ON AN INCREDIBLE NAVAL PROGRAM

ALL ABOARD
This New York Times article on how the Navy planned and implemented a multi-year, multi-billion dollar contract for a whole new class of warships, has to be read to be believed.  I had to read it a couple of times to let the series of decisions made by the various parties, to fully sink in.  Here is the context of the program:

"A project heralded as the dawning of an innovative, low-cost era in Navy shipbuilding has turned into a case study of how not to build a combat ship. The bill for the ship, being built by Lockheed Martin, has soared to $531 million, more than double the original, and by some calculations could be $100 million more.
With an alternate General Dynamics prototype similarly struggling at an Alabama shipyard, the Navy last year temporarily suspended the entire program.

The program’s tribulations speak to what military experts say are profound shortcomings in the Pentagon’s acquisitions system. Even as spending on new projects has risen to its highest point since the Reagan years, being over budget and behind schedule have become the norm: a recent Government Accountability Office audit found that 95 projects — warships, helicopters and satellites — were delayed 21 months on average and cost 26 percent more than initially projected, a bill of $295 billion.

In a narrow sense, the troubled birth of the coastal ships was rooted in the Navy’s misbegotten faith in a feat of maritime alchemy: building a hardened warship by adapting the design of a high-speed commercial ferry. As Representative Gene Taylor, the Mississippi Democrat who leads the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Expeditionary Forces, put it, “Thinking these ships could be built to commercial specs was a dumb move.”

Each ship was initially budgeted to cost less than quarter of a billion dollar, since the idea was to build military versions "off-the-shelf" commercial ferry designs.

You're not going to believe how many things went wrong as this program was implemented, and what remains yet to be fixed.  Some examples:

"In their haste to get the ships into the water, the Navy and contractors redesigned and built them at the same time — akin to building an office tower while reworking the blueprints."

"With that in mind, Lockheed and General Dynamics proposed different high-speed ferry models as the template, and in 2004, the Navy selected the two companies to compete for the business. The model for the Freedom was a ferry built in Italy. An Australian ferry was the model for the General Dynamics prototype, named Independence.  Lockheed had virtually no shipbuilding experience."

"...the Navy agreed to reimburse the companies for cost overruns rather than setting a fixed price, leaving little incentive to hold down costs."
"Normally, the Marinette yard prefers to get modules 85 percent to 90 percent completed before they are transported to the ship erection building. In the case of the Freedom, with its repeated design alterations, better than half of the 39 sections fell well short of that goal.  The risks seemed obvious, yet neither the Navy nor the shipyard was willing to reconsider the timetable"
"Yet if the project was troubled, the Navy’s oversight at Marinette was less than robust. Because of staffing reductions, the Navy office responsible for supervising shipbuilding initially dispatched no one full time to Wisconsin. Even after a team arrived, it failed to appreciate the severity of problems.

“We had very junior people on site,” Admiral Sullivan said."

The sad thing is that the way this program was conceived and implemented seems more the rule than the exception with most Pentagon programs across the services.  Head-shaking stuff indeed.

Comments

[Alex Tolley]

Yet another sad example of the military-industrial complex working for itself, not the country. Contracts are handed out to the major players, massive cost overruns occur, the tax payer loses (again).

Even more worrying is that from a military perspective, I don't even know why we are building these things. Surface naval vessels are an obsolete weapon, as the British experience in the Falklands demonstrated. Large carriers, are just platforms for aircraft, but even these behemoths are vulnerable to stealthy attack by large numbers of small vessels. How much did the carrier Ronald Reagan cost?

The US seems to have gone for highly expensive weapons systems, many of which are of operationally dubious status, serving only as corporate welfare for companies serving the military. It;s about time we put a stop to much of this nonsense.