They're going to f*ck up the Constellations, aren't they?
The Potomac Flotilla is proof whatifalthist has a point. "Consider a time-line where terrorists nuke Washington DC, and America enters a time of unprecedented freedom and prosperity".
I have yet to hear them discuss their plans for the electric motors. The other big one lying in wait is the Congressionally mandated must do SM-6 and Tomahawk requirement. Among others.
Give the ship to Ukraine in lieu of pallets of $100 bills. They can make it the flagship of their fleet or sell it to Somalia to be a Legacy Capability mothership to their seagoing revenue collectors. Big question now is what class ship will replace the LCS as a "get well" or "punishment" tour? Did a 2 year tour on CVA-19 myself. Was told "needs of the Navy" but I think I know better.
Sell to the PRC? I am half way convinced the guys/gals/undecided who have been running the Navy almost 2 decades and responsible for the LCS, Zumwalt, Ford and DE&I for work for the PRC.
On his blogger page the Cdr. had a gibberish sentence at the top which often drew a chuckle. Here's another buzzword salad.
"To maintain our strategic advantage, particularly under fiscal constraints, it is important for the Navy to carefully review our force structure regularly and divest of legacy capabilities that no longer bring sufficient lethality to maximize our effectiveness in deterring and defeating potential adversaries.”
To maintain our strategic advantage, while promoting diversity, particularly under fiscal constraints, it is important for the Navy to carefully review our force structure regularly and divest of legacy capabilities that no longer bring sufficient lethality to maximize our effectiveness in deterring and defeating potential adversaries.”
"it is important for the Navy to carefully review our force structure regularly and divest of legacy capabilities that no longer bring sufficient lethality to maximize our effectiveness in deterring and defeating potential adversaries.”
Ah, umm, when did it EVER "bring sufficient lethality"????
It is one thing to dump stinkin scupper trout on the US Sailor. We all know deep in our soul that there is a flush ahead of us no matter rank or rate that will dump the stink on us and greatly affect our career. But to dump on an entire COMMUNITY? WTF?
And obviously Capt Reiher is a complete and utter moron only capable of parroting the comments given to him. He still probably thinks the MCM module is available fully tested, funded and ready "next month". What exactly does a CO of the LCS Training Facility do - teach the crews how to sit pierside, or "deploy" staying under 15 knots? Sold his soul to the devil.
Ideally? An LCS Training Facility should be teaching crewmembers how to operate and maintain ship systems. The manning toothpaste tube squeezes from the bottom up...the first positions you get rid of are the junior OJT posts. Which means a more robust shoreside training establishment, dedicated training ships, or both.
Anyone know if Gregory Vistica is still in business? We're long overdue for a sequel to "Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy".
Ironically, yesterday I was in the Big Apple attending a special event - the 80th commissioning ceremony for USS Intrepid (CV-11), a warship built in less than 2 years, in commissioned service for nearly 30, and is still with us over eight decades later. SECHAV & entourage were in attendance, and during his obligatory speech he touted the recent commissioning of Cooperstown LCS-23 in NYC. At the rate the Freedom-class are tapping out, I suspect Intrepid will long outlast the last of the LCS.
Any navy is capable of designing a turd of warship, but the navy that fails to ADMIT to & LEARN from such failure is truly in dire straits. How did we stray so far off course?
"The alarms were going off well in to the mid-00s - and anyone who raised those alarms were crushed, marginalized, or dismissed as uninformed cranks." Modus operandi for the imperial city of D.C. I'm sure we can all say natural immunity. At least for the time being.
The Army Corps maintains a 9 foot barge channel in the Missouri River. Considering the Navy is going to end up practically giving these things away to anyone, I bet the mayor could take up another collection and get her towed to the river front during the spring high water levels.
Wouldn't it have been nice to see a statement like "Sorry, it turned out the Sioux City was, in fact, a Little Crappy Ship. We didn't mean to offend the good people of Sioux City, and we hoped it would work out, but it didn't. The persons responsible have been sacked."
Apparently the PEO-USC was the guy in charge of unmanned and small combatants , e.g LCS. previously he managed the LCS mission modules 2014-2016. He did such a great job with his two LCS tours that he was promoted and is now PEO- CARRIERS
MY BAD: he had 3 LCS assignments. I missed his tour as Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program manager’s representative at a shipyard building quality in from the keel up.
The Drill SGT has identified one of those who was in a position to have known how bad the LCS dumpster fire really was/is. Perhaps this group, under Sal's leadership, could identify all of the people that have benefited after heading major acquisition failures. Just a thought.
One of my last assignments as a naval architect "in support of" LCS Mission Modules had us searching high and low for additional roles for the two ship classes.The biggest problem with that task was that we were, in effect, trying to put lipstick on a pig. So much of their original design space had gone into the effort of trying to make 3,100 and 3,400 ton ships with screamingly small KG margins act like WW2 PT boats. Very few meaningful improvements could be made, even if one were to set aside the propulsion and cathodic protection woes. In an assignment in NAVSEA Prelim Design 20 years BEFORE LCS 1 was laid down, I proved that 40 kt + Pacific AOR range + useful payload = frigate, not a PT boat, in a conventional hull A Surface Effect Ship design might work, but PLEASE let's not go down that acquisition risk rabbit hole. Current DoD PM's are incapable of recognizing and managing the risks they currently have.
That really is how things get done now. In good cases it brings about justice. Unfortunately it also often results in what basically amounts to terrorism. Let's roll the dice....
Alabama seemed to get theirs built on time and in budget. That's why they got to build more and have fewer left to go. In Wisconsin they have to upgrade the yard and get the 4 Saudi ships built before we see a frigate.
I knew there was a big problem a decade ago when we started undermanning the ship and the sailors chosen were senior cherry-picked high performers. I remember the articles bragging that sailors were driving the ship one day, flipping burgers the next day, and acting as ship's doc the next. Anyone with any time haze gray and underway time knows that there are only so many superstar sailors and that real quick these undermanned ships were going to get the remaining 95% of fleet sailors who aren't going to excel in a rotating daily assignment process. Well the inevitable happened and we are where we are now. Sad!
Part of the hype about the OHP FFG's was minimum manning. Spent 4 years on one and loved it. Most sailors don't mind a challenge. But minimum manning never realistically took into account sweep/swab/wax/buff, painting, watchstanding, the need for sleep, overloading techs and mechs with NEC's. When my ship went NRF, minimum manning became a real problem. How did 1st Division cope with just 8-10 people? Horribly. They played flag football on weekends in order to get LIMDU and a transfer from a blown out knee. The only LIMDU injury proved deliberate was one sailor who couldn't stomach a cheap shot to the knee and had his wife run over his foot with the family car. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he blamed the broken foot on flag football. First was "Minimum Manning", a deliberate decision by bean counters. Now we have "Undermanning", caused by making a job in the military so unattractive to many young people. Next? Contract it out? Hire from the manpower pool on curb in front of Home Depot?
I left NR LCSRON2 last year because the latest reorg meant the men writing my eval were in another state, and I was tired of the command from 2016-2022. The crews were almost always thankful for an extra body, but were not very happy with their systems when they worked. Blue/Gold crew was not well implemented compared to a SSBN, but sailors in the pipeline would get TAD'd to ships in port. An illustration of this is from DETROIT when I worked on her in 2022. When the crew I was with left her previously, they had painted the 57mm gun barrel with red and white stripes, with a blue band at the breach end. The other crew had painted it back to grey.
If you ask experienced sailors what they want to do, it's work in their rating productively. I did not see much of that in LCS, and many sailors were just there to be in Mayport. When the big work for the day is checking cutouts for the gun, or moving machine gun ammo up to the O2 level, they aren't being appropriately led.
The thing that bugs me, though, is that there's no way to run an organization as vast as the U.S. military without a gargantuan bureaucracy. It's not like we can privatize it, and we can't really make it smaller (unless you go for the Ron Paul "tiny militia plus stripped-down Coast Guard only" plan and abandon the rest of the world.) You can try to reduce the bureaucracy, but a certain level of it is unavoidable.
Focusing on "efficiency" only gets you so far, and indeed is a big part of the problem.
I don't know what the answer is, but I hope we can figure it out pretty quick.
I'm not necessarily buying that the military needs a gargantuan bureaucracy. The DOD civilian staffing in 1950 was 753k and in FY 21 it was 814k. In 1950 the Army had 600k in 10 divisions and in FY 21 it was 495k. The Navy had 634 active ships in 1950. There are probably some efficiencies to be had. After all, we have all of these computers to reduce paperwork now!
LOL! I once asked my Master Chief (I was a lowly MM2 at the time) if he was happy with the advent of computes to automate some of his work load. His response was awesomely classic. He said heck no! It just expanded his admin work load and required even more time that before.
Urban and transportation planners have long understood a concept called “induced demand”. No matter how many lanes you add to a congested roadway, you’ll never eliminate traffic because more drivers will be drawn to the newly expanded road. Sadly, induced demand in bureaucracies seems to be less well understood, with “leaders” convinced that they are only ever just one more level of reporting or visibility down into their domains away from nirvana.
A potentially viable concept turned into an absurd program run from inception in a silly place by tailors busy making a fortune selling new clothes to the emperor.......
.........and their brothers are still selling the Zumwalt line of clothing.
They're going to f*ck up the Constellations, aren't they?
The Potomac Flotilla is proof whatifalthist has a point. "Consider a time-line where terrorists nuke Washington DC, and America enters a time of unprecedented freedom and prosperity".
Would building new OHP FFGs be much worse?
I have yet to hear them discuss their plans for the electric motors. The other big one lying in wait is the Congressionally mandated must do SM-6 and Tomahawk requirement. Among others.
they already have-check the gun specs.
57mm Bofors, rather than a 5/54", right?
Yup.
The Italians version uses the excellent Oto Breda 5”64. https://youtu.be/-unZOJEZjC4
The Italians are a sensible bunch.
FMS? WTF are we going to do, sell the LCS's to the PRC??
Romania recently "bought" 21 AAVs, maybe they can "buy" an LCS.
And ruin any hope of ever having good will between our two countries?
They did just officially end their potential Gowind deal with France.
Give the ship to Ukraine in lieu of pallets of $100 bills. They can make it the flagship of their fleet or sell it to Somalia to be a Legacy Capability mothership to their seagoing revenue collectors. Big question now is what class ship will replace the LCS as a "get well" or "punishment" tour? Did a 2 year tour on CVA-19 myself. Was told "needs of the Navy" but I think I know better.
Do they need a new reef?
we should be so lucky
Probably gift them to Ukraine.
Sell to the PRC? I am half way convinced the guys/gals/undecided who have been running the Navy almost 2 decades and responsible for the LCS, Zumwalt, Ford and DE&I for work for the PRC.
The Navy will decommision as many of these things as Congress will permit.
but they are still building them
Job-works program.
On his blogger page the Cdr. had a gibberish sentence at the top which often drew a chuckle. Here's another buzzword salad.
"To maintain our strategic advantage, particularly under fiscal constraints, it is important for the Navy to carefully review our force structure regularly and divest of legacy capabilities that no longer bring sufficient lethality to maximize our effectiveness in deterring and defeating potential adversaries.”
Ugg...
Needs some diversity-inclusion-equity gobbledegook to really put the cherry on top
To maintain our strategic advantage, while promoting diversity, particularly under fiscal constraints, it is important for the Navy to carefully review our force structure regularly and divest of legacy capabilities that no longer bring sufficient lethality to maximize our effectiveness in deterring and defeating potential adversaries.”
Jesus what a mouthful of nothing!
I know I learned it in the Marines LOL
Sounds like something the VP would say!
"it is important for the Navy to carefully review our force structure regularly and divest of legacy capabilities that no longer bring sufficient lethality to maximize our effectiveness in deterring and defeating potential adversaries.”
Ah, umm, when did it EVER "bring sufficient lethality"????
It is one thing to dump stinkin scupper trout on the US Sailor. We all know deep in our soul that there is a flush ahead of us no matter rank or rate that will dump the stink on us and greatly affect our career. But to dump on an entire COMMUNITY? WTF?
And obviously Capt Reiher is a complete and utter moron only capable of parroting the comments given to him. He still probably thinks the MCM module is available fully tested, funded and ready "next month". What exactly does a CO of the LCS Training Facility do - teach the crews how to sit pierside, or "deploy" staying under 15 knots? Sold his soul to the devil.
Well said!
Ideally? An LCS Training Facility should be teaching crewmembers how to operate and maintain ship systems. The manning toothpaste tube squeezes from the bottom up...the first positions you get rid of are the junior OJT posts. Which means a more robust shoreside training establishment, dedicated training ships, or both.
Anyone know if Gregory Vistica is still in business? We're long overdue for a sequel to "Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy".
Ironically, yesterday I was in the Big Apple attending a special event - the 80th commissioning ceremony for USS Intrepid (CV-11), a warship built in less than 2 years, in commissioned service for nearly 30, and is still with us over eight decades later. SECHAV & entourage were in attendance, and during his obligatory speech he touted the recent commissioning of Cooperstown LCS-23 in NYC. At the rate the Freedom-class are tapping out, I suspect Intrepid will long outlast the last of the LCS.
Any navy is capable of designing a turd of warship, but the navy that fails to ADMIT to & LEARN from such failure is truly in dire straits. How did we stray so far off course?
We were supporting a spec war detachment and one of the operators gave me sage advice. I have posted this many times. But this exemplifies the navy:
",When you start believing your own bullshit, it's gonna end bad."
CS continues to provide great coverage of LCS... which someone can easily copy and use as a template for the USCG’s OPC acquisition.
Embarrassingly the USCG is walking the same dog, 20 years later.
The U.S. Woke Guard is only going to get worse. The senior CAPT and RDML/RADM ranks are overstuffed with careerist ticket punchers and D.I.E. scolds.
"The alarms were going off well in to the mid-00s - and anyone who raised those alarms were crushed, marginalized, or dismissed as uninformed cranks." Modus operandi for the imperial city of D.C. I'm sure we can all say natural immunity. At least for the time being.
The Army Corps maintains a 9 foot barge channel in the Missouri River. Considering the Navy is going to end up practically giving these things away to anyone, I bet the mayor could take up another collection and get her towed to the river front during the spring high water levels.
Don't count on Congress to fix this. They control very little of it. And that won't change soon.
Don't sell them short on their ability to add to the damage.
Wouldn't it have been nice to see a statement like "Sorry, it turned out the Sioux City was, in fact, a Little Crappy Ship. We didn't mean to offend the good people of Sioux City, and we hoped it would work out, but it didn't. The persons responsible have been sacked."
Apparently the PEO-USC was the guy in charge of unmanned and small combatants , e.g LCS. previously he managed the LCS mission modules 2014-2016. He did such a great job with his two LCS tours that he was promoted and is now PEO- CARRIERS
RADM MOTON
MY BAD: he had 3 LCS assignments. I missed his tour as Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program manager’s representative at a shipyard building quality in from the keel up.
The Drill SGT has identified one of those who was in a position to have known how bad the LCS dumpster fire really was/is. Perhaps this group, under Sal's leadership, could identify all of the people that have benefited after heading major acquisition failures. Just a thought.
One of my last assignments as a naval architect "in support of" LCS Mission Modules had us searching high and low for additional roles for the two ship classes.The biggest problem with that task was that we were, in effect, trying to put lipstick on a pig. So much of their original design space had gone into the effort of trying to make 3,100 and 3,400 ton ships with screamingly small KG margins act like WW2 PT boats. Very few meaningful improvements could be made, even if one were to set aside the propulsion and cathodic protection woes. In an assignment in NAVSEA Prelim Design 20 years BEFORE LCS 1 was laid down, I proved that 40 kt + Pacific AOR range + useful payload = frigate, not a PT boat, in a conventional hull A Surface Effect Ship design might work, but PLEASE let's not go down that acquisition risk rabbit hole. Current DoD PM's are incapable of recognizing and managing the risks they currently have.
That really is how things get done now. In good cases it brings about justice. Unfortunately it also often results in what basically amounts to terrorism. Let's roll the dice....
Can you expand on this? I’d love to understand your point, but afraid I’m not following.
The inability of the program manager to fend off desirements that come at a prohibitive cost has crippled more than one program.
"We apologize again for the faults in the Little Crappy Ship. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked."
So let me understand some of the Naval idiocy here:
- commissioned in Nov 2018
- first use, Sep of 2020 as an expensive anti-drug cutter
- decommissioned 3 years later after 4 deployments of how many weeks at a time at a cost of $500M ?
AND WE ARE STILL BUILDING 7 MORE OF THESE F----ERS, TO FLUSH MORE BORROWED MONEY DOWN THE TOILET?
AND YOU WANT MORE MONEY FOR NEW TOYS?
Where are the new ships being built? Is this some sort of shipwright jobs program in order to keep reelecting some senator?
4 in Wisconsin, 3 in Alabama
Alabama seemed to get theirs built on time and in budget. That's why they got to build more and have fewer left to go. In Wisconsin they have to upgrade the yard and get the 4 Saudi ships built before we see a frigate.
Sorry, the toilets in the mission modules don’t work.
I knew there was a big problem a decade ago when we started undermanning the ship and the sailors chosen were senior cherry-picked high performers. I remember the articles bragging that sailors were driving the ship one day, flipping burgers the next day, and acting as ship's doc the next. Anyone with any time haze gray and underway time knows that there are only so many superstar sailors and that real quick these undermanned ships were going to get the remaining 95% of fleet sailors who aren't going to excel in a rotating daily assignment process. Well the inevitable happened and we are where we are now. Sad!
Part of the hype about the OHP FFG's was minimum manning. Spent 4 years on one and loved it. Most sailors don't mind a challenge. But minimum manning never realistically took into account sweep/swab/wax/buff, painting, watchstanding, the need for sleep, overloading techs and mechs with NEC's. When my ship went NRF, minimum manning became a real problem. How did 1st Division cope with just 8-10 people? Horribly. They played flag football on weekends in order to get LIMDU and a transfer from a blown out knee. The only LIMDU injury proved deliberate was one sailor who couldn't stomach a cheap shot to the knee and had his wife run over his foot with the family car. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he blamed the broken foot on flag football. First was "Minimum Manning", a deliberate decision by bean counters. Now we have "Undermanning", caused by making a job in the military so unattractive to many young people. Next? Contract it out? Hire from the manpower pool on curb in front of Home Depot?
I left NR LCSRON2 last year because the latest reorg meant the men writing my eval were in another state, and I was tired of the command from 2016-2022. The crews were almost always thankful for an extra body, but were not very happy with their systems when they worked. Blue/Gold crew was not well implemented compared to a SSBN, but sailors in the pipeline would get TAD'd to ships in port. An illustration of this is from DETROIT when I worked on her in 2022. When the crew I was with left her previously, they had painted the 57mm gun barrel with red and white stripes, with a blue band at the breach end. The other crew had painted it back to grey.
If you ask experienced sailors what they want to do, it's work in their rating productively. I did not see much of that in LCS, and many sailors were just there to be in Mayport. When the big work for the day is checking cutouts for the gun, or moving machine gun ammo up to the O2 level, they aren't being appropriately led.
Keep doxxing yourself, what could go wrong?
Washington is where leadership goes to die.
The only thing stupider than gargantuan government bureaucracies is anarchy.
Bureaucrats can be as much of a threat to a military force as an enemy’s forces.
Nah, sometimes you get someone competent who puts an end to anarchy.
The thing that bugs me, though, is that there's no way to run an organization as vast as the U.S. military without a gargantuan bureaucracy. It's not like we can privatize it, and we can't really make it smaller (unless you go for the Ron Paul "tiny militia plus stripped-down Coast Guard only" plan and abandon the rest of the world.) You can try to reduce the bureaucracy, but a certain level of it is unavoidable.
Focusing on "efficiency" only gets you so far, and indeed is a big part of the problem.
I don't know what the answer is, but I hope we can figure it out pretty quick.
I'm not necessarily buying that the military needs a gargantuan bureaucracy. The DOD civilian staffing in 1950 was 753k and in FY 21 it was 814k. In 1950 the Army had 600k in 10 divisions and in FY 21 it was 495k. The Navy had 634 active ships in 1950. There are probably some efficiencies to be had. After all, we have all of these computers to reduce paperwork now!
We need those extra 61,000 political officers to ensure our ideology remains pure and our diversity, equity, and inclusion quotas are met
LOL! I once asked my Master Chief (I was a lowly MM2 at the time) if he was happy with the advent of computes to automate some of his work load. His response was awesomely classic. He said heck no! It just expanded his admin work load and required even more time that before.
Urban and transportation planners have long understood a concept called “induced demand”. No matter how many lanes you add to a congested roadway, you’ll never eliminate traffic because more drivers will be drawn to the newly expanded road. Sadly, induced demand in bureaucracies seems to be less well understood, with “leaders” convinced that they are only ever just one more level of reporting or visibility down into their domains away from nirvana.
A potentially viable concept turned into an absurd program run from inception in a silly place by tailors busy making a fortune selling new clothes to the emperor.......
.........and their brothers are still selling the Zumwalt line of clothing.