What Broke Shipbuilding Predictions in 2014?

and it has only gotten worse

When it comes to the FY 2025 Navy budget, it is simply too big to comment on everything. So, what’s a good approach? Highlighting items in detail.

The best place to go for detail delivered in a calm neutral tone? The Congressional Budget Office. They don’t have to be snarky…they just give us the numbers we need to do that for ourselves.

It is fun. Let’s have some fun.

When looking over a presentation by CBO’s Dr. Eric Labs last week on Shipbuilding, the Congress, and the Shipbuilding Industrial Base, a few things made my head tilt, or broke above the ambient noise that I’d like to point out to you for review.

Those who follow me on X are familiar with a long-running thread on a whole bunch of socio-cultural metrics that show over and over from all aspects of our nation that something ‘broke’ around 2012/13. I always ask, ‘Why?”

The most common answer is ‘the smart phone.’ OK, maybe—but I think that when it comes to shipbuilding estimates and the annual exercise of predicting how many ships we have when, from Labs’s presentation, Slide-3 just plain jumped out and slapped me in the head:

As you know, I caution everyone to ignore ‘the out years.’ Anything more than five years in the future is just silly. This is an old story—just check out my post at the OG Blog in 2006 quoting…Eric Labs.

OK, we know that, but look at 2014. That is the last year anything held up even in the short term. As a matter of fact, before and after, the 2013 and 2014 plans seems to be the most realistic over time, even through to 2035. Every time since then, Navy has over-promised and under-delivered to an almost comical degree. How can anyone trust anything you say when you have such a long track record of toxic happy-talk? Just look at that mess of weaponized untruth.

I am less interested in the view of the fleet in 2029 provided by 2023 (Alternative 1) and 2023 (Alternative 2) as I am in somebody telling me why all the other 30-year shipbuilding plans were so incredibly and foolishly optimistic.

Until we clearly define why that happened and then explain how we are not doing the same thing now, this is just fooling yourself for your own entertainment.

This isn’t what serious organizations with healthy cultures doing serious things do. The consistency is what is so damning to institutional reputation.

What I can safely assume here is that we will not be north of 300 ships anytime soon..and if the this century’s track record of ‘out year’ predictions hold, we won’t be after then either.

Of course, that can change with a combination if money and what we buy and how we buy it. What won’t fix it are magic beans and Tomorrow Land promises. Note the footnote to the above slide.

This is correct. There are a lot of people who overplay the potential of unmanned systems fixing everything, and as such hide their own failures today with the magic beans of tomorrow. They read too much science fiction and talk to too few engineers. Do not let anyone throw numbers at you that tell you that this or that unmanned system will displace water in number in the 2030s that will save all of from the hangover from the Age of Transformation. If we are lucky, we will have roughly the same number of ships at the end of the decade that we have now, under 320. Don’t forget that the very credentialed and very well paid Smartest People in the Room™ with the best parking spaces in DC looked you and your elected representatives in the eye just a few years ago and promised that we would be at 320 or more.

Let’s move along the slide-deck.

Here and on Midrats, for years we have discussed the threadbare condition of our submarine industrial and repair base. Starved for decades, we cannot properly maintain the submarines we have right now, and the stress of the Columbia SSBN build straining the entire system. We all know where we are in 2024. How do we meet the peak of this graph?

I’m open minded. I’m all ears. Show me the reports and stories I’ve missed. Please, comments are open.

More evidence of the results of the crisis of competence. Remember The Sal Rule…only pay attention to the first five years.

Note the delta between ‘norms’ and what we actually are able to do is growing, not closing. As with most things: what are we doing to change how we manage programs, how we build out ships, how we expand capacity, how we grow our skilled workforce in our shipbuilding industry?

Serious as a heart attack, what are we changing? We really are not expecting better results with the same people, processes, and institutions that have failed us the last three decades, are we? Really? That’s our plan?

Let’s finish up on a positive note. We know we will most likely be under 300 ships until the crack of doom. We also know, especially with the decommissioning of the SSGN from 2026-28, that our VLS inventory is going to significantly shrink and not grow. Those VLS cells are what we use to both project power and defend our fleet. What can be done?

All three of these options have been on the Salamander Approved list for years. This is an easy All-of-the-Above question.

It appears that the retrofit option—the one with the shortest timeline—may already be in work. As reported at the end of last week by Geoff Ziezulewicz:

In a significant step toward finally giving the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) fleet greater offensive capabilities, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced Wednesday that “many” LCS ships will receive the modular Mk 70 Payload Delivery System, allowing the beleaguered LCS to field the type of substantial firepower that has long eluded them.

The Mk 70 is a containerized launch system based on the Mk 41 Vertical Launching System (VLS) in use on many American and foreign warships. It can accommodate a variety of missiles, including the versatile Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) and the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM).

This is related to the Army’s Typhon system we covered over the summer. We have LCS for awhile, we’ve got to find some useful way to get them in the fight. I’ll take it.