Here's the thing that bugs me: I have major doubts about the future of manned combat aircraft because of lasers. I have serious reservations about the future of satellites. I have doubts about drones because, if autonomous, I don't trust them and, if not, the link between operator and drone strikes me as very vulnerable.
Sure, planes can stand off and keep low but that, too, is reducing their effectiveness. So, maybe our carriers, though dominant now, don't have much of a future. Oh, not today and not tomorrow, but some number of tomorrows away.
Given that, I think maybe we need to be looking at both real armor and long range heavy guns again. I could be shown different.
Small drones are highly vulnerable to a well designed EW (jamming+RDF&arty)+ SHORAD. For example, build a 25mm prox fuze, you can make really small radios in a semiconductor fab along with the mechanical parts as MEMS. Plus AA lasers will also toast moderate+ sized drones, cruise missiles, even some long range rockets and missiles.
There is some speculation in Romania that we will buy two of these retired LCS, to use in the role of corvettes/OPVs. You figure these would work better in the Black Sea with Russia on the other side, than they would for the US against China?
Fincantieri has two shipyards in Romania, so maybe that's not such a big issue since they worked on the LCS? But the maintenance costs would be a bigger issue for us, I think.
Both classes of alCS have too many design flaws for maintenance to keep up with. Berg your government to buy something else - unless they are looking for a new class of target to practice with.
There is no solution for, not just the Navy, but for DoD as a whole, but to shut down the services a piece at a time, permit no one who prospered under the current system even through the door of DoD 2.0 (or the War Department and Department of the Navy),and rebuild almost from scratch.
There was a time when all the stupidity, waste and outright fraud was a manageable problem. That time has passed and there will be a reckoning somewhere down the road. Whether it is a gradual process or a cataclysmic event is TBD.
Depending on how long they were in before being dismissed from service, there may or may not be retirement pay depending on how many dismissals for cause you can manage.
By keeping them in Gitmo, there definitely will be expenses in keeping them a) reasonably healthy ('m flexible on "reasonable", with "Auschwitz survivor on 1Feb1945" as a bare minimum), and b) secured.
Absolutely sell or even give them away to an allied/partner navy. Perhaps to the Philippines for use in the South China Sea, or Mexico and Columbia to interdict drug smugglers.
I think Andrew is right. Give them away with the caveat "As-Is", "No Returns". Then you are rid of them like a gangrenous big toe. Alternatively these LCS's could be towed pierside to NYC, Boston, Philly, Baltimore and even up the Potomac to be operated by the local government as homeless and immigrant shelters, floating jails or for future 2024 COVID variant treatment centers.
Well, they could also be used to take the entire House Armed Services committee water skiing (all at the same time) and then have a nice cookout on the flight deck.
I can't escape this horrible feeling that somehow, the Saudi LCS variant is going to work relatively well, unlike the dumpster fires we've been dealing with.
Well they are still functional to a degree, just not suitable for the pivot to peer level combat in the western Pacific. So they could provide service to a minor navy not likely to have to dice it up with the big boys. Hence my comment that they are well suited to a policing function inshore.
Salute to CDR Salamander for his excellent efforts on bring these incidents to light.
Department of Defense material & equipment acquisition process has stopped being about providing the best product to the warfighter and has turned into providing the best process to whet the beaks along the way. Not only regarding the LCS program. There are numerous examples of the military boondoggles.
This has created a bloated expenditure system that helps civilian defense company executives and politicians acquire a vacation home on the lake, but the dysfunctional practice is to the extreme detriment to our military members and national defense overall.
It stopped at exactly the same time that the United States stopped building US ships in US Naval Shipyards. Until we return to the government the ability to build government ships in government yards, this will happen over, and over again. Navy sailors built ships that worked.
Government is not a business. You can't "run government like a business," because it ain't a business. A Navy is not a corporation. Privatization is killing our Navy.
Lengthy article but very informative as to how the biggest weakness of the F-35 may be her logistical stance. Towards the bottom of the story is a graphic showing the Global Supply Chain. 1450 domestic suppliers/80 suppliers across 11 countries. Not looking good.
In my study of DoD cost over runs, the one factor that kept coming up was the Program Managers’ inability to judge and manage technical risk. They think that have been taught how to do it because the people at the front of the classroom keeps insisting that they, the teachers, know what they are talking about. An objective look at the data unequivocally proves otherwise. And no one asks “Why?” But we still see promotions in that group. Until the Navy makes cost risk reduction a substantial element in a PM’s fitrep, we will continue to see failure.
Plenty of retired O-5's are getting those vacation homes by the lake as well. Easy to do when you slide into a GS-14+ or manager role at a defense contractor. It's not just "the politicians" and the "Generals/Admirals." Same goes for OIF/OEF.
Any officer that advocated for them should be recalled and court martialed. Just find all the civilians that pushed it and frog march them up 13 steps along with the court martialed officers.
"The entire manning CONOPS was founded on the abuse of Sailors - “How long can we work these people non-stop until they burn out?” - and unworkable PPT-thick understanding of how you can have ships only manned by experienced Sailors. "
That was certainly the peacetime CONOPS. I suspect the wartime CONOPS was that the overworked, sleep deprived crew was one-and-done expendable. At least they were honest in calling it a seaframe. The complement, as orginally proposed or currently modified, is likely insufficient to fight the ship and preventing a mission kill from becoming a hulk on the sea floor. Three hundred was the complement for a similar tonnage Sumner, Gearing, or Fletcher. Losing 30 crew on an EP-3 to the enemy is the cost of doing business in combat. They are airframes after all. Lose three hundred crew an people will notice - but you can call it a seaframe.
The OHP FFG's were minimum manned. Served 4 years on one. First 3 years were wonderful. The last year we were an NRF ship. Lost significant manpower but were promised TAR replacements, and we were infrequently supplemented with SELRES (good people). Lots of personnel burn out, deliberate football injuries on weekends leading to LIMDU and transfers, one suicide, increase in NJP's. Retention was bad. Very difficult to keep up with watch standing, equipment maintenance, cleaning and painting. Never saw a TAR replacement in that final year. Long pipeline to train TAR PN2's and YN1's to be techs and mechs. Speaking from experience as a force converted EW1 from RD1, you are not at the top of your game tech-wise when you first report aboard. It wasn't pretty, that final year. Must have been hell on those LCS's from the git-go.
The FFG-7 program called for an undermanned complement out of the gates. While it slowly crept up over time (https://www.gao.gov/assets/plrd-81-34.pdf), it ultimately required a significant amount of support from IMAs to keep them as available even with a bolstered roster. I was fortunate to get a SIMA Mayport reservist billet in the early 90's and the "peace dividend". I had been penciled out of my CVN-72 billet in '93 and, as memory recalls, they gave you 3 months to fit into a new billet or they IRRd you. Anyway, Mayport had OHPs and there was always something to go help fix on them.
It seems easy to diagnose as I head back to my 50th at Navy tomorrow. The world has radically changed but we continue to use the same Power Point logic of the 1990s. Our senior officers are trained early not to stray too far from the herd. This leads to one disaster after another and mountains of "lessons learned" but never corrected.
Most likely, probably not. Maybe if the initial cost was right (i.e. free), and we helped as part of a foreign aid package. Based on this GAO report https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-22-105387.pdf the annual cost to run one seaframe is roughly $70 million per year. Ouch!
does anybody believe that $7b opportunity cost? If so, it's only labor, and they wrote down the hull values.
What is missing for me in the decommissioning story is the part about how we are going to make a reef out of one, and zip tie every member of the LCS PM/PEO team to the anchor chain.
I prefer the idea of finding said miscreants and put them in irons, then weld the irons to the anchor chain. The only idea I like better would to but them in chains like the Brits used to hang Captain Kid's corpse for the seafaring public to see. Hang them in front of the 5-sided wind tunnel and rearrange traffic so that everyone coming in has to drive by them.
Some years ago we good CDR Sal said something to the effect we have them we need to use them. We’re retiring PC’s in Bahrain. Despite all the issues posted here for years I think it’s a terrible decision to not at least put freedom variants in Bahrain - visibility matters. What about anti piracy patrols in the 5th Fleet Somali area of operations?
Gotta use them in low threat areas and move more DDG’s to the Pacific Fleet.
I went by Bremerton in early August and it was jarring to see LCS 2 and 4 right on the road where Kitty Hawk and Independence were when I visited my son there in 2016-2018
I think we would be better taking a chance and building MUSV hulls and manning them. Faster, longer range, greater capacity, greater displacement, potentially better seakeeping. Then we have a community of people at sea very familiar with what an MUSV can and can't do.
"...well-meaning people assumed that the Navy that won the Cold War had enough institutional knowledge and inertia of excellence to properly develop the fleet of the future."
Oops, indeed, Commander. Inertia applies to bodies at rest and those in straight line motion. In the case of the LCS it was a well-fed cash cow creating a cow patty. It was met with a resistive outside force (call it: a b_tch-slap of grounded reality) and thence became a hot steaming pile.
So wasn’t the original sales job on this conceptual ppt project “Big ships are too valuable to push into The Littorals, and that’s the only war the Navy will ever see again because (wishes), so we need less expensive hulls, which means smaller, which means all the toys won’t fit, which means swappable toys modules, and lots of hulls means lots of bodies, which we don’t and won’t have, so minimal manning, and blue/gold...” and so on, with everything rooting back to “push the fleet into The Littorals otherwise the Navy is useless” as the underlying premise.
But now we are facing a light blue water naval adversary with aspirations to dark blue.
Doesn’t that mean the folks who are supposed to be figuring out the next war are the real root cause of this fiasco?
I have to chuckle. Why say “Good bye” when we never really said “Hello”? Evidently, we did not enunciate clearly and they mistook “Hell no!” for “Hello.”
Hopefully they don't f#,k up the Constellations with improvements. But that probably won't happen.
They already have: 57mm gun - useful for what?
drug interventions or salutes
Anti-tank work all the way through, perhaps, 1944?
ouch
Both the Rooskis and Germans were up to at least 76mm by then.
Yeah but a six pounder could still penetrate most armor.
A 2" shell could penetrate the current crop of ships. Nothing has been armored been built in a long time.
Modern concept of naval armor is 1.5 cm of aluminum. 57 mm should be more than adequate. It might even be overkill.
Here's the thing that bugs me: I have major doubts about the future of manned combat aircraft because of lasers. I have serious reservations about the future of satellites. I have doubts about drones because, if autonomous, I don't trust them and, if not, the link between operator and drone strikes me as very vulnerable.
Sure, planes can stand off and keep low but that, too, is reducing their effectiveness. So, maybe our carriers, though dominant now, don't have much of a future. Oh, not today and not tomorrow, but some number of tomorrows away.
Given that, I think maybe we need to be looking at both real armor and long range heavy guns again. I could be shown different.
Small drones are highly vulnerable to a well designed EW (jamming+RDF&arty)+ SHORAD. For example, build a 25mm prox fuze, you can make really small radios in a semiconductor fab along with the mechanical parts as MEMS. Plus AA lasers will also toast moderate+ sized drones, cruise missiles, even some long range rockets and missiles.
Without Madfires it should be some variant of 76/62, but the reality is by ditching a 5" we get the 16 extra VLS cells.
Maritime Militia and missile defense... but a 76.2 Super Rapid would have been better.
There is some speculation in Romania that we will buy two of these retired LCS, to use in the role of corvettes/OPVs. You figure these would work better in the Black Sea with Russia on the other side, than they would for the US against China?
When they break in half the SAR op is a lot easier in the Black Sea then the Pacific.
Absolutely brutal.
Too much truth in it, though.
Romanian contractor force to perform all maintenance on ship. Probably not.
Fincantieri has two shipyards in Romania, so maybe that's not such a big issue since they worked on the LCS? But the maintenance costs would be a bigger issue for us, I think.
I don't think LCS would be worth the trouble for the Romanian Navy.
Both classes of alCS have too many design flaws for maintenance to keep up with. Berg your government to buy something else - unless they are looking for a new class of target to practice with.
There is no solution for, not just the Navy, but for DoD as a whole, but to shut down the services a piece at a time, permit no one who prospered under the current system even through the door of DoD 2.0 (or the War Department and Department of the Navy),and rebuild almost from scratch.
There was a time when all the stupidity, waste and outright fraud was a manageable problem. That time has passed and there will be a reckoning somewhere down the road. Whether it is a gradual process or a cataclysmic event is TBD.
Whether we survive is TBD.
Indeed!
Why can't we give the people that thrived under DOD 1.0 a life sentence in GITMO?
_I_ certainly can't interpose an objection...
I can.
Depending on how long they were in before being dismissed from service, there may or may not be retirement pay depending on how many dismissals for cause you can manage.
By keeping them in Gitmo, there definitely will be expenses in keeping them a) reasonably healthy ('m flexible on "reasonable", with "Auschwitz survivor on 1Feb1945" as a bare minimum), and b) secured.
Absolutely sell or even give them away to an allied/partner navy. Perhaps to the Philippines for use in the South China Sea, or Mexico and Columbia to interdict drug smugglers.
If they are too expensive for us to operate and maintain, would anybody really want them?
I think Andrew is right. Give them away with the caveat "As-Is", "No Returns". Then you are rid of them like a gangrenous big toe. Alternatively these LCS's could be towed pierside to NYC, Boston, Philly, Baltimore and even up the Potomac to be operated by the local government as homeless and immigrant shelters, floating jails or for future 2024 COVID variant treatment centers.
I think their highest and best use is fish habitat.
Or maybe make the Academy use them as intended with minimal crewing for their summer cruises. They can go do drug interdiction with a USCG det.
But you mean to have them converted to oared galleys first, right?
No, it's not enlisted duty. ;)
Well, they could also be used to take the entire House Armed Services committee water skiing (all at the same time) and then have a nice cookout on the flight deck.
Saudi Arabia
I can't escape this horrible feeling that somehow, the Saudi LCS variant is going to work relatively well, unlike the dumpster fires we've been dealing with.
They will care less about range and seem to have increased manning. Guessing it will end up a bit too heavy though and even slower than advertised.
They won't escape the giant leach that will be the ever present, always required, contractor tail though.
And their Operational environment can (somewhat) tolerate the 80% pierside schedule.
Why would we want people, that are supposedly our allies, to be loaded down with something we ourselves rejected?
Well they are still functional to a degree, just not suitable for the pivot to peer level combat in the western Pacific. So they could provide service to a minor navy not likely to have to dice it up with the big boys. Hence my comment that they are well suited to a policing function inshore.
My understanding is some of them have been maintenance nightmare.
That is an understatement! Rube Goldberg propulsion train to begin with.
Salute to CDR Salamander for his excellent efforts on bring these incidents to light.
Department of Defense material & equipment acquisition process has stopped being about providing the best product to the warfighter and has turned into providing the best process to whet the beaks along the way. Not only regarding the LCS program. There are numerous examples of the military boondoggles.
This has created a bloated expenditure system that helps civilian defense company executives and politicians acquire a vacation home on the lake, but the dysfunctional practice is to the extreme detriment to our military members and national defense overall.
civilian defense company executives ...
and DOD leadership (but I repeat myself)
... and politicians
It stopped at exactly the same time that the United States stopped building US ships in US Naval Shipyards. Until we return to the government the ability to build government ships in government yards, this will happen over, and over again. Navy sailors built ships that worked.
Government is not a business. You can't "run government like a business," because it ain't a business. A Navy is not a corporation. Privatization is killing our Navy.
Death by a thousand Lean Six Sigma cuts.
We keep cutting, but we just can't make a profit.
Lengthy article but very informative as to how the biggest weakness of the F-35 may be her logistical stance. Towards the bottom of the story is a graphic showing the Global Supply Chain. 1450 domestic suppliers/80 suppliers across 11 countries. Not looking good.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/how-the-f-35s-lack-of-spare-parts-became-as-big-a-threat-as-enemy-missiles
In my study of DoD cost over runs, the one factor that kept coming up was the Program Managers’ inability to judge and manage technical risk. They think that have been taught how to do it because the people at the front of the classroom keeps insisting that they, the teachers, know what they are talking about. An objective look at the data unequivocally proves otherwise. And no one asks “Why?” But we still see promotions in that group. Until the Navy makes cost risk reduction a substantial element in a PM’s fitrep, we will continue to see failure.
Plenty of retired O-5's are getting those vacation homes by the lake as well. Easy to do when you slide into a GS-14+ or manager role at a defense contractor. It's not just "the politicians" and the "Generals/Admirals." Same goes for OIF/OEF.
Will anyone be held responsible for all the waste?
Not likely, as they are all retired by now.
Any officer that advocated for them should be recalled and court martialed. Just find all the civilians that pushed it and frog march them up 13 steps along with the court martialed officers.
QM, it would not be so bad if this was the first time, but WTH we keep repeating the same mistakes all
.. the...time!
The country has been degraded over the last 50 years. Sadly, such things are to be expected from a degraded country.
"The entire manning CONOPS was founded on the abuse of Sailors - “How long can we work these people non-stop until they burn out?” - and unworkable PPT-thick understanding of how you can have ships only manned by experienced Sailors. "
That was certainly the peacetime CONOPS. I suspect the wartime CONOPS was that the overworked, sleep deprived crew was one-and-done expendable. At least they were honest in calling it a seaframe. The complement, as orginally proposed or currently modified, is likely insufficient to fight the ship and preventing a mission kill from becoming a hulk on the sea floor. Three hundred was the complement for a similar tonnage Sumner, Gearing, or Fletcher. Losing 30 crew on an EP-3 to the enemy is the cost of doing business in combat. They are airframes after all. Lose three hundred crew an people will notice - but you can call it a seaframe.
The OHP FFG's were minimum manned. Served 4 years on one. First 3 years were wonderful. The last year we were an NRF ship. Lost significant manpower but were promised TAR replacements, and we were infrequently supplemented with SELRES (good people). Lots of personnel burn out, deliberate football injuries on weekends leading to LIMDU and transfers, one suicide, increase in NJP's. Retention was bad. Very difficult to keep up with watch standing, equipment maintenance, cleaning and painting. Never saw a TAR replacement in that final year. Long pipeline to train TAR PN2's and YN1's to be techs and mechs. Speaking from experience as a force converted EW1 from RD1, you are not at the top of your game tech-wise when you first report aboard. It wasn't pretty, that final year. Must have been hell on those LCS's from the git-go.
The FFG-7 program called for an undermanned complement out of the gates. While it slowly crept up over time (https://www.gao.gov/assets/plrd-81-34.pdf), it ultimately required a significant amount of support from IMAs to keep them as available even with a bolstered roster. I was fortunate to get a SIMA Mayport reservist billet in the early 90's and the "peace dividend". I had been penciled out of my CVN-72 billet in '93 and, as memory recalls, they gave you 3 months to fit into a new billet or they IRRd you. Anyway, Mayport had OHPs and there was always something to go help fix on them.
Did you ever make it to CVN-72? I was there in the early 90s
Never been aboard her. The Reserve Detachment was at NAS Point Mugu. On active duty I was on the Vinson, CVN-70. '87-91.
Got it. Engineering Lincoln, 90-93. Left about a week before the debacle in Somalia.
It seems easy to diagnose as I head back to my 50th at Navy tomorrow. The world has radically changed but we continue to use the same Power Point logic of the 1990s. Our senior officers are trained early not to stray too far from the herd. This leads to one disaster after another and mountains of "lessons learned" but never corrected.
"lessons unlearned". Seems to be some consistency there.
Most likely, probably not. Maybe if the initial cost was right (i.e. free), and we helped as part of a foreign aid package. Based on this GAO report https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-22-105387.pdf the annual cost to run one seaframe is roughly $70 million per year. Ouch!
does anybody believe that $7b opportunity cost? If so, it's only labor, and they wrote down the hull values.
What is missing for me in the decommissioning story is the part about how we are going to make a reef out of one, and zip tie every member of the LCS PM/PEO team to the anchor chain.
Pour encourager les autres
I prefer the idea of finding said miscreants and put them in irons, then weld the irons to the anchor chain. The only idea I like better would to but them in chains like the Brits used to hang Captain Kid's corpse for the seafaring public to see. Hang them in front of the 5-sided wind tunnel and rearrange traffic so that everyone coming in has to drive by them.
Some years ago we good CDR Sal said something to the effect we have them we need to use them. We’re retiring PC’s in Bahrain. Despite all the issues posted here for years I think it’s a terrible decision to not at least put freedom variants in Bahrain - visibility matters. What about anti piracy patrols in the 5th Fleet Somali area of operations?
Gotta use them in low threat areas and move more DDG’s to the Pacific Fleet.
I went by Bremerton in early August and it was jarring to see LCS 2 and 4 right on the road where Kitty Hawk and Independence were when I visited my son there in 2016-2018
If you've seen the manning and maintenance brief...
And I haven’t
Zero + Zero = Zero
Fast Response Cutter hulls painted in Navy rather than Coast Guard colors. And keep producing them in a missile boat version.
I think we would be better taking a chance and building MUSV hulls and manning them. Faster, longer range, greater capacity, greater displacement, potentially better seakeeping. Then we have a community of people at sea very familiar with what an MUSV can and can't do.
"...well-meaning people assumed that the Navy that won the Cold War had enough institutional knowledge and inertia of excellence to properly develop the fleet of the future."
Oops, indeed, Commander. Inertia applies to bodies at rest and those in straight line motion. In the case of the LCS it was a well-fed cash cow creating a cow patty. It was met with a resistive outside force (call it: a b_tch-slap of grounded reality) and thence became a hot steaming pile.
Good reads for all ...
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-238sp
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL32665/357
10 years too late.
So wasn’t the original sales job on this conceptual ppt project “Big ships are too valuable to push into The Littorals, and that’s the only war the Navy will ever see again because (wishes), so we need less expensive hulls, which means smaller, which means all the toys won’t fit, which means swappable toys modules, and lots of hulls means lots of bodies, which we don’t and won’t have, so minimal manning, and blue/gold...” and so on, with everything rooting back to “push the fleet into The Littorals otherwise the Navy is useless” as the underlying premise.
But now we are facing a light blue water naval adversary with aspirations to dark blue.
Doesn’t that mean the folks who are supposed to be figuring out the next war are the real root cause of this fiasco?
I have to chuckle. Why say “Good bye” when we never really said “Hello”? Evidently, we did not enunciate clearly and they mistook “Hell no!” for “Hello.”
For the hard of hearing, they do sound a lot alike.
The bucket of shit theory of Management.
https://web.mnstate.edu/alm/humor/ThePlan.htm
My former son-in-law gave me a copy of that while he was stationed at Fort Stewart 20 years ago. It's still just as funny.