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An interesting summary, but I don't think the article really answered the headline. In particular, I'm left wondering which is the bigger problem: Is it that th

An interesting summary, but I don't think the article really answered the headline. In particular, I'm left wondering which is the bigger problem: Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent and have turned what should have been a fairly straightforward modification of an existing design into a huge boondoggle, or is it that the government requirements are poorly thought out and/or overly ambitious, resulting in costly redesign efforts that aren't really necessary? Put another way, are we spending all this time and money to fail at simply building a ship that is functionally identical to one of these ~$300m Finnish ice breakers, or are we claiming we need something more sophisticated?

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
> Put another way, are we spending all this time and money to fail at simply building a ship that is functionally identical to one of these ~$300m Finnish ice breakers, or are we claiming we need something more sophisticated? It sounds like it is the former. > If and when the ships are completed (currently 2029 for the first vessel at the earliest), they are expected to cost $1.7-1.9 billion apiece[0], roughly four to five times what a comparable ship would cost to build[1] elsewhere. 0: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-08/60170-Polar-Security-Cutter.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-08/60170-Polar-Securit... 1: https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-of-icebreaking https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-...
jahewson 2y ago
> Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent Yes, they are woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere. It’s an industry on life support.
- delfinom 2y ago
  The same industry is currently crying they can't people to work the shipbuilding jobs. Heh
- beloch 2y ago
  Canada has the same problem with building icebreakers. The problem with icebreakers capable of dealing with multi-year ice is that they're a very expensive and specialized kind of ship that's hard to construct, but also the sort of ship that has a very long lifetime. Only a few governments in the world have any need of such ships, and they typically only need a few in the span of many decades. By the time Canada got around to looking for new icebreakers, not a single shipyard in the country had made one in many decades. Ordering a ship from someplace foreign that had actually made one recently would be cheaper than trying to make one domestically. However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years. It really would make a lot of sense for close allies like Canada and the U.S. to collaborate on building icebreakers.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    >However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years. Is there really much difference?
    - Teever 2y ago
      Yes. The longer that a shipyard goes with fewer and fewer contracts the more likely it is to go out of business. And it's far harder to get a ship built at a yard that is out of business than one that isn't.
      - Sakos 2y ago
        Also, shipyards that recently built one are more likely to get contracts to build more. Because other countries will be facing the same question.
        bruce511 2y ago
        More likely though isn't the same as likely. If I'm going to buy an icebreaker from a foreign supplier, sure the US is in the market, but they're still more expensive and take longer than Finland. To get good at something, good enough that you're competitive on the world stage, you need to be building lots, iterating, getting feedback and so on. The US coast guard doesn't have the need to kick-start that sort of scale of development. So it takes a fortune (think 10s of billions) to catch up to the Finns. But the headline number is somewhat irrelevant. 300m sent to Finland is "gone forever". 1.1 billion spent in the US boosts the economy, and ultimately works its way back to the govt in taxes. The benefits have little to do with "preserving skillset" and more to do with the economic benefit of circulating another billion in the local economy.
- faangguyindia 2y ago
  Recently OpenAI is failing to compete with Google's hardware and has asked US government for 5Gigawatt data center.
- hintymad 2y ago
  Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders?
  - throwup238 2y ago
    The US outproduced the axis towards the end of the war but it was a real mess for the first few years while industries retooled and the government broke through obstacles like the aluminum cartel. It was only after Pearl Harbor and the formation of the War Production Board in 1942 that manufacturing really picked up because everyone felt the existential threat and organized against it. The US can’t make cheap artillery shells because we don’t have much artillery manufacturing. Our armies just don’t use much artillery. We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery.
    - cpursley 2y ago
      Russia is out producing the US on guided munitions and rockets fired from the ground as well (and missile defense). And icebreakers, of course. So it’s doable - just depends on priorities (ie, moving chip manufacturing back which seems to have us recent success).
      - Sakos 2y ago
        US shipyards and military production are extremely low on any number of metrics. It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population. At some point, you do need constant production of enough munitions, doesn't matter how smart or precise those might be. Just recently a US navy tanker ran aground and now they're scrambling to find some way to fuel the carrier group in the middle east because for some reason that's the only one that was available. The navy logistics group is woefully understaffed und under-equipped. What are the priorities in actuality? Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  >woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere unions and pro union legislation makes US shipbuilding uncompetitive. it also ruins US merchant marine. We could encourage it, but the world market is fairly competitive so we don't really need to, except for defense.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Other countries have unions too. I don't know the situation in Finland, but they are surrounded by countries that have even stronger union and union laws that the US. (and some of those countries also have ship building)
  - ghnws 2y ago
    Ship building, like most other industries, is unionized in Finland and I would be surprised if it wasn't the same in Germany.
- throwaway290 2y ago
  The question was, is it uncompetitive because self-imposed requirements/limtiations are stricter or because of lack of competence. You are answering something else
potato3732842 2y ago
Don't forget that RFPs for this sort of thing get massively stuffed with pork so they're doomed to be bloated even regardless of the quality of the contractor who does the implementation. They love including requirements that all but mandates a specific vendor's product because that vendor is a key employer in the district of some rep's who's vote they need or has a good lobbyist or whatever.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mattmaroon 2y ago
The root cause is that naval warfare has practically no role in national security and hasn’t in a long time. Even ignoring nuclear weaponry and mutually assured destruction, ships are expensive and fragile. They are easily destroyed from above or below, which makes them only useful against nations that don’t have modern military technology. If you need a floating platform to fight Houthi rebels they’re useful, if we’re facing an actual invasion they’ll be worse than useless. As a result there’s not much pressure to get it right. If breaking ice were an activity that our national security relied upon I have no doubt we would be building them quickly.
- kjs3 2y ago
  Ships are useful for more than combat. Even icebreakers.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    Didn’t say they weren’t. But if they were useful for national security we’d be building them just fine.
golemiprague 2y ago
[dead]
wakawaka28 2y ago
Labor is much more expensive in the US than elsewhere. That is the overwhelming burden in every industry. We need protectionist laws to guarantee that we can manufacture what we must have for strategic reasons, at minimum.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Labor is much more expensive in the US than elsewhere. That is the overwhelming burden in every industry This is true. But it’s not the root cause for our shipbuilding problems. Our dockworkers and shipbuilders are uniquely inefficient.
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    Maybe our dockworkers and shipbuilders are dragging to extend contracts that they only got due to protectionist laws to begin with. If they had more work to do and more experience, they might become more efficient.
- ywvcbk 2y ago
  I’m not sure labor costs could explain the difference the supposedly 5x difference in cost between Finland and the US. Labor is only a fraction of the overall cost and the difference is not that huge (e.g. average wage is $63k vs $50k). It’s more likely that US workers (in this sector) expect to get paid $100k to produce $20k of value (relative to other countries)
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    Of course I'm not talking about averages. Average fast food workers make as much as engineers in some other countries. I'm not sure wages at the low-skill end are much lower in Europe, but certainly engineers seem to be paid less there. I assume that is similar across skilled professions. Comparing the US to Asia, yes the wage differences are across the board.
SubiculumCode 2y ago
This episode of War on the Rocks: goes into some depth on the issue, if interested: Can ICE Pact Salvage American Shipbuilding? Episode webpage: https://warontherocks.libsyn.com/can-ice-pact-salvage-american-shipbuilding https://warontherocks.libsyn.com/can-ice-pact-salvage-americ... Media file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/warontherocks/WOTR_-_Icebreakers_9.19.24.mp3?dest-id=298196 https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/warontherocks/WOTR_-_Icebr...
silexia 2y ago
Unions in the US make for very high costs and long production schedules.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago

> Put another way, are we spending all this time and money to fail at simply building a ship that is functionally identical to one of these ~$300m Finnish ice breakers, or are we claiming we need something more sophisticated? It sounds like it is the former. > If and when the ships are completed (currently 2029 for the first vessel at the earliest), they are expected to cost $1.7-1.9 billion apiece[0], roughly four to five times what a comparable ship would cost to build[1] elsewhere. 0: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-08/60170-Polar-Security-Cutter.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-08/60170-Polar-Securit... 1: https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-of-icebreaking https://sixtydegreesnorth.substack.com/p/the-silicon-valley-...

jahewson 2y ago

> Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent Yes, they are woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere. It’s an industry on life support.

delfinom 2y ago
The same industry is currently crying they can't people to work the shipbuilding jobs. Heh
beloch 2y ago
Canada has the same problem with building icebreakers. The problem with icebreakers capable of dealing with multi-year ice is that they're a very expensive and specialized kind of ship that's hard to construct, but also the sort of ship that has a very long lifetime. Only a few governments in the world have any need of such ships, and they typically only need a few in the span of many decades. By the time Canada got around to looking for new icebreakers, not a single shipyard in the country had made one in many decades. Ordering a ship from someplace foreign that had actually made one recently would be cheaper than trying to make one domestically. However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years. It really would make a lot of sense for close allies like Canada and the U.S. to collaborate on building icebreakers.
- thfuran 2y ago
  >However, then shipyards that haven't made an icebreaker for twenty years would become shipyards that haven't made one for forty years. Is there really much difference?
  - Teever 2y ago
    Yes. The longer that a shipyard goes with fewer and fewer contracts the more likely it is to go out of business. And it's far harder to get a ship built at a yard that is out of business than one that isn't.
    - Sakos 2y ago
      Also, shipyards that recently built one are more likely to get contracts to build more. Because other countries will be facing the same question.
      - bruce511 2y ago
        More likely though isn't the same as likely. If I'm going to buy an icebreaker from a foreign supplier, sure the US is in the market, but they're still more expensive and take longer than Finland. To get good at something, good enough that you're competitive on the world stage, you need to be building lots, iterating, getting feedback and so on. The US coast guard doesn't have the need to kick-start that sort of scale of development. So it takes a fortune (think 10s of billions) to catch up to the Finns. But the headline number is somewhat irrelevant. 300m sent to Finland is "gone forever". 1.1 billion spent in the US boosts the economy, and ultimately works its way back to the govt in taxes. The benefits have little to do with "preserving skillset" and more to do with the economic benefit of circulating another billion in the local economy.
faangguyindia 2y ago
Recently OpenAI is failing to compete with Google's hardware and has asked US government for 5Gigawatt data center.
hintymad 2y ago
Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only keep our expertise by actively doing. If the next war breaks out, how would the US win? By sending armies of lawyers and coders?
- throwup238 2y ago
  The US outproduced the axis towards the end of the war but it was a real mess for the first few years while industries retooled and the government broke through obstacles like the aluminum cartel. It was only after Pearl Harbor and the formation of the War Production Board in 1942 that manufacturing really picked up because everyone felt the existential threat and organized against it. The US can’t make cheap artillery shells because we don’t have much artillery manufacturing. Our armies just don’t use much artillery. We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery.
  - cpursley 2y ago
    Russia is out producing the US on guided munitions and rockets fired from the ground as well (and missile defense). And icebreakers, of course. So it’s doable - just depends on priorities (ie, moving chip manufacturing back which seems to have us recent success).
    - Sakos 2y ago
      US shipyards and military production are extremely low on any number of metrics. It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population. At some point, you do need constant production of enough munitions, doesn't matter how smart or precise those might be. Just recently a US navy tanker ran aground and now they're scrambling to find some way to fuel the carrier group in the middle east because for some reason that's the only one that was available. The navy logistics group is woefully understaffed und under-equipped. What are the priorities in actuality? Because maintaining a military at adequate readiness doesn't seem to be at the top of the list.
fsckboy 2y ago
>woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere unions and pro union legislation makes US shipbuilding uncompetitive. it also ruins US merchant marine. We could encourage it, but the world market is fairly competitive so we don't really need to, except for defense.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Other countries have unions too. I don't know the situation in Finland, but they are surrounded by countries that have even stronger union and union laws that the US. (and some of those countries also have ship building)
- ghnws 2y ago
  Ship building, like most other industries, is unionized in Finland and I would be surprised if it wasn't the same in Germany.
throwaway290 2y ago
The question was, is it uncompetitive because self-imposed requirements/limtiations are stricter or because of lack of competence. You are answering something else

potato3732842 2y ago

Don't forget that RFPs for this sort of thing get massively stuffed with pork so they're doomed to be bloated even regardless of the quality of the contractor who does the implementation. They love including requirements that all but mandates a specific vendor's product because that vendor is a key employer in the district of some rep's who's vote they need or has a good lobbyist or whatever.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

mattmaroon 2y ago

The root cause is that naval warfare has practically no role in national security and hasn’t in a long time. Even ignoring nuclear weaponry and mutually assured destruction, ships are expensive and fragile. They are easily destroyed from above or below, which makes them only useful against nations that don’t have modern military technology. If you need a floating platform to fight Houthi rebels they’re useful, if we’re facing an actual invasion they’ll be worse than useless. As a result there’s not much pressure to get it right. If breaking ice were an activity that our national security relied upon I have no doubt we would be building them quickly.

kjs3 2y ago
Ships are useful for more than combat. Even icebreakers.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  Didn’t say they weren’t. But if they were useful for national security we’d be building them just fine.

golemiprague 2y ago

[dead]

wakawaka28 2y ago

Labor is much more expensive in the US than elsewhere. That is the overwhelming burden in every industry. We need protectionist laws to guarantee that we can manufacture what we must have for strategic reasons, at minimum.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Labor is much more expensive in the US than elsewhere. That is the overwhelming burden in every industry This is true. But it’s not the root cause for our shipbuilding problems. Our dockworkers and shipbuilders are uniquely inefficient.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  Maybe our dockworkers and shipbuilders are dragging to extend contracts that they only got due to protectionist laws to begin with. If they had more work to do and more experience, they might become more efficient.
ywvcbk 2y ago
I’m not sure labor costs could explain the difference the supposedly 5x difference in cost between Finland and the US. Labor is only a fraction of the overall cost and the difference is not that huge (e.g. average wage is $63k vs $50k). It’s more likely that US workers (in this sector) expect to get paid $100k to produce $20k of value (relative to other countries)
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  Of course I'm not talking about averages. Average fast food workers make as much as engineers in some other countries. I'm not sure wages at the low-skill end are much lower in Europe, but certainly engineers seem to be paid less there. I assume that is similar across skilled professions. Comparing the US to Asia, yes the wage differences are across the board.

SubiculumCode 2y ago

This episode of War on the Rocks: goes into some depth on the issue, if interested: Can ICE Pact Salvage American Shipbuilding? Episode webpage: https://warontherocks.libsyn.com/can-ice-pact-salvage-american-shipbuilding https://warontherocks.libsyn.com/can-ice-pact-salvage-americ... Media file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/warontherocks/WOTR_-_Icebreakers_9.19.24.mp3?dest-id=298196 https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/warontherocks/WOTR_-_Icebr...

silexia 2y ago

Unions in the US make for very high costs and long production schedules.