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> And the point of the ship is .. what? If you are a US taxpayer you should weep. Same as any prototype or sufficiently advanced aircraft like the F-117, pave
by crdb 10y ago
> And the point of the ship is .. what? If you are a US taxpayer you should weep.
Same as any prototype or sufficiently advanced aircraft like the F-117, pave the way for future generations like the Beast of Kandahar, demonstrate or invalidate a series of bold ideas.
In particular, the number of innovations crammed in the Zumwalt makes it relatively cost-effective from a "things we had to try" point of view: new low RCS hull, new composite bridge, new launch system (VLS), new centralised control systems (TSCE). All of this stuff can now be iterated upon and integrated in newer ships. That the new gun system has "failed" in practice is itself a lesson probably worth the dollars spent on it.
Not to mention: look up the name of its first captain [1].
There's few institutions that can do R&D with a multi-decade horizon and the armed forces are one of them. Is there waste in the process, sure, the ghost of Admiral Rickover must be turning in his grave, but it is not totally wasted, unlike a certain aircraft that is somehow manufactured in a full 45 states (have the remaining ones managed to get a piece yet, I haven't followed).
[1] http://www.public.navy.mil/surfor/ddg1000/Pages/bio1.aspx http://www.public.navy.mil/surfor/ddg1000/Pages/bio1.aspx - shame the USS Enterprise was inactivated in 2012.
- jamescway 10y agoCAPTAIN James T. Kirk......just kidding James A. Kirk.
- rl3 10y ago>Same as any prototype or sufficiently advanced aircraft like the F-117, pave the way for future generations ... The F-117 had an incredibly useful operational life, though. I can't imagine these three destroyers having anywhere near the relative effectiveness that the F-117 program brought to the table for its time.
- crdb 10y agoObviously, the comparison is not perfect. For starters, Have Blue was done by Kelly Johnson's Lockheed (although technically under Ben Rich, himself no slouch); Rickover's nuclear navy was similarly led and with similar low budgets, met deadlines and exceeded expectations. So ROI for projects from that era will be much higher (and let's not mention the actual Kelly Johnson projects like the A-12...). That being said I'm not sure the F-117 was that useful in actual combat, certainly it was used because it was there but did it change anything? It flew a large number of sorties in the first Gulf War but some say these could have been flown cheaper and just as well with conventional aircraft [1], and bombed a few targets in Yugoslavia (so far away from the kind of conflict it was designed for that TV crews were filming it taking off, live) until Zoltan Dani worked out how to shoot one down using equipment worth a fraction as much thus pointing out its edge was gone in less than two decades after launch. As far as I understand it, Have Blue's main value was to pave the way for stealth research, its operational value being what happened to it in combat rather than the targets it took out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Operational_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Opera... "On the first night they failed to hit 40% of the air-defense targets they were assigned, including the Air Defense Operations Center in Baghdad, and 8 such targets remained functional out of 10 that could be assessed. [...] many other aircraft hit targets in the downtown area, with minimal casualties when they attacked at night like the F-117"
- eevilspock 10y agoInteresting point. We are quick to judge such apparent failures and waste on the part of the government, but what percentage of Silicon Valley startups succeed? What percentage of scientific experiments advance our knowledge?
- dmichulke 10y agoThe difference is that VCs give their money to the start-up voluntarily. Tax payers are forced.
- Anchor 10y agoBy the people they chose to make those decisions.
- na85 10y agoA big part of the US political discourse for the last 5 or so years has been that the voters no longer have any say. The machinery of so-called "Big Defence" trundles on forever, immune from the politicians who might want to cut spending due to the attack ads they would surely face about "jeopardizing national security".
- Anchor 10y agoThe national security argument only flies if the people buy it. That's the root cause; fix the people. I deliberately and provocatively overly simplify the issue here, but I claim that every problem we face can be solved by better education that simply requires people to ask "Is that really the way you say it is?" in every single step of every single fact they ever face.
- na85 10y ago>The national security argument only flies if the people buy it. That's the root cause; fix the people. You can't. People that are receptive to the politics of fear are that way because of brain structure; they simply are unable to respond to reasoned arguments.
- Animats 10y agoThe Zumwalt was designed for railguns. The third ship of the class will have at least one railgun. That fires dumb projectiles at some insane velocity. Maybe the earlier ships will get an upgrade.