12 ms·

Revitalizing US Navy Shipbuilding

147 points by jseliger 3y ago

vavooom 3y ago
Letting yards fail may be the most politically sensitive change. It will be a disaster if the Navy decides to toughen up on yards but waits until the ship is delivered in poor condition to lay the hammer down. The earlier Naval officers are in the yards and shops identifying problems, the less painful changes for the shipyard will be. Companies can fire bad managers or exit the business while some value remains. The bottom line is getting officers out of their offices. The rest will follow. Tough love.
- pi-e-sigma 3y ago
  This is all just red herring. The decline of shipbuilding in the US is just the result of the general, nation-wide deindustrialization. And analogously, you can't revive the shipbuilding without reviving bigger industrial base.
  - pjscott 3y ago
    The article claims that the US has over 100,000 shipyard workers, while Japan has about 70,000 and yet produces 20x more tonnage. This suggests that there's a lot more to it than just US deindustrialization.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      But it also goes into some detail about why that's true as well. Essentially, to me the biggest issue is that Defense spending is a Congressional pork trough. Instead of centralizing for efficiency, everything is spread out so everyone gets their share. It's a decent report for someone that has the merest of an idea what the Navy does/uses/needs. It shows how thoughts about various aspects of a ship's needs have changed over the years including walking back from implemented changes as they've responded to opponents' reactions to those changes. It's also in an interesting format seeing the difference from a report vs a presentation style slide deck that must be so tempting to use. Glad to see that actual reports are alive and well outside of the tech bubble.
      - practicemaths 3y ago
        Centralized what exactly for efficiency in defense spending? edit: downvote if you want but it's rather rude to do so with out providing an answer to my question. It comes off more like you're offended that your assumption in thought is being questioned.
      - gamepsys 3y ago
        I don't think a single central source for ship building is probably the best path. We should probably have one on each coast at minimum.
        hinkley 3y ago
        It should take large number of bombers or ICBMs to render the US unable to build or repair her Navy. In World War II we hijacked most of the industrial base for the war machine. After the war, there was incentive to be certain that the US was capable of outfitting the Armed Forces regardless of whether manufacturing slowly shifted overseas. South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are too geographically close to a number of likely antagonists in the next global conflict. In the latter case, the distance might be negative. They may be occupied or their industry bombed to dust as the opening moves in a protracted conflict. There is something to be said for the DoD to effectively be paying rent (or a retainer, if you prefer that analogy) to Western Hemisphere manufacturing, with a large fraction in the continental US.
    - floxy 3y ago
      What moats do U.S. shipyards have that prevent disruption? Or why doesn't someone spin up the SpaceX for shipbuilding?
      - teruakohatu 3y ago
        > Or why doesn't someone spin up the SpaceX for shipbuilding? Do VCs invest in industries that are so mature that they are almost as old and civilisation itself?
        teyrana 3y ago
        "Anduril industries" has entered the chat... Long story short, yes, VCs have entered the defense industry (writ large) and although I have my doubts about whether said VC money will achieve FB-like returns, they are trying. And to answer the GP poster.... The industry is not "ripe for disruption" because it's dominated more by the "invisible hand of the lobbyist" much more than the "invisible hand of the market". Fwiw, from my ~20 years in the defense industry.
        Teever 3y ago
        You say this as if there's no innovation in modern shipbuilding, as if the Koreans and Japanese who dominate the industry have just gotten really good at lashing together logs to make really big rafts. That would be like saying that VC's don't invest in communication companies because communication is as old as civilization, and who wants to invest in semaphores and stone tablets anyways?
        obmelvin 3y ago
        You might find this recent article interesting about the uptick in people moving from Pentagon -> VC, as opposed to Pentagon -> Prime Defense Contractor. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/us/politics/pentagon-venture-capitalists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/us/politics/pentagon-vent...
        nvm0n2 3y ago
        VCs weren't behind SpaceX. Musk invested his own money.
    - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
      That's exactly how deindustrialization looks like. Efficiency goes down because nobody knows how to build ships anymore (metaphorically speaking), so more people are required than before. A lousy analogy: think about history of agriculture mechanization but in reverse: the less mechanization the more work needs to be done manually again and the machines that are still in operation are harder and harder to operate because spare parts and technical expertise are getting harder to come by.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      Why the implication that we measure industrialisation in number of people? People are almost categorically not a factor in industrialisation. It is all about processes, technologies, expertise, organisation and economics. The English speaking world has been on a decades-long campaign to reign in industry. Energy availability has been reduced. Environmental protection has been given supremacy. Manufacturing outsourced to Asia. An impenetrable net of regulations put in place to force businesses to conform to the average. There is the pattern of bailing out incompetent managers so that the financial system doesn't have to reform. In that environment, number of people is a weak metric. The US has people, educated people and otherwise great people. I don't think at any point anyone has accused this of being a people problem. The issue is that capable people are being prevented from improving the situation.
      - kibwen 3y ago
        > The issue is that capable people are being prevented from improving the situation. What situation, specifically, needs to be improved? The US Navy does not, at present, have any need whatsoever to drastically increase the size of its fleet. Every ship that gets built is a ship that needs to be manned and maintained, which siphons money from elsewhere. We can bemoan the inefficiency of the existing shipbuilders, but that's just how the US sells welfare programs to conservative voters. If you think that a hot war with China is in the cards, forget investing in shipbuilding infrastructure and instead put that money towards onshoring the rest of the national critical supply chain, much of which is in far more dire straits (ahem) than the shipyards.
        thereisnospork 3y ago
        Shipbuilding inefficient and the lack of onshore critical supply chain are two symptoms of the same problem: whether it's chips, shells, or ships: production capacity is critical in any prolonged conflict - which is something we've been agnostically gutting and impeding. It's desirable that we be able to build ships well[0] because being able to build ships well (or not) is a reasonable proxy for being able to build drones, fighter planes, or ballistic missles (whatever the next war calls for). [0]Read: unacceptable for it to be otherwise for a superpower that would like to stay one. Actually cranking out ships is another thing but the capacity needs to be there (and tested/validated accordingly).
    - Spooky23 3y ago
      Not really. It’s more about the politicization of military contracting. Every congressional district gets a piece of the pie, so the process is incredibly inefficient by design. For all the hooh-rah, the US military is probably the greatest make work program since the pyramids. Many industries, especially tech, exist due to the largesse of the military. When you hear pandering politicians quack about efficiency, they are a fool or a liar.
    - mdorazio 3y ago
      What kind of tonnage, though? A huge containership is easier to build than a modern nuclear submarine, for example, and gives you a hell of a lot more tonnage.
    - cyberax 3y ago
      Tonnage by itself is not a great comparison. E.g. one super-tanker (~250000) would have about twice the tonnage as an aircraft carrier (~150000). There's no doubt that the US shipbuilding is stagnating, but it's not _that_ much stagnating.
  - willis936 3y ago
    You should talk to some shipbuilding insiders. It is a culture of phoning it in. Really most all US defense contractors have that issue to some extent. Fat and happy.
    - pstuart 3y ago
      Isn't a core issue that budgets (cost and time) are effectively fictional and that a lot of work is time and materials so there's no incentive to deliver high quality under budget and on time?
      - willis936 3y ago
        In my opinion the issue is cultural. Everything's in place to churn out a lot of ships, jets, missiles, night vision goggles, etc. Budgets are very high and schedules are realistic. Failure isn't scary enough. It's a problem that can only fixed from the top with sustained effort.
        pstuart 3y ago
        If you were in a position of power to effect change, what would you do about it?
        willis936 3y ago
        Lead by example. Demonstrate what putting in effort looks like, be passionate about the projects, and inspire others to be passionate about them. I've made a very conscious decision to not work on weapons, but if I dedicated my life to making weapons then I would hopefully have a core drive to cultivate. Give meaning to the work. The security of your family and way of life are at stake. If that isn't gaining traction after about six months then try to shake things up with the stick. Put middle managers on alert that failures without improvement won't be tolerated. "A" position of power is insufficient here. "The" position of power is necessary. It's a big ocean and one person needs to have control of their section to be able to affect change.
  - huytersd 3y ago
    The very notion of a service based industry is idiotic and feels gutturally wrong. If the US can’t bring back it manufacturing industries, we’re done for.
    - nateglims 3y ago
      As an engineer I also feel the "realness" or whatever of manufacturing a real product, but countries that don't shift into a service economy tend to struggle more: there's fewer profitable investments and not enough places to sell goods. Our liberalization policies from the 90s until recently would not let us maintain the industries, and places like Germany or China with industrial policies more favorable to manufacturing are criticized by a lot of our policy makers, economists, media, etc.
      - eru 3y ago
        > Our liberalization policies from the 90s until recently would not let us maintain the industries, [...] What is that supposed to mean? Btw, value added in manufacturing in the US has not shrunken during that time, as far as I am aware.
    - maxerickson 3y ago
      It's not like there isn't manufacturing in the US. It's not great that the US shipbuilders are apparently fat and lazy, but for example, the US has 70+ modern destroyers in service, compared to the ~dozen that the apparently much more efficient Japanese and Korean shipbuilders have constructed for their countries. The complaint is thus that we should have more for what we paid...
    - eru 3y ago
      Why? What's so magic about manufacturing?
      - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
        Maybe the fact that you need the physical, manufactured goods to live a comfortable life unlike 'financial services', that won't cloth you, won't transport you and definitively won't feed you.
  - sfifs 3y ago
    It's the result of American business culture prioritising and incentivizing "shareholder value creation" (aka making wealthy fund managers more wealthy) above all else and regulatory capture of the government by the wealthy. For the rest of us on the outside, the US often serves as an interesting experimental platform to test the most extreme ideas and see how things work out
- colechristensen 3y ago
  >The bottom line is getting officers out of their offices. The rest will follow. This is not necessarily true. An analogy would be saying a company has a software quality problem where things are always late and broken... and thinking the solution is hiring more managers and getting them more involved in the day-to-day work of programmers. Management is a part of the problem but throwing more managers at the problem isn't the solution. Defense acquisitions is hideously complex and involves many stakeholders from entirely different heirarchies often changing their minds half way through and making politically- or career-motivated decisions that have little to do with "doing a good job". Fixing this involves somebody or some group motivated more by "doing a good job" than everybody else's motivations to go in and sort out the inefficiencies and broken processes and organization. It's hard. It's not a matter of "we need more of our guys in on this".
  - gonzo41 3y ago
    > getting them more involved in the day-to-day work of programmers. Just a point. Getting people involved in the day to day of programmers, or really any one building things is exactly what works. The more management know, the better they are at unblocking problems, or steering people onto the correct task. It's magical thinking to heap crap on managers and expect that devs or welders will just build the correct thing.
    - colechristensen 3y ago
      I take it you’ve never been micromanaged. Management well done doesn’t equal just more of it. Organizations in trouble often just reach for exactly that and in doing so make things worse. Better can mean doing more in some places, but things don’t automatically improve by adding more management.
  - nateglims 3y ago
    My understanding is that the officers are supposed to be doing this oversight and not traditional management. The shift-left aspect of it is more about correcting problems sooner rather than letting a huge capital investment go to waste.
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sciurus 3y ago
Related recent opinion piece- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/04/navy-houthis-ships-shipyards-sailors/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/04/navy-hout...
spacecadet 3y ago
Most of my direct relatives work for Bath Iron Works. Many as fitters. I wont say much more. The article ain't wrong. Who is going to change it?
- maroonblazer 3y ago
  Apropos of nothing, my son and I toured the coast of Maine last summer and visited the maritime museum in Bath, including the boat tour that passes by Bath Iron Works. Very impressive facility and a highlight of our trip.
falcor84 3y ago
The best idea I heard of to solve this problem is the ancient Greek "liturgy" [0], whereby the richest citizens would be compelled to spend their money on public works such as ship construction. Scott Alexander recently made a good (though somewhat tongue in cheek) case for reviving this [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgy_%28ancient_Greece%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgy_%28ancient_Greece%29 [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-presidential-platform https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-presidential-platform
- nateglims 3y ago
  I’m not sure tossing free money at the shipbuilders will make them more productive per dollar
Sparkyte 3y ago
We actually build with other countries to build up relationships and defense pacts. It is a complicated dance, but it would be nicer to bring back some jobs here in this category.
trynumber9 3y ago
Not sold on the short-range air defense destroyer idea. I think we want destroyers also capable of intercepting ballsitic missiles after seeing what has happened in Ukraine. The changes to procurement do not sound harmful but why go for a less capable ship? South Korea, Japan, and China are building larger and more capable multi-role ships. Are they all wrong? And regarding software, didn't Sqlite originate on Aegis destroyers?
- nradov 3y ago
  Area air defense capabilities including ABM is growing more important by the day. Has this guy been paying attention to what's happening in China and the Middle East? And building slower surface warships just to save money doesn't make any sense. Aircraft carriers have to be fast in order to generate enough wind over the deck for flight operations. And the escorting destroyers need to be just as fast to keep up. Amphibious vessels are already designed with wider hulls and lower top speeds.
  - livueta 3y ago
    It's not just to save money - it also increases the number you can crank out in a big hurry. In WWII, escort carriers were small, slow, lightly armored and yet came in absolutely clutch because some slow air cover that needs extensive destroyer/cruiser babysitting >>> no air cover at all once all the fleet carriers of both sides were done mutually annihilating each other (iirc at one point the US was down to one operational fleet carrier in the Pacific; the Saratoga in late 42/early 43) due to how most leaders hadn't fully grasped just how lethal massed air power was, some figures like Halsey aside. In that breach, and even later on e.g. Battle off Samar, escort carriers were indispensable. Of the 151 aircraft carriers built in the U.S. during World War II, 122 were escort carriers. I don't think it's totally implausible that massed cruise/hypersonic missile attacks won't play out similarly in a future conflict, leading to a scenario where both sides need to rebuild asap. Being able to crank out limited-purpose ships is important if you want to maintain any capability at all, even if that capability is less flexible than the gucci option.
    - deleted 3y ago
discarded1023 3y ago
On a related note, for those who don't mind reading 17k words on industrial decline, is Ian Jack's great take on (civilian) shipbuilding in Glasgow. The relevance to TFA is the difficulty of recovering the arts of ship construction lost to offshoring, financial engineering, politics, whatever. And it's a great read. [1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/ian-jack/chasing-steel https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/ian-jack/chasing-ste...
diracs_stache 3y ago
For the interested reader: https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/ https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/ (The Good Commander has dedicated himself to exposing problems of this sort that plague our Navy) I had the pleasure of spending part of my service trying to escape the shipyards. I lacked the perspective of these widespread issues as a lowly Junior Officer (I was trying to survive the equivalent of the daily standup without getting flayed for any number of issues that would become our responsibility with little agency to help). But I mostly fought against system upgrades that had no semblance of deconfliction ( my tracker had something like 8-10 medium mods with another 2 large ones eating our bandwidth). A shop of a handful of sailors that had to provide maintenance support, and operational support, conduct training/development and also quite literally babysitting some of the shipyard workers and many lacked experience (I certainly did). The QA work was poor as was acceptance testing, and always created issues later as kicking cans down the road created issues during workups. Also culture goes down the drain as the leadership has no incentive to address the inevitable scope increases ("growth work") will require more time in the shipyard which is unacceptable. I've read a lot of administrative action proposed (which is part of the issue) but as others have stated the quality must improve, shoddy work does absurd damage down the line (fires a la Bonhomme Richard and Oscar Austin) and defeats the purpose of mooring up to get the vessel right.
- DavidPastrnak 3y ago
  I was an enlisted sailor aboard the USS Mount Whitney when it experienced a major fire in the shipyards in Croatia and extended our visit by months[0]. Career growth was halted during that period for nearly everyone as they spent months babysitting contractors and standing extra watches with only the slightest bit of valuable training conducted over the period. [0] https://news.usni.org/2015/08/03/command-ship-uss-mount-whitney-suffers-45-minute-pier-side-fire-no-injures-reported https://news.usni.org/2015/08/03/command-ship-uss-mount-whit...
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  I love Salamander, but respectfully disagree when it comes to Cultural Marxism being responsible for the destruction of the officer corps. Has it[1] helped? Probably not? But you're tweensing needles off the fir tree in the middle of a very big forest, and the forest is made of bankers. Everything else, he's great. [1] Insofar as Kulturbolschewismus is an actual thing, that is
lumost 3y ago
The DCS game provide interesting simulations of how different combat styles and doctrines play out. An early take away is that CIWIS and other close range air defense are broadly ineffective in a major engagement. They provide a necessary short range component which can be effective in limited circumstances-but little more. Likewise, armor is ineffective as it is always possible to use/build a bigger bomb. However speed is effective at making long range strikes harder. IMO the useful observation in the article is the cost difference between US, Japanese, and South Korean ships. I’d be curious to understand whether this is purely due to efficiency, or a difference in war doctrines and missions.
- nocoiner 3y ago
  Command: Modern Operations is very good at this as well. A bit dry, and a little pricy, but lots and lots of depth.
- maxerickson 3y ago
  It seems likely that most of the cost difference comes down to the US ships being built at shipyards that specialize at working with the US Navy and the others being built at shipyards that mostly competitively build commercial vessels.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    A lot of the costs involved are in infrastructure and the running a maintenance of that infrastructure, which is the same regardless of whether you are building two ships every 10 years, or 200.
  - ehnto 3y ago
    That sounds right to me, a lack of competition and low supply of skills and infrastructure brings costs up. Bit of a chicken and egg problem though, if you don't manufacture locally because of cost you'll never build up a competitive industry that brings the cost down.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  Interesting then that the article challenges conventional wisdom, arguing for more armor on slower ships.
hindsightbias 3y ago
There are no crews for these fantasies. Ships and missiles are easy. If half your population is obese and the other half is ADHD, the remaining 3% isn’t going to sea for $20/hr. They can make more at Amazon and still be treated better.
- joyeuse6701 3y ago
  Draft, boot camp, stimulants, easy.
  - Abekkus 3y ago
    The long-term Stimulant-medicated do not hold up well in hotter climes. Actually, daily early morning Physical exertion/exhaustion works better than stimulant drugs to combat ADHD anyways.
    - hindsightbias 3y ago
      That destroyer collision in the SW Pacific, rescuers had to go into the flooding deck to wake seaman up. They had to be drugged out of their minds.
- missedthecue 3y ago
  The new Ford carrier is undermanned by hundreds of sailors, and the Navy missed every single one of its recruitment goals in FY2023, by thousands. It's a chronic issue at this point for practically every branch. Only way to actually fix this would be a draft but it goes without saying that this has it's own issues.
- maxglute 3y ago
  This is the real bottleneck and what navy force design 2045 wants to add 150 unmanned hulls. But that's still going to require more shipbuilding capacity. Assuming it's not fantasy. Sometimes I think Navy/planners see writing on the wall and realize future is not naval.
Animats 3y ago
Here's a view, from the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, mostly by retired Naval officers. [1] War starts in 2026, China invades Taiwan, takes over the southern third of the island, then stalls. A long war ensues, involving Taiwan, the US, China, and Japan. 2026 is close enough that nothing not already under construction will be available. [1] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/december/war-2026-phase-iii-scenario https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/december/war...
- pi-e-sigma 3y ago
  That's pure nonsense. Here's how it's really going to play out: China keeps building warships and waits patiently. Once it's navy outclasses the US Navy the US simply abandons Taiwan because it won't dare to get in a shooting war with China when it's guaranteed to lose it.
  - Animats 3y ago
    Xi Jinping is 70, and he wants to see this happen while he's still running things. That affects the timing. It's a failure of dictators. If Hitler had taken a decade to consolidate Europe into Greater Germany, remaining at peace with the UK and the USSR, things might have worked better for the Nazis.
    - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
      If Xi wanted to invade Taiwan he could have done it already. The US is not able to militarily defend it anymore. Obviously it would cause massive, massive problems for China, for instance it could completely stall the economic growth and as a result likely even create political instability but if 'uniting' Taiwan was the goal worth pursuing above anything else and it would need to be done NOW because Xi wants to live to see it happen then Chinese military is already capable of it and would have done it already. But they don't because they are rising superpower and Xi apparently doesn't want to see united Taiwan that badly or his grip on power is not so strong and others are not that keen on a shooting war with the US. So they just wait, because with every passing year China gets stronger and the US weaker. So they don't need to do anything to 'win by default'.
patrickhogan1 3y ago
From article -> "British yards using traditional techniques could turn out liberty ships cheaper than US yards like Kaiser's Richmond, CA" During WW2, if British shipyards had been tasked with constructing Liberty ships for the US, it would have hurt the war effort. Many British yards were heavily damaged by aerial bombings, making them less capable than U.S. yards such as Kaiser's in Richmond, CA, especially for large-scale projects like Liberty ship production.
wolverine876 3y ago
> I'm a guy that loves to learn about new things and occasionaly write about them. I read a lot of foreign policy, which often overlaps with military. The author's facts and assumptions are often in conflict with everyone else, and the author seems unware of that - not addressing very many essential issues. > Block-Style Construction / Parts of the ship (or "blocks") are made in workshops and then transported to a dry dock. Cranes move the blocks into place, and workers connect them. The US Navy's shipbuilding contractors (the Navy doesn't build its own ships, or at least not ones of any significance) have been doing that for many years, at least on some kinds of ships. > Lack of Integrated Testing / The Navy is infamous for its paperwork. It prefers standards and supplier certifications instead of actual testing (and often drags its feet on testing even when Congress mandates it). I might misunderstand the author's intent, but the US Navy does extensive testing and qualification of new ships, sometimes a year or more, just like the rest of the US military. For example, the latest aircraft carrier, the Gerald Ford, went through eight years of tests (it was a new model of carrier). For an idea of what that means, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gerald_R._Ford_(CVN-78)#Operational_and_major_system_testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gerald_R._Ford_(CVN-78)#Op... Here's one test I won't be doing on my new sailfish: On 18 June 2021, Gerald R. Ford completed her first Full Ship Shock Trial ... to ensure that she is able to withstand battle conditions. 40,000 lbs. (18 tonnes) of TNT was detonated underwater, measured as a 3.9 magnitude earthquake by USGS. Additional tests were conducted in July and August, with the test detonations set off closer to the hull. > Single-role ships [instead of multi-role] I've never heard anyone else ever suggest that. Thoughts based on what I have read: The US military is moving aggressively in the opposite direction. They want people and machines to be highly flexible. The main reasons is the advent long-range precision missiles - once the enemy sees you, they now can pretty reliably hit you now. That means you can't concentrate large forces, including lots of specialized personnel and equipment. You can't move and resupply, or even communicate. What does work is smaller units operating within the range of fire, with the personnel you have, and moving and attacking faster than the enemy can react (within their 'OODA loop'). You need highly flexible generalists who take initiative and make decisions on the spot, not rigid specialists coordinating with higher-ups. It also is believed to play to US strengths as a free-thinking, entrepeneurial population; the US trusts its sergeants to make the decisions. Applied to the Navy, they are switching to more, smaller ships. Due to the new precision, long-range (hundreds or thousands of miles) anti-ship missiles, big ships risk too much. For similar reasons, the Navy wants 'distributed lethality', deploying weapons, if even a few, to every ship imaginable. They want to make it hard for an enemy to disable the Navy with missiles. All services report encountering minimums in size, including the Navy: When ships shrink too much, for example, they lack the powerplant for peak power necessary to capabilities like high-end radars, future directed energy weapons, etc. Alsdo, the oceans are an enormous area (2x the land area!). The US Navy has a ~250 ships, and moving a ship to the place it's needed can take weeks. If the available nearby ship is single-role, and it's the wrong kind, what then? Maybe the enemy won't attack it, being the wrong kind of ship for the fight, and will wait for the other ships to arrive. > Speed is the defining feature of some ship classes, like the American Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) > New form factors and propulsion designs are available if missiles devalue top speed. Boxier ships can carry more mass and provide more internal space for crew, armor, and armaments. Again, this author is the only place I've ever heard that. In my limited experience, almost all Navy ships advertise similar top speeds (around 30 knots), to the point that I wonder if there's a reason for it - possibly they are just not revealing the true speed. Again, oceans are enormous; moving a ship on-station can take weeks. The idea is to delay that even more? The LCS's defining feature was to reduce the cost of low-end missions by using low-end ships, instead of wasting multi-billion dollar warships on (e.g.) chasing smugglers in powerboats. The other defining features were a non-very-successful attempt at modular, swappable equipment for different capabilities, and armor insufficient for a real naval battle (not really their purpose). > An alternative option is to use electric motors powered by diesel generators. > Inexpensive marine diesel engines can power the generators. These engines are reliable and can efficiently burn a wide range of fuels. Newer navy ships already use direct-drive shafts for propulsion, IIRC. Regardless, the warships may have requirements beyond the niceties above. For example, each Ford-class carrier uses (looking quickly) four 30-ton propellers. Maybe they can use some inexpensive marine diesel engines? > Use Radar Judiciously > Moving to smaller radars (150 km range?) on most ships would have significant benefits with few drawbacks. The US military's fundamental approach is to use sensors to see the enemy before they see us, network those sensors in a mesh network (satellites, planes, ships, ground-based), and use computers to integrate, filter, and present all this info into real-time situational awareness to all units. Saying 'maybe we should cut back radars' is like telling OpenAI 'maybe we should cut back on GPUs'. Next! > Missile Armor > Missiles aren't too destructive because the Houthis have fired anti-ship missiles at dozens of cargo ships in the Red Sea, most sailing away with minor damage. And I shot my sibling with a sling-shot, and they survived, so who needs body armor - or cover for that matter? I suspect the Russian and Chinese anti-ship missiles might be a little different than the Houthi ones. I've never seen anyone suggest that armor was an effective counter-measure against missiles (or mines). Maybe this author knows something that everyone else overlooked. > Artillery shells and gravity bombs can replace cruise missiles Not very useful when the enemy has precision missiles with hundreds to thousands of miles in range. Artillery? Like WWI? > Limit Software Again, the author is going in the wrong direction; it's unthinkable, IMHO. Could you imagine doing this for any modern business? 'Hey boss, my proposal for our disruptive strategy is - minimize computers!' The Navy is just going to give up all the capabilities of computers? In fact, they see it (rightly) as the present and the future, with many military assets being essentially flying/floating on-site computer platforms. Software also has the advantage of being far easier to deploy, upgrade, and repair remotely - as in thousands of miles away, under fire in a war zone - than hardware.
briantakita 3y ago
A common criticism of the defense industry, or relating to government contractors in all industries, is misaligned incentives. Military contractors are incentivized to maximize profit, not win wars. Health care contractors are incentivized to maximize profit, not care for people. Technology contractors are incentivized to maximize profit, not innovate. And so on... Which may explain why Russia's military is more effective than US led NATO. Or why US Health Care is relatively expensive compared to other countries offering equivalent care. Or why massive tech initiatives need to be rescued or are a costly failure.
- ranger207 3y ago
  If you want to point to misaligned incentives, I don't think a conscript army like Russia's is a good counterexample. In fact, they're probably the prime example of how misaligned incentives makes an organization less effective.
  - briantakita 3y ago
    I'll leave it to the Russians to determine if they are achieving their publicly stated goals or not. In the meantime, I think we should focus on helping our government better & more efficiently serve the people in America...rather than flooding the world with weapons, publically lecturing about "values" while privately destabilizing governments abroad & arming genocidal maniacs & Banderite Nazis...while disproportionately enriching select contractors & politically entrenched institutions.
ranger207 3y ago
reformer detected Let's start with sensors, since that's probably the most important part of a modern warship: a radar 10m above the surface of the water can theoretically see a target at 10km altitude ~350km away. Bombers are the primary choice to launch missiles, as they're basically a reusable first stage. Surfaced launched missiles don't travel at low altitude because the lower atmosphere has lots of drag. And of course Chinese antiship ballistic missiles are not known for their sea-skimming capabilities. So there is a theoretical need for long-range radars. Also, stealth: stealth isn't binary, it just makes things _harder_ to detect, not impossible. A 350km radar may only be able to detect a stealth fighter/missile at, say, 100km; a 150km radar could detect it at 50km or less. This obviously creates massive gaps, so if you want to fill those gaps, you need more ships, and whoops, now your fleet is more expensive. Ships are multirole for two main reasons: first, larger ships are perfectly capable of carrying adequate loadouts for every role at once. A theoretical 9700 ton antisubmarine destroyer would not be significantly more effective at ASW than a 9700 ton Flight III Burke, because there's just not a lot to do with them. Slap on another helicopter or two, add a slightly larger sonar... what else? Possibly surprisingly, helicopters are the best ASW weapons out there once they've been detected (maritime patrol aircraft and other submarines are the best), and it only takes a couple to prosecute a contact. For antiair warfare, you can either have radar and missiles on the same ship or not. In the former case, as we'll talk about in a second, the marginal cost to add ASW capability is much lower than a whole 'nother ship. If you split radar and missiles, you have to worry about your kill chain being twice as vulnerable. If either is taken out then both are useless. Second, fewer ships is cheaper basically always. There's certain amounts of fixed work on any ship, like engines and stuff, and you can't really get rid of them[0]. If you add more stuff onto a new ship, you add the crew of that new stuff, plus a few more sailors for the larger ship. If you have two ships, you have to add a whole new ship's base cost in sailors, and sailors are by far the biggest obstacle to the US Navy right now. [0] You may be thinking that greater automation would enable lower crews, and you'd be right. Modern container ships have like 20 crew or less. It was so effective that the Navy tried it on the Zumwalt class destroyers. It turns out that Navy ships can't always expect to be in peaceful waters, and when you suddenly need 20 extra bodies to fight a fire or shore up a leaking compartment (or even just do more maintenance on higher-spec Navy engines) then automation isn't helpful. Next, power. He proposes hybrid electric propulsion. He's correct in that regard and everyone's moving to that, called Integrated Electric Propulsion. However, he proposes eliminating gas turbines, and that's the wrong way to go. As mentioned above, sensors are the most important part of a ship, and bigger engines is always better for more power. Also though, next-generation ships are going to be using even more power, because everything's going to get lasers. Big gas turbine engines is important for speed yes, but it's getting to be even more important for power. On to armor. An armor piercing Mark 8 16" shell fired from an Iowa class battleship has a bursting charge of... 18.55kg. (all data from navweaps) It has a muzzle velocity of 762 meters per second (~mach 2.2), with a striking velocity of 514m/s (~mach 1.5) at maximum range of 38.7km. The shell weighs 1225kg. Armor to defend against that is legendarily thick. Compare that to, say, a Russian/Indian BrahMos antiship cruise missile. (figures taken from wikipedia so a little suspect) The BrahMos has a maximum speed of 2.8 mach, a range of 500km from a ship, weighs 3000kg (presumably when launched), and has a warhead of 300kg. Other than mass, the missile is better in every way than the battleship shell. Not to mention higher accuracy and the like. If you wanted to armor ships to withstand more power than battleship shells, then good luck. How about armament? Oh wait I just showed why missiles are so much better than artillery. If you need sustained firepower, then yeah artillery is great. That basically never comes up on the water. (Not related to warships, but I really don't think the author knows anything about gravity bombs. Do you know how many gravity bombs it took to destroy the Thanh Hóa bridge? Answer: the gravity bombs couldn't hit the target with enough accuracy to destroy it. Do you know how many laser guided bombs it took? About 30. Oh, well, maybe we can make it up with better planes and keep the cheaper gravity bombs you say? A JDAM kit turns an unguided bomb into a guided one for $27k in 2011 dollars. A bomb at the time cost $3000. You can either get a hit on the first shot with a single $30k JDAM or take 10 bombs, possibly mounted on multiple aircraft, and then still likely not get a hit.) "Short Range Air Defense Missiles over large interceptors." What if the short range interceptor misses? You lose your ship. Interceptors aren't measured in cost, they're measured in cost of the thing they're protecting. Your long range interceptor misses? You have another chance. Assume a probability of kill (pK) or 0.5 for example: one short range interceptor has a pK of 0.5; a long range interceptor backed up by a short range one has a pK of 0.75. And if the long range one misses, you get to reuse the short range one. "Ballistic missiles over hypersonic missiles." Yeah probably. That's part of the reason why the US isn't investing so much in hypersonics, although they use planes rather than ballistic missiles because you launch a ballistic missile and there's suddenly a question of whether or not it's a nuke. All that about his ship design being said, his shipbuilding stuff isn't bad. I'm in favor of cancelling the Jones Act and letting the yards fail just because I don't think there's any other way Congress is going to care enough to change the status quo, but that's another issue. Sorry if this is a little disjointed, it's 3:00AM here.
yyyfb 3y ago
I don't see mention of naval drones, even though they seem like effective harassment against US and Russia in present conflicts. I wonder what would happen if you got 10,000 cheap drones for the price of just one traditional navy ship.

147 points by jseliger 3y ago

Letting yards fail may be the most politically sensitive change. It will be a disaster if the Navy decides to toughen up on yards but waits until the ship is delivered in poor condition to lay the hammer down. The earlier Naval officers are in the yards and shops identifying problems, the less painful changes for the shipyard will be. Companies can fire bad managers or exit the business while some value remains. The bottom line is getting officers out of their offices. The rest will follow. Tough love.

pi-e-sigma 3y ago
This is all just red herring. The decline of shipbuilding in the US is just the result of the general, nation-wide deindustrialization. And analogously, you can't revive the shipbuilding without reviving bigger industrial base.
- pjscott 3y ago
  The article claims that the US has over 100,000 shipyard workers, while Japan has about 70,000 and yet produces 20x more tonnage. This suggests that there's a lot more to it than just US deindustrialization.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    But it also goes into some detail about why that's true as well. Essentially, to me the biggest issue is that Defense spending is a Congressional pork trough. Instead of centralizing for efficiency, everything is spread out so everyone gets their share. It's a decent report for someone that has the merest of an idea what the Navy does/uses/needs. It shows how thoughts about various aspects of a ship's needs have changed over the years including walking back from implemented changes as they've responded to opponents' reactions to those changes. It's also in an interesting format seeing the difference from a report vs a presentation style slide deck that must be so tempting to use. Glad to see that actual reports are alive and well outside of the tech bubble.
    - practicemaths 3y ago
      Centralized what exactly for efficiency in defense spending? edit: downvote if you want but it's rather rude to do so with out providing an answer to my question. It comes off more like you're offended that your assumption in thought is being questioned.
    - gamepsys 3y ago
      I don't think a single central source for ship building is probably the best path. We should probably have one on each coast at minimum.
      - hinkley 3y ago
        It should take large number of bombers or ICBMs to render the US unable to build or repair her Navy. In World War II we hijacked most of the industrial base for the war machine. After the war, there was incentive to be certain that the US was capable of outfitting the Armed Forces regardless of whether manufacturing slowly shifted overseas. South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are too geographically close to a number of likely antagonists in the next global conflict. In the latter case, the distance might be negative. They may be occupied or their industry bombed to dust as the opening moves in a protracted conflict. There is something to be said for the DoD to effectively be paying rent (or a retainer, if you prefer that analogy) to Western Hemisphere manufacturing, with a large fraction in the continental US.
  - floxy 3y ago
    What moats do U.S. shipyards have that prevent disruption? Or why doesn't someone spin up the SpaceX for shipbuilding?
    - teruakohatu 3y ago
      > Or why doesn't someone spin up the SpaceX for shipbuilding? Do VCs invest in industries that are so mature that they are almost as old and civilisation itself?
      - teyrana 3y ago
        "Anduril industries" has entered the chat... Long story short, yes, VCs have entered the defense industry (writ large) and although I have my doubts about whether said VC money will achieve FB-like returns, they are trying. And to answer the GP poster.... The industry is not "ripe for disruption" because it's dominated more by the "invisible hand of the lobbyist" much more than the "invisible hand of the market". Fwiw, from my ~20 years in the defense industry.
      - Teever 3y ago
        You say this as if there's no innovation in modern shipbuilding, as if the Koreans and Japanese who dominate the industry have just gotten really good at lashing together logs to make really big rafts. That would be like saying that VC's don't invest in communication companies because communication is as old as civilization, and who wants to invest in semaphores and stone tablets anyways?
      - obmelvin 3y ago
        You might find this recent article interesting about the uptick in people moving from Pentagon -> VC, as opposed to Pentagon -> Prime Defense Contractor. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/us/politics/pentagon-venture-capitalists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/us/politics/pentagon-vent...
      - nvm0n2 3y ago
        VCs weren't behind SpaceX. Musk invested his own money.
  - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
    That's exactly how deindustrialization looks like. Efficiency goes down because nobody knows how to build ships anymore (metaphorically speaking), so more people are required than before. A lousy analogy: think about history of agriculture mechanization but in reverse: the less mechanization the more work needs to be done manually again and the machines that are still in operation are harder and harder to operate because spare parts and technical expertise are getting harder to come by.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    Why the implication that we measure industrialisation in number of people? People are almost categorically not a factor in industrialisation. It is all about processes, technologies, expertise, organisation and economics. The English speaking world has been on a decades-long campaign to reign in industry. Energy availability has been reduced. Environmental protection has been given supremacy. Manufacturing outsourced to Asia. An impenetrable net of regulations put in place to force businesses to conform to the average. There is the pattern of bailing out incompetent managers so that the financial system doesn't have to reform. In that environment, number of people is a weak metric. The US has people, educated people and otherwise great people. I don't think at any point anyone has accused this of being a people problem. The issue is that capable people are being prevented from improving the situation.
    - kibwen 3y ago
      > The issue is that capable people are being prevented from improving the situation. What situation, specifically, needs to be improved? The US Navy does not, at present, have any need whatsoever to drastically increase the size of its fleet. Every ship that gets built is a ship that needs to be manned and maintained, which siphons money from elsewhere. We can bemoan the inefficiency of the existing shipbuilders, but that's just how the US sells welfare programs to conservative voters. If you think that a hot war with China is in the cards, forget investing in shipbuilding infrastructure and instead put that money towards onshoring the rest of the national critical supply chain, much of which is in far more dire straits (ahem) than the shipyards.
      - thereisnospork 3y ago
        Shipbuilding inefficient and the lack of onshore critical supply chain are two symptoms of the same problem: whether it's chips, shells, or ships: production capacity is critical in any prolonged conflict - which is something we've been agnostically gutting and impeding. It's desirable that we be able to build ships well[0] because being able to build ships well (or not) is a reasonable proxy for being able to build drones, fighter planes, or ballistic missles (whatever the next war calls for). [0]Read: unacceptable for it to be otherwise for a superpower that would like to stay one. Actually cranking out ships is another thing but the capacity needs to be there (and tested/validated accordingly).
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    Not really. It’s more about the politicization of military contracting. Every congressional district gets a piece of the pie, so the process is incredibly inefficient by design. For all the hooh-rah, the US military is probably the greatest make work program since the pyramids. Many industries, especially tech, exist due to the largesse of the military. When you hear pandering politicians quack about efficiency, they are a fool or a liar.
  - mdorazio 3y ago
    What kind of tonnage, though? A huge containership is easier to build than a modern nuclear submarine, for example, and gives you a hell of a lot more tonnage.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    Tonnage by itself is not a great comparison. E.g. one super-tanker (~250000) would have about twice the tonnage as an aircraft carrier (~150000). There's no doubt that the US shipbuilding is stagnating, but it's not _that_ much stagnating.
- willis936 3y ago
  You should talk to some shipbuilding insiders. It is a culture of phoning it in. Really most all US defense contractors have that issue to some extent. Fat and happy.
  - pstuart 3y ago
    Isn't a core issue that budgets (cost and time) are effectively fictional and that a lot of work is time and materials so there's no incentive to deliver high quality under budget and on time?
    - willis936 3y ago
      In my opinion the issue is cultural. Everything's in place to churn out a lot of ships, jets, missiles, night vision goggles, etc. Budgets are very high and schedules are realistic. Failure isn't scary enough. It's a problem that can only fixed from the top with sustained effort.
      - pstuart 3y ago
        If you were in a position of power to effect change, what would you do about it?
        willis936 3y ago
        Lead by example. Demonstrate what putting in effort looks like, be passionate about the projects, and inspire others to be passionate about them. I've made a very conscious decision to not work on weapons, but if I dedicated my life to making weapons then I would hopefully have a core drive to cultivate. Give meaning to the work. The security of your family and way of life are at stake. If that isn't gaining traction after about six months then try to shake things up with the stick. Put middle managers on alert that failures without improvement won't be tolerated. "A" position of power is insufficient here. "The" position of power is necessary. It's a big ocean and one person needs to have control of their section to be able to affect change.
- huytersd 3y ago
  The very notion of a service based industry is idiotic and feels gutturally wrong. If the US can’t bring back it manufacturing industries, we’re done for.
  - nateglims 3y ago
    As an engineer I also feel the "realness" or whatever of manufacturing a real product, but countries that don't shift into a service economy tend to struggle more: there's fewer profitable investments and not enough places to sell goods. Our liberalization policies from the 90s until recently would not let us maintain the industries, and places like Germany or China with industrial policies more favorable to manufacturing are criticized by a lot of our policy makers, economists, media, etc.
    - eru 3y ago
      > Our liberalization policies from the 90s until recently would not let us maintain the industries, [...] What is that supposed to mean? Btw, value added in manufacturing in the US has not shrunken during that time, as far as I am aware.
  - maxerickson 3y ago
    It's not like there isn't manufacturing in the US. It's not great that the US shipbuilders are apparently fat and lazy, but for example, the US has 70+ modern destroyers in service, compared to the ~dozen that the apparently much more efficient Japanese and Korean shipbuilders have constructed for their countries. The complaint is thus that we should have more for what we paid...
  - eru 3y ago
    Why? What's so magic about manufacturing?
    - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
      Maybe the fact that you need the physical, manufactured goods to live a comfortable life unlike 'financial services', that won't cloth you, won't transport you and definitively won't feed you.
- sfifs 3y ago
  It's the result of American business culture prioritising and incentivizing "shareholder value creation" (aka making wealthy fund managers more wealthy) above all else and regulatory capture of the government by the wealthy. For the rest of us on the outside, the US often serves as an interesting experimental platform to test the most extreme ideas and see how things work out
colechristensen 3y ago
>The bottom line is getting officers out of their offices. The rest will follow. This is not necessarily true. An analogy would be saying a company has a software quality problem where things are always late and broken... and thinking the solution is hiring more managers and getting them more involved in the day-to-day work of programmers. Management is a part of the problem but throwing more managers at the problem isn't the solution. Defense acquisitions is hideously complex and involves many stakeholders from entirely different heirarchies often changing their minds half way through and making politically- or career-motivated decisions that have little to do with "doing a good job". Fixing this involves somebody or some group motivated more by "doing a good job" than everybody else's motivations to go in and sort out the inefficiencies and broken processes and organization. It's hard. It's not a matter of "we need more of our guys in on this".
- gonzo41 3y ago
  > getting them more involved in the day-to-day work of programmers. Just a point. Getting people involved in the day to day of programmers, or really any one building things is exactly what works. The more management know, the better they are at unblocking problems, or steering people onto the correct task. It's magical thinking to heap crap on managers and expect that devs or welders will just build the correct thing.
  - colechristensen 3y ago
    I take it you’ve never been micromanaged. Management well done doesn’t equal just more of it. Organizations in trouble often just reach for exactly that and in doing so make things worse. Better can mean doing more in some places, but things don’t automatically improve by adding more management.
- nateglims 3y ago
  My understanding is that the officers are supposed to be doing this oversight and not traditional management. The shift-left aspect of it is more about correcting problems sooner rather than letting a huge capital investment go to waste.
- 3y ago
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sciurus 3y ago

Related recent opinion piece- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/04/navy-houthis-ships-shipyards-sailors/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/04/navy-hout...

spacecadet 3y ago

Most of my direct relatives work for Bath Iron Works. Many as fitters. I wont say much more. The article ain't wrong. Who is going to change it?

maroonblazer 3y ago
Apropos of nothing, my son and I toured the coast of Maine last summer and visited the maritime museum in Bath, including the boat tour that passes by Bath Iron Works. Very impressive facility and a highlight of our trip.

falcor84 3y ago

The best idea I heard of to solve this problem is the ancient Greek "liturgy" [0], whereby the richest citizens would be compelled to spend their money on public works such as ship construction. Scott Alexander recently made a good (though somewhat tongue in cheek) case for reviving this [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgy_%28ancient_Greece%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgy_%28ancient_Greece%29 [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-presidential-platform https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-presidential-platform

nateglims 3y ago
I’m not sure tossing free money at the shipbuilders will make them more productive per dollar

Sparkyte 3y ago

We actually build with other countries to build up relationships and defense pacts. It is a complicated dance, but it would be nicer to bring back some jobs here in this category.

trynumber9 3y ago

Not sold on the short-range air defense destroyer idea. I think we want destroyers also capable of intercepting ballsitic missiles after seeing what has happened in Ukraine. The changes to procurement do not sound harmful but why go for a less capable ship? South Korea, Japan, and China are building larger and more capable multi-role ships. Are they all wrong? And regarding software, didn't Sqlite originate on Aegis destroyers?

nradov 3y ago
Area air defense capabilities including ABM is growing more important by the day. Has this guy been paying attention to what's happening in China and the Middle East? And building slower surface warships just to save money doesn't make any sense. Aircraft carriers have to be fast in order to generate enough wind over the deck for flight operations. And the escorting destroyers need to be just as fast to keep up. Amphibious vessels are already designed with wider hulls and lower top speeds.
- livueta 3y ago
  It's not just to save money - it also increases the number you can crank out in a big hurry. In WWII, escort carriers were small, slow, lightly armored and yet came in absolutely clutch because some slow air cover that needs extensive destroyer/cruiser babysitting >>> no air cover at all once all the fleet carriers of both sides were done mutually annihilating each other (iirc at one point the US was down to one operational fleet carrier in the Pacific; the Saratoga in late 42/early 43) due to how most leaders hadn't fully grasped just how lethal massed air power was, some figures like Halsey aside. In that breach, and even later on e.g. Battle off Samar, escort carriers were indispensable. Of the 151 aircraft carriers built in the U.S. during World War II, 122 were escort carriers. I don't think it's totally implausible that massed cruise/hypersonic missile attacks won't play out similarly in a future conflict, leading to a scenario where both sides need to rebuild asap. Being able to crank out limited-purpose ships is important if you want to maintain any capability at all, even if that capability is less flexible than the gucci option.
  - deleted 3y ago

discarded1023 3y ago

On a related note, for those who don't mind reading 17k words on industrial decline, is Ian Jack's great take on (civilian) shipbuilding in Glasgow. The relevance to TFA is the difficulty of recovering the arts of ship construction lost to offshoring, financial engineering, politics, whatever. And it's a great read. [1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/ian-jack/chasing-steel https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/ian-jack/chasing-ste...

diracs_stache 3y ago

For the interested reader: https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/ https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/ (The Good Commander has dedicated himself to exposing problems of this sort that plague our Navy) I had the pleasure of spending part of my service trying to escape the shipyards. I lacked the perspective of these widespread issues as a lowly Junior Officer (I was trying to survive the equivalent of the daily standup without getting flayed for any number of issues that would become our responsibility with little agency to help). But I mostly fought against system upgrades that had no semblance of deconfliction ( my tracker had something like 8-10 medium mods with another 2 large ones eating our bandwidth). A shop of a handful of sailors that had to provide maintenance support, and operational support, conduct training/development and also quite literally babysitting some of the shipyard workers and many lacked experience (I certainly did). The QA work was poor as was acceptance testing, and always created issues later as kicking cans down the road created issues during workups. Also culture goes down the drain as the leadership has no incentive to address the inevitable scope increases ("growth work") will require more time in the shipyard which is unacceptable. I've read a lot of administrative action proposed (which is part of the issue) but as others have stated the quality must improve, shoddy work does absurd damage down the line (fires a la Bonhomme Richard and Oscar Austin) and defeats the purpose of mooring up to get the vessel right.

DavidPastrnak 3y ago
I was an enlisted sailor aboard the USS Mount Whitney when it experienced a major fire in the shipyards in Croatia and extended our visit by months[0]. Career growth was halted during that period for nearly everyone as they spent months babysitting contractors and standing extra watches with only the slightest bit of valuable training conducted over the period. [0] https://news.usni.org/2015/08/03/command-ship-uss-mount-whitney-suffers-45-minute-pier-side-fire-no-injures-reported https://news.usni.org/2015/08/03/command-ship-uss-mount-whit...
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
I love Salamander, but respectfully disagree when it comes to Cultural Marxism being responsible for the destruction of the officer corps. Has it[1] helped? Probably not? But you're tweensing needles off the fir tree in the middle of a very big forest, and the forest is made of bankers. Everything else, he's great. [1] Insofar as Kulturbolschewismus is an actual thing, that is

lumost 3y ago

The DCS game provide interesting simulations of how different combat styles and doctrines play out. An early take away is that CIWIS and other close range air defense are broadly ineffective in a major engagement. They provide a necessary short range component which can be effective in limited circumstances-but little more. Likewise, armor is ineffective as it is always possible to use/build a bigger bomb. However speed is effective at making long range strikes harder. IMO the useful observation in the article is the cost difference between US, Japanese, and South Korean ships. I’d be curious to understand whether this is purely due to efficiency, or a difference in war doctrines and missions.

nocoiner 3y ago
Command: Modern Operations is very good at this as well. A bit dry, and a little pricy, but lots and lots of depth.
maxerickson 3y ago
It seems likely that most of the cost difference comes down to the US ships being built at shipyards that specialize at working with the US Navy and the others being built at shipyards that mostly competitively build commercial vessels.
- adastra22 3y ago
  A lot of the costs involved are in infrastructure and the running a maintenance of that infrastructure, which is the same regardless of whether you are building two ships every 10 years, or 200.
- ehnto 3y ago
  That sounds right to me, a lack of competition and low supply of skills and infrastructure brings costs up. Bit of a chicken and egg problem though, if you don't manufacture locally because of cost you'll never build up a competitive industry that brings the cost down.
nvm0n2 3y ago
Interesting then that the article challenges conventional wisdom, arguing for more armor on slower ships.

hindsightbias 3y ago

There are no crews for these fantasies. Ships and missiles are easy. If half your population is obese and the other half is ADHD, the remaining 3% isn’t going to sea for $20/hr. They can make more at Amazon and still be treated better.

joyeuse6701 3y ago
Draft, boot camp, stimulants, easy.
- Abekkus 3y ago
  The long-term Stimulant-medicated do not hold up well in hotter climes. Actually, daily early morning Physical exertion/exhaustion works better than stimulant drugs to combat ADHD anyways.
  - hindsightbias 3y ago
    That destroyer collision in the SW Pacific, rescuers had to go into the flooding deck to wake seaman up. They had to be drugged out of their minds.
missedthecue 3y ago
The new Ford carrier is undermanned by hundreds of sailors, and the Navy missed every single one of its recruitment goals in FY2023, by thousands. It's a chronic issue at this point for practically every branch. Only way to actually fix this would be a draft but it goes without saying that this has it's own issues.
maxglute 3y ago
This is the real bottleneck and what navy force design 2045 wants to add 150 unmanned hulls. But that's still going to require more shipbuilding capacity. Assuming it's not fantasy. Sometimes I think Navy/planners see writing on the wall and realize future is not naval.

Animats 3y ago

Here's a view, from the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, mostly by retired Naval officers. [1] War starts in 2026, China invades Taiwan, takes over the southern third of the island, then stalls. A long war ensues, involving Taiwan, the US, China, and Japan. 2026 is close enough that nothing not already under construction will be available. [1] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/december/war-2026-phase-iii-scenario https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/december/war...

pi-e-sigma 3y ago
That's pure nonsense. Here's how it's really going to play out: China keeps building warships and waits patiently. Once it's navy outclasses the US Navy the US simply abandons Taiwan because it won't dare to get in a shooting war with China when it's guaranteed to lose it.
- Animats 3y ago
  Xi Jinping is 70, and he wants to see this happen while he's still running things. That affects the timing. It's a failure of dictators. If Hitler had taken a decade to consolidate Europe into Greater Germany, remaining at peace with the UK and the USSR, things might have worked better for the Nazis.
  - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
    If Xi wanted to invade Taiwan he could have done it already. The US is not able to militarily defend it anymore. Obviously it would cause massive, massive problems for China, for instance it could completely stall the economic growth and as a result likely even create political instability but if 'uniting' Taiwan was the goal worth pursuing above anything else and it would need to be done NOW because Xi wants to live to see it happen then Chinese military is already capable of it and would have done it already. But they don't because they are rising superpower and Xi apparently doesn't want to see united Taiwan that badly or his grip on power is not so strong and others are not that keen on a shooting war with the US. So they just wait, because with every passing year China gets stronger and the US weaker. So they don't need to do anything to 'win by default'.

patrickhogan1 3y ago

From article -> "British yards using traditional techniques could turn out liberty ships cheaper than US yards like Kaiser's Richmond, CA" During WW2, if British shipyards had been tasked with constructing Liberty ships for the US, it would have hurt the war effort. Many British yards were heavily damaged by aerial bombings, making them less capable than U.S. yards such as Kaiser's in Richmond, CA, especially for large-scale projects like Liberty ship production.

wolverine876 3y ago

> I'm a guy that loves to learn about new things and occasionaly write about them. I read a lot of foreign policy, which often overlaps with military. The author's facts and assumptions are often in conflict with everyone else, and the author seems unware of that - not addressing very many essential issues. > Block-Style Construction / Parts of the ship (or "blocks") are made in workshops and then transported to a dry dock. Cranes move the blocks into place, and workers connect them. The US Navy's shipbuilding contractors (the Navy doesn't build its own ships, or at least not ones of any significance) have been doing that for many years, at least on some kinds of ships. > Lack of Integrated Testing / The Navy is infamous for its paperwork. It prefers standards and supplier certifications instead of actual testing (and often drags its feet on testing even when Congress mandates it). I might misunderstand the author's intent, but the US Navy does extensive testing and qualification of new ships, sometimes a year or more, just like the rest of the US military. For example, the latest aircraft carrier, the Gerald Ford, went through eight years of tests (it was a new model of carrier). For an idea of what that means, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gerald_R._Ford_(CVN-78)#Operational_and_major_system_testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gerald_R._Ford_(CVN-78)#Op... Here's one test I won't be doing on my new sailfish: On 18 June 2021, Gerald R. Ford completed her first Full Ship Shock Trial ... to ensure that she is able to withstand battle conditions. 40,000 lbs. (18 tonnes) of TNT was detonated underwater, measured as a 3.9 magnitude earthquake by USGS. Additional tests were conducted in July and August, with the test detonations set off closer to the hull. > Single-role ships [instead of multi-role] I've never heard anyone else ever suggest that. Thoughts based on what I have read: The US military is moving aggressively in the opposite direction. They want people and machines to be highly flexible. The main reasons is the advent long-range precision missiles - once the enemy sees you, they now can pretty reliably hit you now. That means you can't concentrate large forces, including lots of specialized personnel and equipment. You can't move and resupply, or even communicate. What does work is smaller units operating within the range of fire, with the personnel you have, and moving and attacking faster than the enemy can react (within their 'OODA loop'). You need highly flexible generalists who take initiative and make decisions on the spot, not rigid specialists coordinating with higher-ups. It also is believed to play to US strengths as a free-thinking, entrepeneurial population; the US trusts its sergeants to make the decisions. Applied to the Navy, they are switching to more, smaller ships. Due to the new precision, long-range (hundreds or thousands of miles) anti-ship missiles, big ships risk too much. For similar reasons, the Navy wants 'distributed lethality', deploying weapons, if even a few, to every ship imaginable. They want to make it hard for an enemy to disable the Navy with missiles. All services report encountering minimums in size, including the Navy: When ships shrink too much, for example, they lack the powerplant for peak power necessary to capabilities like high-end radars, future directed energy weapons, etc. Alsdo, the oceans are an enormous area (2x the land area!). The US Navy has a ~250 ships, and moving a ship to the place it's needed can take weeks. If the available nearby ship is single-role, and it's the wrong kind, what then? Maybe the enemy won't attack it, being the wrong kind of ship for the fight, and will wait for the other ships to arrive. > Speed is the defining feature of some ship classes, like the American Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) > New form factors and propulsion designs are available if missiles devalue top speed. Boxier ships can carry more mass and provide more internal space for crew, armor, and armaments. Again, this author is the only place I've ever heard that. In my limited experience, almost all Navy ships advertise similar top speeds (around 30 knots), to the point that I wonder if there's a reason for it - possibly they are just not revealing the true speed. Again, oceans are enormous; moving a ship on-station can take weeks. The idea is to delay that even more? The LCS's defining feature was to reduce the cost of low-end missions by using low-end ships, instead of wasting multi-billion dollar warships on (e.g.) chasing smugglers in powerboats. The other defining features were a non-very-successful attempt at modular, swappable equipment for different capabilities, and armor insufficient for a real naval battle (not really their purpose). > An alternative option is to use electric motors powered by diesel generators. > Inexpensive marine diesel engines can power the generators. These engines are reliable and can efficiently burn a wide range of fuels. Newer navy ships already use direct-drive shafts for propulsion, IIRC. Regardless, the warships may have requirements beyond the niceties above. For example, each Ford-class carrier uses (looking quickly) four 30-ton propellers. Maybe they can use some inexpensive marine diesel engines? > Use Radar Judiciously > Moving to smaller radars (150 km range?) on most ships would have significant benefits with few drawbacks. The US military's fundamental approach is to use sensors to see the enemy before they see us, network those sensors in a mesh network (satellites, planes, ships, ground-based), and use computers to integrate, filter, and present all this info into real-time situational awareness to all units. Saying 'maybe we should cut back radars' is like telling OpenAI 'maybe we should cut back on GPUs'. Next! > Missile Armor > Missiles aren't too destructive because the Houthis have fired anti-ship missiles at dozens of cargo ships in the Red Sea, most sailing away with minor damage. And I shot my sibling with a sling-shot, and they survived, so who needs body armor - or cover for that matter? I suspect the Russian and Chinese anti-ship missiles might be a little different than the Houthi ones. I've never seen anyone suggest that armor was an effective counter-measure against missiles (or mines). Maybe this author knows something that everyone else overlooked. > Artillery shells and gravity bombs can replace cruise missiles Not very useful when the enemy has precision missiles with hundreds to thousands of miles in range. Artillery? Like WWI? > Limit Software Again, the author is going in the wrong direction; it's unthinkable, IMHO. Could you imagine doing this for any modern business? 'Hey boss, my proposal for our disruptive strategy is - minimize computers!' The Navy is just going to give up all the capabilities of computers? In fact, they see it (rightly) as the present and the future, with many military assets being essentially flying/floating on-site computer platforms. Software also has the advantage of being far easier to deploy, upgrade, and repair remotely - as in thousands of miles away, under fire in a war zone - than hardware.

briantakita 3y ago

A common criticism of the defense industry, or relating to government contractors in all industries, is misaligned incentives. Military contractors are incentivized to maximize profit, not win wars. Health care contractors are incentivized to maximize profit, not care for people. Technology contractors are incentivized to maximize profit, not innovate. And so on... Which may explain why Russia's military is more effective than US led NATO. Or why US Health Care is relatively expensive compared to other countries offering equivalent care. Or why massive tech initiatives need to be rescued or are a costly failure.

ranger207 3y ago
If you want to point to misaligned incentives, I don't think a conscript army like Russia's is a good counterexample. In fact, they're probably the prime example of how misaligned incentives makes an organization less effective.
- briantakita 3y ago
  I'll leave it to the Russians to determine if they are achieving their publicly stated goals or not. In the meantime, I think we should focus on helping our government better & more efficiently serve the people in America...rather than flooding the world with weapons, publically lecturing about "values" while privately destabilizing governments abroad & arming genocidal maniacs & Banderite Nazis...while disproportionately enriching select contractors & politically entrenched institutions.

ranger207 3y ago

reformer detected Let's start with sensors, since that's probably the most important part of a modern warship: a radar 10m above the surface of the water can theoretically see a target at 10km altitude ~350km away. Bombers are the primary choice to launch missiles, as they're basically a reusable first stage. Surfaced launched missiles don't travel at low altitude because the lower atmosphere has lots of drag. And of course Chinese antiship ballistic missiles are not known for their sea-skimming capabilities. So there is a theoretical need for long-range radars. Also, stealth: stealth isn't binary, it just makes things _harder_ to detect, not impossible. A 350km radar may only be able to detect a stealth fighter/missile at, say, 100km; a 150km radar could detect it at 50km or less. This obviously creates massive gaps, so if you want to fill those gaps, you need more ships, and whoops, now your fleet is more expensive. Ships are multirole for two main reasons: first, larger ships are perfectly capable of carrying adequate loadouts for every role at once. A theoretical 9700 ton antisubmarine destroyer would not be significantly more effective at ASW than a 9700 ton Flight III Burke, because there's just not a lot to do with them. Slap on another helicopter or two, add a slightly larger sonar... what else? Possibly surprisingly, helicopters are the best ASW weapons out there once they've been detected (maritime patrol aircraft and other submarines are the best), and it only takes a couple to prosecute a contact. For antiair warfare, you can either have radar and missiles on the same ship or not. In the former case, as we'll talk about in a second, the marginal cost to add ASW capability is much lower than a whole 'nother ship. If you split radar and missiles, you have to worry about your kill chain being twice as vulnerable. If either is taken out then both are useless. Second, fewer ships is cheaper basically always. There's certain amounts of fixed work on any ship, like engines and stuff, and you can't really get rid of them[0]. If you add more stuff onto a new ship, you add the crew of that new stuff, plus a few more sailors for the larger ship. If you have two ships, you have to add a whole new ship's base cost in sailors, and sailors are by far the biggest obstacle to the US Navy right now. [0] You may be thinking that greater automation would enable lower crews, and you'd be right. Modern container ships have like 20 crew or less. It was so effective that the Navy tried it on the Zumwalt class destroyers. It turns out that Navy ships can't always expect to be in peaceful waters, and when you suddenly need 20 extra bodies to fight a fire or shore up a leaking compartment (or even just do more maintenance on higher-spec Navy engines) then automation isn't helpful. Next, power. He proposes hybrid electric propulsion. He's correct in that regard and everyone's moving to that, called Integrated Electric Propulsion. However, he proposes eliminating gas turbines, and that's the wrong way to go. As mentioned above, sensors are the most important part of a ship, and bigger engines is always better for more power. Also though, next-generation ships are going to be using even more power, because everything's going to get lasers. Big gas turbine engines is important for speed yes, but it's getting to be even more important for power. On to armor. An armor piercing Mark 8 16" shell fired from an Iowa class battleship has a bursting charge of... 18.55kg. (all data from navweaps) It has a muzzle velocity of 762 meters per second (~mach 2.2), with a striking velocity of 514m/s (~mach 1.5) at maximum range of 38.7km. The shell weighs 1225kg. Armor to defend against that is legendarily thick. Compare that to, say, a Russian/Indian BrahMos antiship cruise missile. (figures taken from wikipedia so a little suspect) The BrahMos has a maximum speed of 2.8 mach, a range of 500km from a ship, weighs 3000kg (presumably when launched), and has a warhead of 300kg. Other than mass, the missile is better in every way than the battleship shell. Not to mention higher accuracy and the like. If you wanted to armor ships to withstand more power than battleship shells, then good luck. How about armament? Oh wait I just showed why missiles are so much better than artillery. If you need sustained firepower, then yeah artillery is great. That basically never comes up on the water. (Not related to warships, but I really don't think the author knows anything about gravity bombs. Do you know how many gravity bombs it took to destroy the Thanh Hóa bridge? Answer: the gravity bombs couldn't hit the target with enough accuracy to destroy it. Do you know how many laser guided bombs it took? About 30. Oh, well, maybe we can make it up with better planes and keep the cheaper gravity bombs you say? A JDAM kit turns an unguided bomb into a guided one for $27k in 2011 dollars. A bomb at the time cost $3000. You can either get a hit on the first shot with a single $30k JDAM or take 10 bombs, possibly mounted on multiple aircraft, and then still likely not get a hit.) "Short Range Air Defense Missiles over large interceptors." What if the short range interceptor misses? You lose your ship. Interceptors aren't measured in cost, they're measured in cost of the thing they're protecting. Your long range interceptor misses? You have another chance. Assume a probability of kill (pK) or 0.5 for example: one short range interceptor has a pK of 0.5; a long range interceptor backed up by a short range one has a pK of 0.75. And if the long range one misses, you get to reuse the short range one. "Ballistic missiles over hypersonic missiles." Yeah probably. That's part of the reason why the US isn't investing so much in hypersonics, although they use planes rather than ballistic missiles because you launch a ballistic missile and there's suddenly a question of whether or not it's a nuke. All that about his ship design being said, his shipbuilding stuff isn't bad. I'm in favor of cancelling the Jones Act and letting the yards fail just because I don't think there's any other way Congress is going to care enough to change the status quo, but that's another issue. Sorry if this is a little disjointed, it's 3:00AM here.

yyyfb 3y ago

I don't see mention of naval drones, even though they seem like effective harassment against US and Russia in present conflicts. I wonder what would happen if you got 10,000 cheap drones for the price of just one traditional navy ship.