8 ms·

Navy Quietly Decommissions Littoral Combat Ship Independence

57 points by protomyth 5y ago

woodruffw 5y ago
TFA says that the ship is being decommissioned after 11 years of service. Could someone with more knowledge/experience with the Navy explain whether that's a normal period of service for this kind of ship? To my civilian brain, that seems like an extraordinarily short period.
- hourislate 5y ago
  The article mentioned 25 years. >It’s been used as a testbed for mission package development and leaving the fleet well ahead of its expected 25-year service life.
  - smalley 5y ago
    This is also against the backdrop of Navy life extensions for cruisers and other small craft towards 35 years from 25 (and much longer for some systems https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/06/07/the-us-navys-ships-are-getting-old-they-might-be-getting-a-lot-older/ https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/06/07/the-us-navys-sh... ). The LCS program was plagued by problems to a degree that the designs are no longer being used as a base for future craft the major defense contractors are proposing. I think the intent is to replace a lot of what the Littoral Combat Ships mission should have been with Constellation Class Frigates instead.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  It is a very short period for a ship, especially a non-nuclear one (which sometimes have no means for refuel, and have a fixed service life). If you poke around the list of US destroyers, the successful classes last about 30 years. USS Arleigh Burke for example was commissioned in 1991, and it’s still on the register. I am personally surprised they’re giving up on the Littoral ships before they gave up on the Zumwalt class, the destroyers that don’t even have any ammunition for their main guns.
  - nradov 5y ago
    The Navy hasn't completely given up on the LCS. More are still being built whereas Zumwalt procurement was stopped at 3. The current thinking is to remove the main guns and install missile launchers in their place.
- saxonww 5y ago
  It is. If you go read about these, on balance the information is negative. The projects suffered from design creep and cost overruns, and turned out not to be well-suited to the types of missions we allegedly needed them for. The US Navy is already well into a new project to develop a new guided-missile frigate [FFG(X)] to replace these LCS ships.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Could someone with more knowledge/experience with the Navy explain whether that's a normal period of service for this kind of ship These ships were commissioned to counter shallow-water adversaries. Iranian speedboats, pirates, et cetera. In the context of balancing Russia and China, they’re underpowered. The orientation shift from terrorists and regional powers to countering a regional hegemon and emerging superpower explains part of the lifespan. The rest is it being a garbage ship.
- stadium 5y ago
  > CNO Adm. Mike Gilday told USNI News in an interview it would take $2.5 billion to upgrade the first four ships – money he would rather put toward the emerging Constellation-class frigate (FFG-62) program.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  OK I'll have a crack. That thing is a tri-hull: not your usual armoured ship. That is designed for speed, it is designed to plane and not displace (think speed boat but a lot bigger). It is described as "littoral" which is Latin for around the shore. It's got trendy slopey sides so slightly stealthy and also those angles will help in slightly deflecting kinetic incoming nasties. So we have a weapon platform that can move really fast close to shore. When you are running something as big as a national cough defensive cough thingie, you will have many experiments running in peacetime. Note the word peacetime. These experiments will cost billions of ickies (pick your currency - it doesn't matter.) This ship class is pretty obviously one such experiment. You also have to remember it takes a very long time to get from "we need this" to the thing floating in the water or flying or breaking down on Salisbury Plain. In wartime, timescales are shortened. In (lol) peacetime it takes longer. For example in 1940s Britain, if you need a fighter/bomber which has decent firepower and a small bomb load and have a fair range and be bloody fast then you suddenly get the Mosquitto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito . It was made of wood and was also considered two kills if one was shot down - that's how bad the Mossie looked to the Germans. Any bit of war gear - ship, plane, rifle, grenade etc takes ages to go from plan to usage. Some become classics for example the AK47. The other thing to consider is that people are employed to conceive, design and build these things. The US is a bunch of states and sometimes politicians ensure local jobs are secured for federal reasons/concerns.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Both LCS designs are primarily displacement hulls. They can get onto a partial plane at speed but are too large to get up on a full plane. No modern warship carries much armor. It's too heavy. And a sloped side will do precisely nothing to deflect incoming missiles.
taylorfinley 5y ago
For anyone else who caught on "littoral," it means: "relating to or situated on the shore of the sea or a lake"
- jdavis703 5y ago
  There was quite a heavy advertising campaign for the littoral combat ship in the early 2000s. They even had ads in the subway! I think this is a fairly common word.
  - ben0x539 5y ago
    I'm a foreigner and I'd have had to look it up.
  - pm90 5y ago
    It was not a term that at least I was not familiar with and am glad someone spelt it out!
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    Did seeing the ad for littoral combat ships influence your likelihood to buy one? Choose a number between 1 and 10, 1 means strongly disagree, 10 means strongly agree.
  - sbierwagen 5y ago
    Which subway? DC metro?
    - patentatt 5y ago
      Not OP, but likely yes. The DC metro is chock full of advertising targeted at the pentagon. It’s kind of surreal.
- touisteur 5y ago
  Same word in French, except we use it as a noun. Curious. Did it cross with the Normans or later? Also it seems that American naval projects with foreign names aren't such a success (littoral combat ship, zumwalt...).
samcheng 5y ago
The criticism in the article seems misplaced to me - it falls victim to the sunk cost fallacy. These ships were problematic from the beginning. I remember them being commissioned without a working gun, alongside reports of ship-wide computer failures leaving the ships dead in the water. If they are costly to operate and ineffective in service, it doesn't really matter how much they cost to build in the first place. That said, it's really a symptom of American corruption / decline / corporate capture in my mind. This program alone funneled billions of dollars into defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, with very little incentive for efficiency. What a waste of American wealth!
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  > I remember them being commissioned without a working gun I think you're confusing the LCS with the Zumwalt class... both of which were troubled and mostly cancelled, but for slightly different reasons.
  - samcheng 5y ago
    You're right - I was definitely thinking about the Zumwalt's cannon!
- colechristensen 5y ago
  There are many angles. Two important ones are that the defense contractors are jobs programs, giving good salaries to skilled workers and investing in education distributed across the country. They are also defense preparedness programs: we buy and build constantly whether or not we need things right now because when we do need them, we don't want to build knowhow and whole industries from scratch. Claiming that it is all being done well is of course absurd, but it is also very hard to build programs that last for decades and through many administrations, many political changes, involving millions of people. And folks are always eager to point out "failures" that aren't always a sign of anything being done wrong, especially from people who have little idea what it's like building an enormous ship/plane/weapon meant to be serviceable for half a century.
light_hue_1 5y ago
The problem is that the military doesn't give a damn about money. They co-developed the ship class with the first four ships that were built. Those four ships are worthless and each cost $600 million. It would cost another $2 billion dollars to make them combat ready. The philosophy of developing and building weapon systems is called "concurrency" and has been a subject of debate for 50 years. You can look at in different ways, but the cynical view, is that if the military first developed weapons systems then reported their final price to Congress, they would never get to run these wasteful programs. So instead, they promise a low price tag and then develop concurrently so that Congress falls into the sunk cost fallacy. This kind of "money doesn't matter we'll do it live" mentality happens all over the world. It plagued the F-35. It's resulting in a disaster with Canada's new Type 26 frigates. The simple solution is to ban all concurrency. You're given a budget, you design the system, then you build it. If you go over, we pay for the cost of the redesign, not the insane cost of upgrading half-broken ships or aircraft. The F-35 wasted more than $21 billion dollars on worthless aircraft https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2017/10/21-billion-worth-of-f-35-concurrency-orphans/ https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2017/10/21-billion-worth-of-f-...
- Grakel 5y ago
  Meh. Is government expenditure bad? The money flows into the economy and technology is researched and developed. It's not like the money would be spent elsewhere, it's all debt we're just going to hold on to until inflation renders it irrelevant.
  - samcheng 5y ago
    If you're going to be spending billions of dollars, would you rather have a working ship afterwards, or not? Accountability DOES matter.
  - TheDudeMan 5y ago
    The greater the government expenditure, the greater the taxes.
    - 5y ago
Grakel 5y ago
Strange, considering the next big thing in military thinking (other than urban) is a shift to littoral focus, preparing for the Pacific shores to become the battleground. Read up on the Marines' major self redefinition currently going on.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  These ships were designed for asymmetric littoral. The new threat is likely peer+ littoral.
  - Grakel 5y ago
    Got it, interesting.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  Sure, but the Marines' Force Design 2030 is centered on the PRC, and the Taiwan invasion in particular. Littoral ships would be disastrously awful for that mission? The PRC strategy is land-based antiship missiles, and LCS are survivability level 1 ships with aluminum hull/superstructure and a single CIWS turret. In a shooting war with China they would evaporate.
  - Grakel 5y ago
    I don't think that's their only focus: https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021/04/15/warrior-mindset-must-remain-corps-says-even-as-marines-shift-from-infantry-to-the-sea/ https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021... Edit: littoral appears in their documents extensively. But you are correct that China is the focus, for sure.
thrower123 5y ago
This is a classic blue water vs green water navy doctrinal battle. The USA has always been a blue water navy at heart, despite these halting experiments at green water doctrine.
- exabrial 5y ago
  For anyone looking for the "why" in this thread, here it is ^. These ships are useful, but only during _acutal_ combat. For force projection, not so much.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  It makes sense, given that all the US's probable enemies are across a major ocean. Certainly all the probable enemies with anything close to the same military.
nickpinkston 5y ago
I actually toured the USS Independence when it was docked at Pier 80 in SF during Fleet Week a few years ago - really cool propulsion system the crew described to us as a jet ski with similar speed and maneuverability implications.
gerdesj 5y ago
I would love to know about what that thing is in the prow. Is it an anchor? I love the hull shape. It looks like it would deal with some nasty seas. If it hit a 50' wall of water, those upwards pointing planes should point it upwards and along with the inherent buoyancy, get the ship back to the surface. The piccy: https://news.usni.org/2021/07/31/navy-quietly-decommissions-littoral-combat-ship-independence-after-11-years https://news.usni.org/2021/07/31/navy-quietly-decommissions-... ... shows that there is a chain going down and some rope warps and springs.
- brucetim 5y ago
  Yep that's the anchor. Just can't see the flukes due to the angle the picture was taken from. Check https://i.redd.it/99rhoexauq2z.jpg https://i.redd.it/99rhoexauq2z.jpg for a better view. Why is the anchor gold? The Retention Excellence Award (previously known as the Golden Anchor Award); an award given by the United States Department of the Navy for sustaining superior levels of military retention. The award was established by the United States Fleet Forces Command through the Fleet Retention Excellence Program. Deployable Navy ships are authorized to paint their anchors gold as a symbol of earning the award.
SkyMarshal 5y ago
Part of the reason for this is that US military is shifting focus from the Persian Gulf where littoral combat was a thing, to great power competition in more open waters, both Atlantic and Pacific. Even if these ships performed as promised, there's a reasonable chance they'd still be cancelled as the force structure changes. Also, the US Air Force has been experimenting with digital design, where they not only use CAD and similar tools to design the aircraft, but also the entire manufacturing process [1][2]. i wonder if the Navy can adopt that methodology for ships and subs too. [1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24491337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24491337 [2]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505184
onecommentman 5y ago
The decommissioning of a ship got me to thinking of the lifecycle of buildings dedicated to business. The large buildings dedicated to a single company where tens of thousands of person-years of adult life by good people were spent. Sometimes I think that these buildings deserve a formal decommissioning, maybe even a desacralization. Or perhaps a Bastille-ization in some cases.
LostInTheWoods 5y ago
The US and others have fallen into the trap of preparing for the next big war by looking at the last (WWII). Did anyone see the recent opening ceremonies at the Olympics? It included a presentation of 1800 drones flying in precise coordination. It does not take much imagination to see potential of drone swarms on the battlefield.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  No one has great plans for swarms but everyone is looking into ways of dealing with them. One reason they're not giving up on it entirely is that using tons of quadcopters like make up those aerial displays is they have pretty low capacity which limits the damage they can do. Control software is also still an issue because it's unlikely gps will be still usable around ships so you need way better software guidance than the display swarms have. They're definitely going to be one of the major challenges in the next major war but we're still in the early stages of both offense and defense for drones and drone swarms.
- nradov 5y ago
  Drone swarms are useless for blue water naval combat. Drones cheap enough to build in large numbers don't have sufficient range, speed, or sensors. But navies are actively developing large, expensive drones to supplement or replace manned tactical aircraft.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  What makes you think the US government isn't investing in drones? Heck, just google "drone strikes"
ChuckMcM 5y ago
One of the things I developed a deeper understanding of when I got a chance to work for a defense contractor was just how difficult and complicated it is to develop a new system for the US Government. Unlike "regular" development where you have a project lead, and maybe a VP, CTO, and CEO to get on board, the government needs congress people on board (the money), the service on board (their generals), all of the participating contractors on board (the builders), and a timeline where you may be funded one year and not the next. It is exceptionally challenging! Getting this ship commissioned was pretty impressive, getting it decommissioned in some ways even more so.

57 points by protomyth 5y ago

TFA says that the ship is being decommissioned after 11 years of service. Could someone with more knowledge/experience with the Navy explain whether that's a normal period of service for this kind of ship? To my civilian brain, that seems like an extraordinarily short period.

hourislate 5y ago
The article mentioned 25 years. >It’s been used as a testbed for mission package development and leaving the fleet well ahead of its expected 25-year service life.
- smalley 5y ago
  This is also against the backdrop of Navy life extensions for cruisers and other small craft towards 35 years from 25 (and much longer for some systems https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/06/07/the-us-navys-ships-are-getting-old-they-might-be-getting-a-lot-older/ https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/06/07/the-us-navys-sh... ). The LCS program was plagued by problems to a degree that the designs are no longer being used as a base for future craft the major defense contractors are proposing. I think the intent is to replace a lot of what the Littoral Combat Ships mission should have been with Constellation Class Frigates instead.
ashtonkem 5y ago
It is a very short period for a ship, especially a non-nuclear one (which sometimes have no means for refuel, and have a fixed service life). If you poke around the list of US destroyers, the successful classes last about 30 years. USS Arleigh Burke for example was commissioned in 1991, and it’s still on the register. I am personally surprised they’re giving up on the Littoral ships before they gave up on the Zumwalt class, the destroyers that don’t even have any ammunition for their main guns.
- nradov 5y ago
  The Navy hasn't completely given up on the LCS. More are still being built whereas Zumwalt procurement was stopped at 3. The current thinking is to remove the main guns and install missile launchers in their place.
saxonww 5y ago
It is. If you go read about these, on balance the information is negative. The projects suffered from design creep and cost overruns, and turned out not to be well-suited to the types of missions we allegedly needed them for. The US Navy is already well into a new project to develop a new guided-missile frigate [FFG(X)] to replace these LCS ships.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> Could someone with more knowledge/experience with the Navy explain whether that's a normal period of service for this kind of ship These ships were commissioned to counter shallow-water adversaries. Iranian speedboats, pirates, et cetera. In the context of balancing Russia and China, they’re underpowered. The orientation shift from terrorists and regional powers to countering a regional hegemon and emerging superpower explains part of the lifespan. The rest is it being a garbage ship.
stadium 5y ago
> CNO Adm. Mike Gilday told USNI News in an interview it would take $2.5 billion to upgrade the first four ships – money he would rather put toward the emerging Constellation-class frigate (FFG-62) program.
gerdesj 5y ago
OK I'll have a crack. That thing is a tri-hull: not your usual armoured ship. That is designed for speed, it is designed to plane and not displace (think speed boat but a lot bigger). It is described as "littoral" which is Latin for around the shore. It's got trendy slopey sides so slightly stealthy and also those angles will help in slightly deflecting kinetic incoming nasties. So we have a weapon platform that can move really fast close to shore. When you are running something as big as a national cough defensive cough thingie, you will have many experiments running in peacetime. Note the word peacetime. These experiments will cost billions of ickies (pick your currency - it doesn't matter.) This ship class is pretty obviously one such experiment. You also have to remember it takes a very long time to get from "we need this" to the thing floating in the water or flying or breaking down on Salisbury Plain. In wartime, timescales are shortened. In (lol) peacetime it takes longer. For example in 1940s Britain, if you need a fighter/bomber which has decent firepower and a small bomb load and have a fair range and be bloody fast then you suddenly get the Mosquitto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito . It was made of wood and was also considered two kills if one was shot down - that's how bad the Mossie looked to the Germans. Any bit of war gear - ship, plane, rifle, grenade etc takes ages to go from plan to usage. Some become classics for example the AK47. The other thing to consider is that people are employed to conceive, design and build these things. The US is a bunch of states and sometimes politicians ensure local jobs are secured for federal reasons/concerns.
- nradov 5y ago
  Both LCS designs are primarily displacement hulls. They can get onto a partial plane at speed but are too large to get up on a full plane. No modern warship carries much armor. It's too heavy. And a sloped side will do precisely nothing to deflect incoming missiles.

taylorfinley 5y ago

For anyone else who caught on "littoral," it means: "relating to or situated on the shore of the sea or a lake"

jdavis703 5y ago
There was quite a heavy advertising campaign for the littoral combat ship in the early 2000s. They even had ads in the subway! I think this is a fairly common word.
- ben0x539 5y ago
  I'm a foreigner and I'd have had to look it up.
- pm90 5y ago
  It was not a term that at least I was not familiar with and am glad someone spelt it out!
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  Did seeing the ad for littoral combat ships influence your likelihood to buy one? Choose a number between 1 and 10, 1 means strongly disagree, 10 means strongly agree.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  Which subway? DC metro?
  - patentatt 5y ago
    Not OP, but likely yes. The DC metro is chock full of advertising targeted at the pentagon. It’s kind of surreal.
touisteur 5y ago
Same word in French, except we use it as a noun. Curious. Did it cross with the Normans or later? Also it seems that American naval projects with foreign names aren't such a success (littoral combat ship, zumwalt...).

samcheng 5y ago

The criticism in the article seems misplaced to me - it falls victim to the sunk cost fallacy. These ships were problematic from the beginning. I remember them being commissioned without a working gun, alongside reports of ship-wide computer failures leaving the ships dead in the water. If they are costly to operate and ineffective in service, it doesn't really matter how much they cost to build in the first place. That said, it's really a symptom of American corruption / decline / corporate capture in my mind. This program alone funneled billions of dollars into defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, with very little incentive for efficiency. What a waste of American wealth!

bpodgursky 5y ago
> I remember them being commissioned without a working gun I think you're confusing the LCS with the Zumwalt class... both of which were troubled and mostly cancelled, but for slightly different reasons.
- samcheng 5y ago
  You're right - I was definitely thinking about the Zumwalt's cannon!
colechristensen 5y ago
There are many angles. Two important ones are that the defense contractors are jobs programs, giving good salaries to skilled workers and investing in education distributed across the country. They are also defense preparedness programs: we buy and build constantly whether or not we need things right now because when we do need them, we don't want to build knowhow and whole industries from scratch. Claiming that it is all being done well is of course absurd, but it is also very hard to build programs that last for decades and through many administrations, many political changes, involving millions of people. And folks are always eager to point out "failures" that aren't always a sign of anything being done wrong, especially from people who have little idea what it's like building an enormous ship/plane/weapon meant to be serviceable for half a century.

light_hue_1 5y ago

The problem is that the military doesn't give a damn about money. They co-developed the ship class with the first four ships that were built. Those four ships are worthless and each cost $600 million. It would cost another $2 billion dollars to make them combat ready. The philosophy of developing and building weapon systems is called "concurrency" and has been a subject of debate for 50 years. You can look at in different ways, but the cynical view, is that if the military first developed weapons systems then reported their final price to Congress, they would never get to run these wasteful programs. So instead, they promise a low price tag and then develop concurrently so that Congress falls into the sunk cost fallacy. This kind of "money doesn't matter we'll do it live" mentality happens all over the world. It plagued the F-35. It's resulting in a disaster with Canada's new Type 26 frigates. The simple solution is to ban all concurrency. You're given a budget, you design the system, then you build it. If you go over, we pay for the cost of the redesign, not the insane cost of upgrading half-broken ships or aircraft. The F-35 wasted more than $21 billion dollars on worthless aircraft https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2017/10/21-billion-worth-of-f-35-concurrency-orphans/ https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2017/10/21-billion-worth-of-f-...

Grakel 5y ago
Meh. Is government expenditure bad? The money flows into the economy and technology is researched and developed. It's not like the money would be spent elsewhere, it's all debt we're just going to hold on to until inflation renders it irrelevant.
- samcheng 5y ago
  If you're going to be spending billions of dollars, would you rather have a working ship afterwards, or not? Accountability DOES matter.
- TheDudeMan 5y ago
  The greater the government expenditure, the greater the taxes.
  - 5y ago

Grakel 5y ago

Strange, considering the next big thing in military thinking (other than urban) is a shift to littoral focus, preparing for the Pacific shores to become the battleground. Read up on the Marines' major self redefinition currently going on.

chrisseaton 5y ago
These ships were designed for asymmetric littoral. The new threat is likely peer+ littoral.
- Grakel 5y ago
  Got it, interesting.
sbierwagen 5y ago
Sure, but the Marines' Force Design 2030 is centered on the PRC, and the Taiwan invasion in particular. Littoral ships would be disastrously awful for that mission? The PRC strategy is land-based antiship missiles, and LCS are survivability level 1 ships with aluminum hull/superstructure and a single CIWS turret. In a shooting war with China they would evaporate.
- Grakel 5y ago
  I don't think that's their only focus: https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021/04/15/warrior-mindset-must-remain-corps-says-even-as-marines-shift-from-infantry-to-the-sea/ https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021... Edit: littoral appears in their documents extensively. But you are correct that China is the focus, for sure.

thrower123 5y ago

This is a classic blue water vs green water navy doctrinal battle. The USA has always been a blue water navy at heart, despite these halting experiments at green water doctrine.

exabrial 5y ago
For anyone looking for the "why" in this thread, here it is ^. These ships are useful, but only during _acutal_ combat. For force projection, not so much.
HWR_14 5y ago
It makes sense, given that all the US's probable enemies are across a major ocean. Certainly all the probable enemies with anything close to the same military.

nickpinkston 5y ago

I actually toured the USS Independence when it was docked at Pier 80 in SF during Fleet Week a few years ago - really cool propulsion system the crew described to us as a jet ski with similar speed and maneuverability implications.

gerdesj 5y ago

I would love to know about what that thing is in the prow. Is it an anchor? I love the hull shape. It looks like it would deal with some nasty seas. If it hit a 50' wall of water, those upwards pointing planes should point it upwards and along with the inherent buoyancy, get the ship back to the surface. The piccy: https://news.usni.org/2021/07/31/navy-quietly-decommissions-littoral-combat-ship-independence-after-11-years https://news.usni.org/2021/07/31/navy-quietly-decommissions-... ... shows that there is a chain going down and some rope warps and springs.

brucetim 5y ago
Yep that's the anchor. Just can't see the flukes due to the angle the picture was taken from. Check https://i.redd.it/99rhoexauq2z.jpg https://i.redd.it/99rhoexauq2z.jpg for a better view. Why is the anchor gold? The Retention Excellence Award (previously known as the Golden Anchor Award); an award given by the United States Department of the Navy for sustaining superior levels of military retention. The award was established by the United States Fleet Forces Command through the Fleet Retention Excellence Program. Deployable Navy ships are authorized to paint their anchors gold as a symbol of earning the award.

SkyMarshal 5y ago

Part of the reason for this is that US military is shifting focus from the Persian Gulf where littoral combat was a thing, to great power competition in more open waters, both Atlantic and Pacific. Even if these ships performed as promised, there's a reasonable chance they'd still be cancelled as the force structure changes. Also, the US Air Force has been experimenting with digital design, where they not only use CAD and similar tools to design the aircraft, but also the entire manufacturing process [1][2]. i wonder if the Navy can adopt that methodology for ships and subs too. [1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24491337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24491337 [2]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505184

onecommentman 5y ago

The decommissioning of a ship got me to thinking of the lifecycle of buildings dedicated to business. The large buildings dedicated to a single company where tens of thousands of person-years of adult life by good people were spent. Sometimes I think that these buildings deserve a formal decommissioning, maybe even a desacralization. Or perhaps a Bastille-ization in some cases.

LostInTheWoods 5y ago

The US and others have fallen into the trap of preparing for the next big war by looking at the last (WWII). Did anyone see the recent opening ceremonies at the Olympics? It included a presentation of 1800 drones flying in precise coordination. It does not take much imagination to see potential of drone swarms on the battlefield.

rtkwe 5y ago
No one has great plans for swarms but everyone is looking into ways of dealing with them. One reason they're not giving up on it entirely is that using tons of quadcopters like make up those aerial displays is they have pretty low capacity which limits the damage they can do. Control software is also still an issue because it's unlikely gps will be still usable around ships so you need way better software guidance than the display swarms have. They're definitely going to be one of the major challenges in the next major war but we're still in the early stages of both offense and defense for drones and drone swarms.
nradov 5y ago
Drone swarms are useless for blue water naval combat. Drones cheap enough to build in large numbers don't have sufficient range, speed, or sensors. But navies are actively developing large, expensive drones to supplement or replace manned tactical aircraft.
HWR_14 5y ago
What makes you think the US government isn't investing in drones? Heck, just google "drone strikes"

ChuckMcM 5y ago

One of the things I developed a deeper understanding of when I got a chance to work for a defense contractor was just how difficult and complicated it is to develop a new system for the US Government. Unlike "regular" development where you have a project lead, and maybe a VP, CTO, and CEO to get on board, the government needs congress people on board (the money), the service on board (their generals), all of the participating contractors on board (the builders), and a timeline where you may be funded one year and not the next. It is exceptionally challenging! Getting this ship commissioned was pretty impressive, getting it decommissioned in some ways even more so.