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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Definitely sounds that way. I wonder if there'll be any significant consequences for General Atomics having these 5-10x cost overruns?

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The worst that can happen to General Atomics is that they don't get any new contracts after they're done building 3 (3!) fleet carriers. But building 3 carriers will give them enough expertise that they'll be able to bid on future shipbuilding contracts, and will probably land a few -- the Pentagon doesn't like letting contractors go out of business, and they'll recognize that General Atomics' giant Ford is at least half their own fault. It wasn't General Atomics that put out a contract for a fleet carrier that used every innovation at once...

Besides, I'm sure General Atomics had the sense to build factories in rustbucket towns and subcontract out to at least 26 states, preferably about half red and half blue; once your procurement system turns into a big enough jobs program, no one will dare to touch it.

Welcome to the cozy, comfortable world of defense contracting, dedicated to equipping the US to fight another world war, but only if the enemy is at least as cronyist as we are. The good news is that our only likely enemies for a world war actually are as cronyist as we are, or significantly worse -- but if any new Prussia ever rises in the world, we are _so_ dead.

I mean at least you guys don't have a welfare system.

I agree that the procurement system is dysfunctional, because of dynamics unrelated to suitability, but there are (at least) another two things in play:

1. Nobody really knows what you'll need until the fighting starts.

2. Once the fighting starts, the necessities of wartime production begin to dominate the necessities of peacetime politics.

But frankly, I hope never to find out whether the USA's carriers are necessary, sufficient or useful in a roughly-equal bunfight.

(edited for wording)

Any potential future naval conflict will be over one way or another long before any new ships are built. The construction lead time on those vessels is years.

Granted, but as WW2 demonstrated, there are industrial learning curves and economies of scale that can take you from months per ship to ships per month.

Not a perfect analogy in the details, but I think reasonable in the dynamics.

No this is impossible. Ships today are an order of magnitude more complex than in WW2. And there is very little spare industrial capacity capable of doing the specialized work necessary.

You're assuming that when total industrial wars begin, everyone decides to fight with only and exactly what they started with. That capacity never increases, that there are no learning curves.

From our sample set of n=1, this isn't realistic. Production would rise, by hook or by crook. If it ran long enough, you'd see carriers coming off the docks every month or two, with their battle groups completely filled.

Again, I hope we never find out.

You simply don't understand how shipbuilding works. Regardless of urgency or funding it takes years to scale up production. By the time that happened, any possible large-scale conflict between advanced near-peer adversaries would be long over. Modern weapons are just too accurate and destructive to make long wars of attrition possible any more. Within a few months one side or the other would suffer crippling losses and then have to decide between surrendering or going out in a blaze of nukes.

I agree with the long lead times, I don't agree that the length of lead and breadth of capacity would grow very slowly.

> Modern weapons are just too accurate and destructive to make long wars of attrition possible any more.

I think this I agree with and it renders the rest of the argument moot.

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