It's a shame they also haven't wasted redundancy resources on the electromagnetic catapult system used to launch aircraft, and which as of 2018 had a failure ra

It's a shame they also haven't wasted redundancy resources on the electromagnetic catapult system used to launch aircraft, and which as of 2018 had a failure rate consistent with a 70% chance of completing a full day of flight operations without downtime. (1) It's easy to imagine that the toilet failures here under discussion represent an isolated concern and a teething problem for the kind of new, nonessential system that you expect to see in a new class of capital warship which, after all, still gets the fundamentals right. The trouble is that, once you start really looking, that's just not borne out by the evidence. A lot of the ideas in play with these ships, as with the LCS or the F-35, are fundamentally good. But the US military procurement process has become so deeply corrupt that we as a country are no longer capable of implementing these good ideas well. The multiple-decade, trillion-dollar boondoggle has become table stakes, and that doesn't deserve to be excused by anyone. (Also, a Ford-class carrier has a crew of something like four thousand. They're gonna need a lot of buckets...) (1) https://breakingdefense.com/2018/06/navys-troubled-ford-carrier-makes-modest-progress/ https://breakingdefense.com/2018/06/navys-troubled-ford-carr...