6 ms·

Seems these problems comes down to selecting a contractor with no experience in building these type of systems (whether steam or electrical).

ceejayoz 9y ago
Definitely sounds that way. I wonder if there'll be any significant consequences for General Atomics having these 5-10x cost overruns?
- clock_tower 9y ago
  The worst that can happen to General Atomics is that they don't get any new contracts after they're done building 3 (3!) fleet carriers. But building 3 carriers will give them enough expertise that they'll be able to bid on future shipbuilding contracts, and will probably land a few -- the Pentagon doesn't like letting contractors go out of business, and they'll recognize that General Atomics' giant Ford is at least half their own fault. It wasn't General Atomics that put out a contract for a fleet carrier that used every innovation at once... Besides, I'm sure General Atomics had the sense to build factories in rustbucket towns and subcontract out to at least 26 states, preferably about half red and half blue; once your procurement system turns into a big enough jobs program, no one will dare to touch it. Welcome to the cozy, comfortable world of defense contracting, dedicated to equipping the US to fight another world war, but only if the enemy is at least as cronyist as we are. The good news is that our only likely enemies for a world war actually are as cronyist as we are, or significantly worse -- but if any new Prussia ever rises in the world, we are _so_ dead.
  - hengheng 9y ago
    I mean at least you guys don't have a welfare system.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacques_chester 9y ago
    I agree that the procurement system is dysfunctional, because of dynamics unrelated to suitability, but there are (at least) another two things in play: 1. Nobody really knows what you'll need until the fighting starts. 2. Once the fighting starts, the necessities of wartime production begin to dominate the necessities of peacetime politics. But frankly, I hope never to find out whether the USA's carriers are necessary, sufficient or useful in a roughly-equal bunfight. (edited for wording)
    - nradov 9y ago
      Any potential future naval conflict will be over one way or another long before any new ships are built. The construction lead time on those vessels is years.
      - jacques_chester 9y ago
        Granted, but as WW2 demonstrated, there are industrial learning curves and economies of scale that can take you from months per ship to ships per month. Not a perfect analogy in the details, but I think reasonable in the dynamics.
        nradov 9y ago
        No this is impossible. Ships today are an order of magnitude more complex than in WW2. And there is very little spare industrial capacity capable of doing the specialized work necessary.
        jacques_chester 9y ago
        You're assuming that when total industrial wars begin, everyone decides to fight with only and exactly what they started with. That capacity never increases, that there are no learning curves. From our sample set of n=1, this isn't realistic. Production would rise, by hook or by crook. If it ran long enough, you'd see carriers coming off the docks every month or two, with their battle groups completely filled. Again, I hope we never find out.
gozur88 9y ago
The military is always in a bind with contractor selection. If the don't choose the lowest bidder they get hauled up in front of a Senate committee full of people grandstanding for the next election accusing them of taking care of cronies. Particularly at the rate we build ships these days, if you only chose companies that have done it before you're not going to have many bids to choose from.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  The military is always in a bind with contractor selection. If the don't choose the lowest bidder they get hauled up in front of a Senate committee full of people grandstanding for the next election accusing them of taking care of cronies. Isn't there some famous economics paper somewhere that shows strategies like median bid produce much better outcomes?
  - teddyh 9y ago
    Do you have a reference to this? I’m particularly curious if they address the secondary effects this will have on bids, and if the strategy then remains viable.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Could you do something like adjust the bids by the average percentage overrun the contractor has on prior projects?
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > The military is always in a bind with contractor selection. If the don't choose the lowest bidder they get hauled up in front of a Senate committee full of people grandstanding for the next election accusing them of taking care of cronies. No, they (or, rather, contractors) solved that problem by assuring that all contracts are divied up between as many states and Congressional districts as possible, so that anyone in Congress attacking any procurement is attacking jobs in their own district, and cost controls are less important because the overruns are also producing work, often also widely distributed. Of course, this also produces the problem (for the military, not contractors) that any attempt to impose accountability on contractors has political problems that are similarly widespread.
jlarocco 9y ago
I partly agree, but it doesn't sound like the Navy did their homework to check that the systems would even work. From the article: > It was also supposed to increase the lifespan of aircraft by putting less stress on their airframes. Unfortunately, recent tests of land-based prototypes showed that the system actually overstressed F-18 airframes during launch. How do they just now discover that? Nobody thought to build a prototype on land first before agreeing to put it on a carrier? It sounds like some defense contractors sold a bunch of neat ideas to the Navy and decided they'd work the kinks out as they came up. The other problem is that there just aren't many companies that build aircraft carriers, and it's a very small market. According to Wikipedia there are only 37 aircraft carriers in the whole world, so nobody's going to do the R&D if they're not getting funded to do it.
- taneq 9y ago
  > Nobody thought to build a prototype on land first before agreeing to put it on a carrier? Sure, but that put their bid 10% above the bid of the guys who just ran FEA on it and said "she'll be right."
- simplicio 9y ago
  > Nobody thought to build a prototype on land first before agreeing to put it on a carrier? The article does talk about "land testing" so I assume they have a mock-up somewhere in the desert to test this stuff in a place where failure doesn't send the pilot/plane into the ocean. I think the problem is that they were still testing these technologies at the same time that they were building the ship, so now there's only so far they can go in modifying them from their original assumptions while still staying withing the power/space/layout specifications the ship was designed around.
  - cottsak 9y ago
    Yes I believe this is correct. When they do get it working on land (http://www.henselphelps.com/projects/electro-magnetic-aircraft-launch-system-emals-land-based-test-site-facility http://www.henselphelps.com/projects/electro-magnetic-aircra...) it will very likely deviate so far from the original assumptions incorporated into the design of the carrier that huge retrofits will need to be made to the carrier to apply the changes. Either they will do that, or simply cut corners and fail to report it accurately. This will fly under the radar until some tragedy. But the root cause of that will likely be covered up too.
dubyah 9y ago
A big problem is the concurrency of development and production. I'm unaware of programs that have gone right, but the more substantial boondoggles have had that issue.

ceejayoz 9y ago

Definitely sounds that way. I wonder if there'll be any significant consequences for General Atomics having these 5-10x cost overruns?

clock_tower 9y ago
The worst that can happen to General Atomics is that they don't get any new contracts after they're done building 3 (3!) fleet carriers. But building 3 carriers will give them enough expertise that they'll be able to bid on future shipbuilding contracts, and will probably land a few -- the Pentagon doesn't like letting contractors go out of business, and they'll recognize that General Atomics' giant Ford is at least half their own fault. It wasn't General Atomics that put out a contract for a fleet carrier that used every innovation at once... Besides, I'm sure General Atomics had the sense to build factories in rustbucket towns and subcontract out to at least 26 states, preferably about half red and half blue; once your procurement system turns into a big enough jobs program, no one will dare to touch it. Welcome to the cozy, comfortable world of defense contracting, dedicated to equipping the US to fight another world war, but only if the enemy is at least as cronyist as we are. The good news is that our only likely enemies for a world war actually are as cronyist as we are, or significantly worse -- but if any new Prussia ever rises in the world, we are _so_ dead.
- hengheng 9y ago
  I mean at least you guys don't have a welfare system.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jacques_chester 9y ago
  I agree that the procurement system is dysfunctional, because of dynamics unrelated to suitability, but there are (at least) another two things in play: 1. Nobody really knows what you'll need until the fighting starts. 2. Once the fighting starts, the necessities of wartime production begin to dominate the necessities of peacetime politics. But frankly, I hope never to find out whether the USA's carriers are necessary, sufficient or useful in a roughly-equal bunfight. (edited for wording)
  - nradov 9y ago
    Any potential future naval conflict will be over one way or another long before any new ships are built. The construction lead time on those vessels is years.
    - jacques_chester 9y ago
      Granted, but as WW2 demonstrated, there are industrial learning curves and economies of scale that can take you from months per ship to ships per month. Not a perfect analogy in the details, but I think reasonable in the dynamics.
      - nradov 9y ago
        No this is impossible. Ships today are an order of magnitude more complex than in WW2. And there is very little spare industrial capacity capable of doing the specialized work necessary.
        jacques_chester 9y ago
        You're assuming that when total industrial wars begin, everyone decides to fight with only and exactly what they started with. That capacity never increases, that there are no learning curves. From our sample set of n=1, this isn't realistic. Production would rise, by hook or by crook. If it ran long enough, you'd see carriers coming off the docks every month or two, with their battle groups completely filled. Again, I hope we never find out.

gozur88 9y ago

The military is always in a bind with contractor selection. If the don't choose the lowest bidder they get hauled up in front of a Senate committee full of people grandstanding for the next election accusing them of taking care of cronies. Particularly at the rate we build ships these days, if you only chose companies that have done it before you're not going to have many bids to choose from.

stcredzero 9y ago
The military is always in a bind with contractor selection. If the don't choose the lowest bidder they get hauled up in front of a Senate committee full of people grandstanding for the next election accusing them of taking care of cronies. Isn't there some famous economics paper somewhere that shows strategies like median bid produce much better outcomes?
- teddyh 9y ago
  Do you have a reference to this? I’m particularly curious if they address the secondary effects this will have on bids, and if the strategy then remains viable.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Could you do something like adjust the bids by the average percentage overrun the contractor has on prior projects?
dragonwriter 9y ago
> The military is always in a bind with contractor selection. If the don't choose the lowest bidder they get hauled up in front of a Senate committee full of people grandstanding for the next election accusing them of taking care of cronies. No, they (or, rather, contractors) solved that problem by assuring that all contracts are divied up between as many states and Congressional districts as possible, so that anyone in Congress attacking any procurement is attacking jobs in their own district, and cost controls are less important because the overruns are also producing work, often also widely distributed. Of course, this also produces the problem (for the military, not contractors) that any attempt to impose accountability on contractors has political problems that are similarly widespread.

jlarocco 9y ago

I partly agree, but it doesn't sound like the Navy did their homework to check that the systems would even work. From the article: > It was also supposed to increase the lifespan of aircraft by putting less stress on their airframes. Unfortunately, recent tests of land-based prototypes showed that the system actually overstressed F-18 airframes during launch. How do they just now discover that? Nobody thought to build a prototype on land first before agreeing to put it on a carrier? It sounds like some defense contractors sold a bunch of neat ideas to the Navy and decided they'd work the kinks out as they came up. The other problem is that there just aren't many companies that build aircraft carriers, and it's a very small market. According to Wikipedia there are only 37 aircraft carriers in the whole world, so nobody's going to do the R&D if they're not getting funded to do it.

taneq 9y ago
> Nobody thought to build a prototype on land first before agreeing to put it on a carrier? Sure, but that put their bid 10% above the bid of the guys who just ran FEA on it and said "she'll be right."
simplicio 9y ago
> Nobody thought to build a prototype on land first before agreeing to put it on a carrier? The article does talk about "land testing" so I assume they have a mock-up somewhere in the desert to test this stuff in a place where failure doesn't send the pilot/plane into the ocean. I think the problem is that they were still testing these technologies at the same time that they were building the ship, so now there's only so far they can go in modifying them from their original assumptions while still staying withing the power/space/layout specifications the ship was designed around.
- cottsak 9y ago
  Yes I believe this is correct. When they do get it working on land (http://www.henselphelps.com/projects/electro-magnetic-aircraft-launch-system-emals-land-based-test-site-facility http://www.henselphelps.com/projects/electro-magnetic-aircra...) it will very likely deviate so far from the original assumptions incorporated into the design of the carrier that huge retrofits will need to be made to the carrier to apply the changes. Either they will do that, or simply cut corners and fail to report it accurately. This will fly under the radar until some tragedy. But the root cause of that will likely be covered up too.

dubyah 9y ago

A big problem is the concurrency of development and production. I'm unaware of programs that have gone right, but the more substantial boondoggles have had that issue.