Congress is spending $400M on a ship the DoD doesn't want | Hacker News Reader

Congress is spending $400M on a ship the DoD doesn't want

politico.com

37 pointsJPKab30 comments

Contrary to the title here, the Navy does want these ships, but the Department of Defense doesn't. "The military" isn't a monolithic entity. Congress is favoring one branch over that branch's nominal bosses, but it's not like they're buying something nobody wants.

Thanks, we updated the submission title to make that clearer.

Cool!

IMO it should say "that the navy wants, but the DoD doesn't"

But that would make it a pretty boring story.

We have too many ships as it is, buying more ships that don't function is stupid, but business as usual. Buying excessive military hardware is contractor welfare after all. How many carrier battlegroups is enough? We have 11, I think they want to build another half dozen.

The Navy thinks it doesn't have enough ships.

The problem is the mission: if you want the Navy to be present all around the world all the time, able to handle serious battle, it really doesn't have enough ships. If you don't agree with that mission, then you need to elect Congresspeople who agree with you.

This is my problem with carrier groups. Today the Navy doesn't really need to worry about battles because they're already so big that no one can compete but also because that's just not what they do day-to-day. As far as I can tell the primary purpose of the Navy these days is ensuring shipping lanes are well protected so they always remain open and safe. That doesn't require huge ships like carriers it requires lots of smaller ships that are big enough to be scary but numerous enough to be everywhere.

Not at all an expert, but is having lots of smaller ships really more cost effective? The thing about a carrier is you can mount aerial strikes against targets thousands of miles from the ship itself. Those smaller ships would be cheaper, but I imagine they would be armed with artillery and maybe cruise missiles, so they won't be able to project power over as large a range. I'd be curious what the relative square-mile-protected/dollar is.

The difference between aerial strike capability and littoral presence is significant. A major tenet of controlling territory is maintaining a presence in it. In this case, the desired mission diverges from the old cold war strategy. Under the WW2 / cold war strategy, the Navy needed to strike targets and prevent troop transports and enemy carriers from reaching their destinations.

The new mission is more reminiscent of the traditional Navy mission; inspecting vessels, supporting anti-insurgency efforts, and performing patrols. These are all missions of a littoral navy with smaller vessels.

Performing patrols is slow and inefficient with boats of any kind; planes are far faster and can cover much more ground. Of course, fighter planes are horribly inefficient too, but this would be a good case for using carrier-launched drones: they're very efficient and can stay aloft for a whole day at a time IIRC, and have limited weapons capability.

Sometimes I wonder if it'd make sense to try to build a capital ship where the giant "carrier" launches not only planes, but also small littoral boats. Steaming a littoral combat ship across oceans can't be that fuel-efficient, and also makes the boat require more size to maintain a sufficient crew for so long; maybe it'd be better to have smaller, shorter-range patrol boats that are kept inside the carrier until it gets to a place where it wants to launch them. Of course, you'd need a really huge carrier for this, but you'd get efficiencies of scale here, by being able to power the whole thing with nuclear reactors, and only burn fossil fuels for the shorter ranges the patrol boats operate at. The drones, combined with the carrier-launched patrol boats, would be able to handle all those operations within a pretty large radius of wherever the mega-carrier drops anchor, with the drones doing surveillance and strikes if necessary, and the patrol boats motoring in where needed, as directed by the drone surveillance.

When was the last serious naval battle?

Right now Navy's have two roles, protect shipping and launch aircraft / missiles. When an aircraft carrier can project force out thousands of km you really don't need a lot of them.

Honestly, I suspect the Navy would be better off with a fleet of solar powered drones and buoy for very high resolution surveillance to back up strikes vs. high cost patrol boats.

>When was the last serious naval battle?

Probably WWII. But that's not a good metric: the purpose of the modern American Navy is to project force, and also to act as a deterrent. When the US can sit a carrier battle group a few dozen miles off the shore of your country, carrying a rather enormous amount of firepower and the ability to deliver it anywhere within 1000km of that, not many are going to want to challenge that.

>When an aircraft carrier can project force out thousands of km you really don't need a lot of them.

F/A-18s can't fly that far. I just looked up the Super Hornet on Wikipedia and it says the combat radius is just over 700km. (The straight-line range is 2346km, but that's not helpful if you want to get back to the ship and doesn't include actual combat maneuvers and a decent reserve.)

So if you want to be able to project force in multiple areas of the world, you'll need that many carrier groups. It's not like a carrier in the Persian Gulf can fly some planes over to India if they need to. Also, Navy ships (just like military aircraft) need a LOT of maintenance, so there's always a bunch of ships in port.

We don't have the technology to have solar-powered drones that can carry ordnance.

Range is a complex topic in large part due to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbRSrjIuzIE

The Super Hornet is designed for air to air combat and needs to stick around in combat for a while which makes the range rather deceptive. Further as all modern combat jets they can do mid air refueling so it's more a question of how much the Navy wants to spend and how long and how much fuel they are willing to spend on transit.

The range for just going somewhere and dropping at lot of bombs without refueling is another consideration. With and without external fuel tanks yet another.

Honestly, the Navy is not going to say what they consider maximum range for strategic reasons.

Number of ships /= budget for ships.

Naval leaders are of the opinion that they need more, but cheaper, ships. Navy programs are suffering the same budget creep as the Airforce (see f35). Congress wants to spend the money and, in truth, the Navy wants the money. They might not want it spent on this particular ship but will take it so long as there is no other program that can take the money.

Said contractors hire employees to build the ship. They also hire other contractors who hire employees to build components that are used to build the ships.

So some of these congress members were going to bat for their constituents.

Now, you can argue that congress members voting for boondoggles to employ their constituents is a perversion of a republican form of government, but at least they've got their voters in mind.

Alternatively, the businesses owners in their distract want more work and are willing to donate to get it. Thus, it has nothing to do with voters only corruption.

Remember, government jobs or private jobs are the same to voters. However contractor jobs also means profit from taxpayer money for someone else.

> Alternatively, the businesses owners in their distract want more work and are willing to donate to get it

It's either:

Congress members are voting for job programs for their constituents so they can convince their constituents to re-elect them

Or:

Congress members are voting for job programs for their donors so they can raise money to buy advertising so they can convince their constituents to re-elect them

In either scenario, the endgame is about the voter.

Your stuck on jobs programs not the multimillion dollar payout for the owners.

Congressional districts are huge at around 700,000 poeple, and 'brining home' money is not going to buy many votes. Further, this still goes on even when there is little risk for reelection. In fact it's more common the longer someone has been in office.

The problem is the only large ships being build in the US are for the Navy. The US Navy does like to buy american.

So the Navy needs to keep buying ships to keep the few shipyards that exist open. If they all close up they loose the ability to competitively bid any jobs...

Just to inject some facts, the LCS rather optimistically handles 6 separate missions, and one of them is replacing 70 OHP-class frigates from forty or so years ago. The LCS ship count is down to 40 and still dropping.

The "doesn't work" bit is because they're too cheaply made and try to do six missions. If it costs $1 to build a CPU and you offer a 75 cent contract for a six core processor, you're gonna get a brick in a box not a working CPU. They're in damage control now, what is the strategy that minimizes bad press WRT spending money upfront or on repairs...

Another interesting fact is "all" new ship classes are clunkers for the first couple ships and first couple years. It would be newsworthy if the LCS worked perfectly outta the box. Because that would be an indication things were over spec'd and contracts were padded increasing the bill higher than it should be, so we'd be showered with reports of the new ripoff being overbuilt and padded for profit. There is no way for the Navy to win on any possible scenario of new ship classes. So I wouldn't read much into the journalist complaining, it doesn't mean anything substantial.

There is the true fact that if you try to replace an auto mechanic's $10K toolchest with a swiss army knife, that might be engineering-possible but you'll have to blow $100K and it might not work as well as dedicated tools. The idea itself of "saving money" by running six different missions using 40 multipurpose ships to replace 70 ships in itself might be a pretty dumb strategy but the only way to find out seems to be to try.

Its interesting to consider a 2010s OHP frigate. A little architectural fine tuning, call it the OHP-II, the cost savings would be staggering so buy 60 of them for less money than the 30 or so LCS we're likely to end up with... Of course you'd be stuck with a cold war mission core design. It might very well be that a post cold war littoral mission is just simply going to cost more money than bluewater cold war missions. Post cold war should in theory nationwide be cheaper, that doesn't mean all possible missions magically will become cheaper.

"according to critics, it is unfortunately the seagoing equivalent of the Air Force’s trillion-dollar F-35 fighter plane: designed too ambitiously to fulfill too many roles and, as a consequence, well over its budget, flawed in its execution and struggling to meet even minimal operational requirements"

At least we'll save money by having all the branches use the JSF for everything. I mean with all that commonality, there's no way we can go wrong...right?

That sounds nice, but I've seen no indication that today's Pentagon is capable of purchasing such a product. What do other countries with littoral interests use? Could we buy the same thing as e.g. Indonesia or Nigeria, and then just tart it up with some fancier electronics?

Has any mission actually become cheaper since the Cold War?

Generally speaking the LCS is an imperial tool. No other nations will have anything quite like it. Which is why we're not calling it our answer to the Russian WTF-class or going in halfsies with our UK-bros. No foreign sales, just a bit of "that's interesting" from a half dozen countries. Its an R+D platform to the very highest levels, not just nuts and bolts level innards. Its a revolutionary ship, not an evolutionary ship. Revolutionary ships have always been very expensive and slow to produce. Sometimes they just don't work. This aspect is not covered in the linked article. Sometimes experiments like "the aircraft carrier" turn out pretty well, other times things like "electromotive propulsion (diesel train style)" don't work so well.

I think its possible all missions are more expensive. During the cold war it was all about looking scary to the Soviets but not actually firing thereby starting WW3. Post cold war its constant hot fire missions invading and occupying countries, the modern Crusades in the middle east and all that. Actually shooting weapons is always more expensive than merely looking tough.

To this ignorant observer, the task is: traveling and occasionally fighting, in shallow coastal water. That requires a ship with shallow draft, which meets certain minimums for maneuver, survival, and deadliness. Those minimums would have to be developed with an understanding of previous military experience in shallow coastal water. USA certainly has such experience, although maybe it's 40 years out of date? Have there been no more recent conflicts in such an environment? That seems unlikely, so it would be an indictment of the Pentagon if such had been ignored while developing this ship. That would also be confirmation of TFA's point that this program should be canceled. Another such confirmation would be to learn that some airy ridiculous notion like "imperial tool" were ever considered by the designers.

The first aircraft carriers were big boats with flat decks. The effect may have been "revolutionary" but the design certainly wasn't.

"designed too ambitiously to fulfill too many roles and, as a consequence, well over its budget, flawed in its execution and struggling to meet even minimal operational requirements."

History repeats ad nauseam. Watch the dark comedy Pentagon Wars movie (featuring the Bradley fighting vehicle) for another example.

We now have examples on land (Bradley), air (F-35) and sea (Littoral) of over-scoped, massively wasteful projects.

Don't forget the Osprey which was plagued with problems as they tried to make a helicopter-plane.

I consider it one of the biggest mistakes in Marine Corps aviation. It has an abysmal safety record and performs its mission half as well as the aircraft it replaced.

I've lost two friends from Osprey crashes, so I have a personal (and perhaps biased) viewpoint.

Honestly, this is pretty small time, and contrary to the title there is some demand. By contrast we seem to just shrug at the F-35 program as it races past $1.5 trillion in sunk costs.

The navy is largely pork. The modern navy is defenseless against any modern state's antiship ballistic missiles.

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