sad Navy when there's no Saratoga, Bunker Hill or Lexington in the fleet. Instead, we name our carriers after more worthless than warm spit politicians like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The Chimp and the Slick Willy. It makes me ill, just like Truman killing the USS United States, once as president and once thanks to Clinton renaming the USS United States after the most anti-Navy president of the 20th century.
I’d rather go back to the tradition of naming carriers after famous ships or famous battles. No more third-rate politicians.
Endorsed
Time for another USS Evans! The historic book Tin Can Sailors captures why many of us like CDR Evans, you did not even know of his ethnic background until digging deeper..he was a hero first! Great Naval Officer.
My brief time in a shipyard had a lot of contact with the repair of the USS Cole. New (for the time) DDG, she still had a lot of empty space in the below decks. That was the only thing that saved her from total destruction, as the blast (somewhat) funneled through the empty spaces and out through various funnels and trunks. That space is full in today's new DDGs. The Ticonderoga class CG used the Spruance hull with an extension. The Tico's filled the empty space AND the extension. Very valid premise to overbuild size (and power generation capability!) to allow for upgrades during service life. However, due to constant timeline shifts to the right and design revisits, it seems we fill the empty space before we ever put a rivet in metal. Which highlights the total inability of our procurement system to actually...procure anything. Epic (not just everyday) failure that is unrecognizably due to procurement process and personnel failure that results in accountability is seemingly the only thing that is going to change / improve this situation. Just hope it isn't calamitous for the nation.
I thoroughly thank you for continuing to flog this horse, however I fully believe the best part of beating your head against the wall is when you stop. I think it’s time to jack up the TACAN and drive another ship underneath this failure known as NAVSEA. If a single person attached to the Tiffany design philosophy of the terrible 20’s is still employed there EVERYTHING is doomed to abject failure,flawed thinking and dreaming has rotted the entire thinking process, which is what isn’t working - no one is held responsible for PowerPoint fairy dust, everything is late and risks are never retired - full stop.
My days on sub optimal Knox classs frigates, pre-VLS sprucans, and launcher less fig7s told me that at least the platform was sound, even if the weapons, sensors and living conditions weren’t. (I’ll leave the ABs out of the discussion as I’m still hurt Sonar Control was relegated to the bilges is a major flaw, but I’m overly obsessed with ASW -natch).
To further your point on “morphing” hulls from Sprus to Ticos, look what that platform morphed into - (DD963, Kidd class, CG47/52) 2 guns, a box launcher and a sea chicken all the way to 2 guns, twin arm bandits, VLS, ABL tomahawks, one helo, 2 helos, chain guns, you name it, we strapped anything and everything onto that hull and it pretty much worked - sound thinking got us here, not what came out of the “process”.
Keep giving em hell, I’m just too jaded to even think about the nonsense anymore.
If you are using "NAVSEA" as a synonym for ASN RDA and the PEO/PM structure, then I agree. And don't forget the mind virus in OPNAV that confuses the power of the purse with technical competence.
I will go so far as to say that uniformed personnal with the power of the purse understand how many of what kind of ships we need for operations today. Tomorrow is a new land, and we need some serious no-holds-barred war games conducted by people who don't mind throwing away the rules of the game in order to get to what might be just over the horizon. We also need to acknolwege that those same people have done a completely piss-poor job of picking the program managers for our acquisition programs. I give the perpetual cost and schedule overruns as my evidence.
More than sixty years ago, when Admiral Rickover was engaged in bureaucratic battle with SECDEF Robert McNamara and his Whiz Kids, he clearly recognized that the acquisition reforms McNamara was pushing would eventually replace warrior-technologist managers with paralysis-by-analysis box checker managers. Over time, that is just what actually happened, for the most part.
Not only replaced them, but replaced them with people who don't even know how to do the analysis. See my rant about risk management. The *right* way to run things would be to do realistic knock-someone-in-the-head war games based on an actual national strategy, and *then* decide what we need to build, followed by hard-headed acquisition management - refusing to take any wooden nickles. Back in the early 80's I was assigned duty at David Taylor Model Basin. In that time period, the Naval War College held war games in which senior civilian technology managers could get an idea of how their "things" would impact the real world. Although in uniform, I was allowed to attend since I was at the lab. My assignment, as an LCDR EDO was to be the surface warfare commander for my task group defending against a Soviet combined naval and air force attack, set in the mid-1990's. No experience in doing that and totally out of my league, but here we go. Using satellite imagery, we obtained an actionable position on Kirov and company. I talked with the aviator who dealt with pushing the forces around and rolling the dice behind the curtain, and using comething that had never been done before, sank the Kirov and damaged several of her escorts. Effectively, on Day 2, we had won the war, but Red Fleet was re-constituted behind the scenes to continue the game. The point of the story is not to brag (too much) but to show that allowing for the unexpected can sometimes produce useful results.
We need to embrace the "unexpected" of the next USN CG will be named something like "Long March of Victory". About the same time you were at DT I was at NavSea as flag aide. We'd have the DARPA boys come in once a month with some new ideas. One I clearly remember was an ASM that would cross the engagement horizon and drop a small torpedo with a warhead of 75-100 lbs, a bubble jet nose cone, 30-40 ft run depth with acoustic homing. They figured that every ship in anyone's navy was gonna have more than 2 "CIWS" so the chances of an ASM getting thru was decreasing. So, change the dynamics - some threats above the sea, some below it. Never saw it come to fruition but the discussion was interesting when the technology was not the short pole in the tent.
It is amazing what out of the box thinking can do to screw up the "Known Facts."
Yeah, sometimes it gets you killed, but sometimes doing the odd thing that nobody thinks of wins the day.
But that's why we wargame. And that's why it's good to open them up to people who aren't the normal decision makers and trigger pullers. I'd bet there were a lot of useful tactics developed back in the day by random people playing Harpoon.
I saw on Steam that Microprose is getting ready to re-release Harpoon 97 for modern platforms. I hope someone somewhere retained that work of love that was the WW2 database.
Yes, synonymous, same as “mafia” too…
There are three tribes in play - NAVSEA, RDA/PEO/PM, and OPNAV. Not surprising that the two dominant ones turned on NAVSEA and starved the source of design expertise required to make Naval shipbuilding succeed. LCS and Frigate are Exhibits A & B. I'm not in the NAVSEA booster club, but if fixing NAVSEA is on the critical path back to shipbuilding success, then count me in.
“Low-trust is well-deserved.”…you got that right, shipmate!
Sal is right...again. As someone involved in the construction of large complex industrial buildings and systems, trouble happens (huge $$ overruns, schedule slippage, technical failures) when engineering and design is incomplete before construction begins. So, for Heaven's sake, save some $$ and aggravation and test and prove the IPS first, then complete the ship's engineering design and quash all but benign changes during the process of building this beast.
And, *do* rename all ships named after politicians. We have plenty of *actual* heroes who deserve head of the line privileges.
My experience is in smaller design/build stuff, but I can tell you there is always the risk of cost overruns and schedule slips if your design supervision is not on it like a hawk...and can reign in the sales & marketing or senior management who always want to add just one more feature, or tweak the form, or....whatever.
I've had both success and failure, and I can tell you it largely depends on the organization. In one case once we had it down, projects rolled out with minimal issues. In another it was always FUBAR.
You can go back to the civil war. When the Monitor had success in Hampton Roads, the decision was taken to use it as the design basis for several classes of warship. The Chief Constructor and Chief Engineer were considered too conservative, so a program office was created to manage the program and report directly the Asst SecNav. The program office had two major problems: first, the shipbuilding industry had experience in ship and boat building, but little to none in steam propulsion so had to contract out the propulsion plants resulting in integration issues. But the bigger problem is the that the program office contract design left most details unresolved. The shipbuilders didn't have the capability to produce detail designs; that was left to the program office and there weren't enough draftsmen available to actually produce the detailed drawings when required by the shipbuilders.
The predictable result is that the river monitors were a total failure. Even the Passaics, which were nominally serial production on the original Monitor had issues.
But maybe a better case history to study would be the transition from triple-expansion reciprocating engines to turbines/turbo-electric/geared turbines and accompanying move from coal to oil. It seems like all navies were willing to experiment much more than today.
What!? Good-Idea Cutoff? Sal, have a heart, shipmate! How will those poor staff weenies ever pump up a fitrep if they can't claim to have contributed a good idea?
Just don't let the "good Idea Fairy" anywhere near the program.
Here we go again? We'll see. Interesting info over at USNI about this program and personnel changes related to shipbuilding.
This program needs a Wayne Meyer stand down until the points that CDR Sal raises are sorted. Otherwise the camel with his nose back to his rump already inside the tent will make it all "too late." Time for SECNAV to take a stand.
Please tell me someone can get a bug in SECDEF's ear to cut the Mabus and Mullen names from the que.
The hopium is thick.
The dopium is ALWAYS thick.
Dopium always washes away hopium.
The term is “concurrency” and it was a HUGE issue on F-35. If you hear the acquisition guys use that word, interrupt them and make them explain ALL the perceived risk. Then double that because there are always things they never thought of and the warfighter is typically at the top of that list.
If you hear the acquisition guys use that word, fire them and ban them from any further government work as an example. That has been the bane of every Navy program for years.
Concurrency isn't a bad word. As a project manager I've used it with small tiger teams with certain limitations.
My experience is that no matter how experienced your designers are, no matter how much research is done, there's always going to be a way that wasn't thought of for the user to break it.
It just never works in real life like it did in the lab.
Agreed. Concurrency in small doses with a deep and functional risk management plan can be fine. But it doesn’t scale up well in high-complexity scenarios. And while you may get a product faster, you’re gonna pay for it down the line.
Nothing is free.
And last note and I’ll shut up. DoD programs are all inherently far too complex to do concurrency effectively. You can’t get there from here-there’s just too much uncertainty, from annual budgets, to technical optimism (deliberate understatement. Too often the plan is “And here, a miracle occurs”), poor management both in the government and industry, divided chains of command, requirements creep, &tc.
The reasons AGAINST concurrency are many, the arguments for are illusory (“it’s faster” is NEVER the case). Count me in the “AGAINST IT” camp.
No Flight II until after the second Flight I comes back from its second deployment. No skipping the shock trials either.
Well said. As always.
CDR, I love your bottom line, which is let's get to "cutting steel." Until we reach that point all of this "planning" is nothing more than the Navy's version of a bull session among poly sci majors who pretend they understand the real world. Could just as easily replace them with grad students in gender studies.
"... if You're Smart Enough ..." I see a weak link in your recommendation.
Sal, Given your incredible foresight and knowledge, have you ever been asked to present your thoughts and ideas before any congressional or Naval planning group, or committee?
Or the SECDEF or SECNAV?
I can neither confirm nor deny anything. Gentlemen keep private conversations private.
MAGA2024 brings up a good point. There is an incredible wealth of knowledge in this chat room. I am constantly learning things about other parts of the Navy. Why hasn’t Hegseth et al tapped into this knowledge?
That is always sage advice but, not always followed.
If Ernest Evans does not deserve another ship named for him, nobody does. And speaking of nobodies, the Navy actually named three Burkes for political hacks Danzig, Mullen, and Mabus? WTF.