8 ms·

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 de

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
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

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

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]