Navy Quietly Decommissions Littoral Combat Ship Independence | Hacker News Reader

Navy Quietly Decommissions Littoral Combat Ship Independence

news.usni.org

57 pointsprotomyth105 comments

The problem is that the military doesn't give a damn about money. They co-developed the ship class with the first four ships that were built. Those four ships are worthless and each cost $600 million. It would cost another $2 billion dollars to make them combat ready.

The philosophy of developing and building weapon systems is called "concurrency" and has been a subject of debate for 50 years. You can look at in different ways, but the cynical view, is that if the military first developed weapons systems then reported their final price to Congress, they would never get to run these wasteful programs. So instead, they promise a low price tag and then develop concurrently so that Congress falls into the sunk cost fallacy.

This kind of "money doesn't matter we'll do it live" mentality happens all over the world. It plagued the F-35. It's resulting in a disaster with Canada's new Type 26 frigates.

The simple solution is to ban all concurrency. You're given a budget, you design the system, then you build it. If you go over, we pay for the cost of the redesign, not the insane cost of upgrading half-broken ships or aircraft. The F-35 wasted more than $21 billion dollars on worthless aircraft https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2017/10/21-billion-worth-of-f-...

Meh. Is government expenditure bad? The money flows into the economy and technology is researched and developed.

It's not like the money would be spent elsewhere, it's all debt we're just going to hold on to until inflation renders it irrelevant.

If you're going to be spending billions of dollars, would you rather have a working ship afterwards, or not? Accountability DOES matter.

The greater the government expenditure, the greater the taxes.

That's not literally true, obviously. There's plenty of money for them to go after if they were actually worried about government debt. I think the big secret is that it doesn't really matter as long as the debt growth rate doesn't become shocking.

No, the real secret is that the US government controls dollar creation. At the sign of any problem in the economy, they create more cash and give it to bankers, who on their turn put it in the hands of investors, who use it to buy assets around the world, increasing the assets and profits of American businesses. That's why the US will use any dirt trick to maintain the dollar supremacy.

If our money was actually backed by something, maybe. As it stands though the government doesn't really need to tax more money to spend more, even banks are allowed to create money for free now.

Govt spending creates inflation which is a tax on everyone. Sometimes its obvious, like Quantirative Easing, and sometimes it's subtle, like wasting human labor and natural resources on worthless stuff/activity instead of value creation. Formal taxation just redistributes the pain.

Government expenditure in general isn’t bad… if it delivers on what it’s trying to. Like it’s great we get the research and tech benefits (if that’s really what happens) but if we’re unable to deliver on producing best in class armaments, we risk falling behind adversaries that do develop those capabilities.

Yes, absolutely.

    At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

This reminds of the Feynman quote about outsiders to a field making obvious statements a about an intellectual idea and thinking they had a clever insight.

I'm sorry, I don't see your connection. It was a snide aside by an economist (I believe a Nobel winning one), but it wasn't dumb.

Generally overbudget projects have other consequences of poor planning such as technical defects. See big dig, F35 helmet annoxia issue.

There are better things to spend it on: infrastructure, education, health, space, and more

Government money isn't finite and doesn't get shuffled from budget to budget in some sort of rational discussion. It's all just numbers and politics.

It could go to a Basic Income for all low income Americans.

They could do both. Government money isn't finite, that's my point. They certainly would never have a meeting where they said, ok we cut a trillion from the military, what should we move it to? It doesn't work like that.

It could also be returned to the taxpayers. Instead of inventing new ways to spend money, the government could just stop taking so much from the people who earned it.

First of all is money spent on equipment to kill people. Second, it's money that is not spent on things that really matter, like education, health care, green energy, etc.

very little of it is actual weapons thar sboot at people. most is detterence, and thr actual killing things are cheap like drones.

Exactly: US President Eisenhower said in a 1953 speech,

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwighteisenhowercr...

Money spent on equipment to discourage China from killing people.

It's taking money away from the people who sacrificed a part of their life for it and giving it to people who place zero importance on it....

It's literally parasitic.

Are you serious?

Taxes don't equal government expenditure. It's not a inflow-outflow system.

Look up the economist Basquiat: you can raise the GDP by tossing bricks through windows — money will be spent replacing /repairing them which contributes to the GDP.

But that same money could have been spent differently on things people like, or invested.

These ships, and the structure of military spending, is more like Basquiat’s example.

There's another way to frame that argument. The spike in window repairs and glass demand will incentivize glass factories to invest in technological advancements to make cheaper and better glass. Investments they would not have made otherwise because there wasn't enough demand to spread the fixed investment cost across and make it profitable. After all the windows are repaired, the glass factories still retain their capital investment and technical knowledge, are producing glass cheaper than before, out-competing their counterparts abroad, and maintaining a global technological lead in glass production.

Bastiat's parable doesn't account for the sticky effects of capital investment. The glass makers in his stories only replace windows with old techniques and never use the spike in demand as an opportunity for technological development.

It distorts investment away from the direction people would otherwise prefer to invest in.

There's a global debate happening today about whether complete free market allocation of investment is best, or whether East Asian state-lead investments into technological advancements is. If the free market was all we need, then why should the government invest into scientific research?

That debate has gone on since the 17th century at least. Obviously neither extremum is effective.

Under this logic, the US should also be evacuating cities like Los Angeles & New York on a regular basis and nuking them till there is nothing left.

After all, it would spur the development of decontamination as well as speedy construction wouldn't it?

Currently the US has spurred the development of military technology by fighting a 20 year war. It's just that the destruction has happened on a non-electorate population. LA and NYC vote.

Planned obsolescence is also a form of this. Why build a phone that lasts 10 years when you build one that lasts 4, convince people to throw away perfectly working phones, and funnel the additional annual sales volume into technological research?

A 20 year war? The US has been fighting pretty much nonstop for the last 80 years.

In San Francisco, people aren’t surprised to have cars broken into multiple times a year at this point. The only change I’ve seen is more auto glass repair companies. Sometimes we are stuck with “perverse incentive”

> There's another way to frame that argument. The spike in window repairs and glass demand will incentivize glass factories to invest in technological advancements to make cheaper and better glass.

This is so, but that cheaper and better glass is unlikely to be tougher and less prone to breaking.

since the money would be spent elsewhere, doesn’t it have a neutral effect on GDP?

The point is that GDP is unidimensional metric that fails to capture a lot of valuable info.

What keeps them from changing or trying out new ways of designing/building? Is it entrenched interests that resist any changes?

Isn’t it in the best interest of everyone to actually deliver on projects? If they don’t how is it that they continue to be relied on by the military?

Apologies if I’m being incredibly naive, I have no experience with what the military procurement world looks like.

They try out new ways of designing and building on every major program. Sometimes the new ways work, sometimes they don't.

>>>What keeps them from changing or trying out new ways of designing/building? Is it entrenched interests that resist any changes?

There are immense barriers to entry. When I tried to boot-strap my defense startup, a Lieutenant Colonel I knew (also a VP at a defense company) told me it would take over a year just to do the paperwork to sell stuff to DoD. It's why I focused on South-East Asia. As long as I steered clear of ITAR products, I felt corruption in SEA was easier to navigate that US bureaucracy. The requirements are even more onerous if you are producing anything of a sensitive nature. My dad knew a business owner in the Gainesville area who got out of the drone-making business because the physical security upgrades that his DoD client required were such a burden. Successfully navigating these hurdles requires program managers with niche domain knowledge on the DoD's procurement, certification, and funding processes.

>>>Isn’t it in the best interest of everyone to actually deliver on projects? If they don’t how is it that they continue to be relied on by the military?

Because of the issues I mentioned above, oftentimes there are few companies who have both the infrastructure and the domain knowledge to even attempt to deliver a product. Some of the engineering problems are also REALLY difficult. But if Lockheed Martin sucks at making a fighter jet, and Boeing sucks at making a fighter jet.....who do you turn to? If you need a jet engine, you go to Pratt & Whitney or you go to Rolls Royce. No amount of VC startup incubation is gonna give you a reliable high-bypass turbofan engine in a reasonable timeframe. The Chinese have been throwing resources at that particular problem (fighter jet engines) for decades and they are STILL behind the US and Russian offerings.

If the Navy doesn't like its Little Crappy Ships....it's not like there is an abundance of efficient shipyards in the US anymore. The few existing ones are practically on life-support and reliant on Navy contracts. A good shipyard needs experienced blue-collar tradesmen (welders, electricians, etc.), which are already in short supply in the US. So again this is another field that is not quickly rectified or disrupted. As a consequence the government is stuck saying "Sigh....here's another bag of money....try to get it right this time." At this point, pushing funding to trade schools in order to get a bunch of noobs into the shipyards, and then being tolerant of them producing "good enough" ships for a decade, would be an improvement over our current situation IMO...

The government is at fault too. We've suffered from a lack of consistent strategic vision, and frequent adjustments to policies, budgets, and tactics lead to engineering changes that are massively expensive. The military is constantly moving the goalposts, so industry responds by rolling its eyes and saying "You want it to do WHAT?!?....Yeah, that's gonna cost another $100 million..." There's also an incestuous relationship between program managers who are military officers or Federal government employees, and industry. The .mil/.gov types leave the service and then, after a short cool-off period to not run afoul of the laws, get hired by the same companies they were pushing billions of dollars towards. It's the same revolving door problem that Wall Street and the SEC have.

It's a depressing mess and I don't expect it to get better until the bodies REALLY start to pile up and the American populace turns its rage towards The Powers That Be instead of each other.

> What keeps them from changing or trying out new ways of designing/building? Is it entrenched interests that resist any changes?

If someone had been honest and told Congress "Oh, the F-35 will cost $1 trillon dollars" they would never have approved it. The military does this so that they can claim something will be cheap. Then over the next 5 to 10 years they increase the cost astronomically, step by step, because Congress will look bad canceling the program and getting nothing for all the billions they spent so far.

There's no one resisting the change. If I gave you unlimited money, but all you had to do is take it $100 at a time, you'd do it too. The problem is that Congress refuses to keep the DoD accountable.

I’ve taken to look at these programs as a jobs programs, and as an empire tax paid to the US (eg. F35 project).

Basically it’s three birds with one stone, you develop weapons and technology (necessary given international affairs), you provide jobs (important for senators and congressman to make their constituents happy), and funnel international money as a brother tax (we’re in this together).

Yes it’s inefficient, but it greases the wheels.

Similar can be said about the ~$3B/year given to each Israel and Egypt. Keeps the peace, supports strategic interests, and pays for defense (military tech, and jobs - since all funds are spent on US defense).

The 3 billion that goes to Israel is used to maintain its military edge over all of its neighbors. The 3 billion which goes to Egypt goes to the military-class to maintain its hold over the country.

The money to Egypt was promised by Carter to create a peace deal between Israel and Egypt. Frankly, there are like 15 countries in the Middle East. If we could just pay all of them 3 billion a year to bring peace there I would vote for that in a second.

Paying dictators ruins the lives of millions of Arabs. Many are imprisoned and tortured by the security state. The majority are condemned to lives where they can barely afford to live and have very little hope of educating their children to improve their outcomes.

But sure, keep pretending like the problems in the Middle East are just a few countries short of 3 billion.

I'm not saying the Middle East's problems are fixable with 3 billion a year. I'm saying 3 billion/country/year is cheap to fix problems in the Middle East. And it fixed the series of wars between Egypt and Israel that had lasted, what, a generation?

But yes, Syria is a mess and cannot be fixed by writing a check. Which is too bad, because it would be great if it could be. And the entire Arabian peninsula has too much money for a 3 billion/year bribe to change things. But if raising 3 billion a year could stop the suffering of millions of people in Syria, my guess is that it could be done very quickly.

But you're only getting two out of three.

The US is falling behind in military tech designed to fight a Cold War. There doesn't seem to be widespread understanding that WWIII is an info/cyber-war, the primary ops are covert and subversive, and Russia and China already have dangerous levels of access to civilian, military, and political infrastructure.

Even if that wasn't true, Russia and China have both been modernising their civil defense and weapons systems. The US has been packing pork into barrels with limited effect. There are some world-leading R&D projects, but not so much in the way of effective weapons systems.

I am honestly concerned that there is unrealistic complacency about the state of readiness, and there's a non-negligible prospect of an attack on (say) Taiwan happening at the same time as some kind of cyber Pearl Harbor event at home.

Just because Russia and China have no problem conducting industrial espionage with military cyber units, doesn't mean the rest of the world can't.

It means they choose not to.

So it's a pretty skewed view to say "These countries end up in the news for hacking, therefore their capabilities are greater than everyone else's."

> It means they choose not to.

They do it with their three letter agencies. When you get hacked, does it make a difference?

It does if you're a non-military target in possession of non-dual-use trade secrets.

Unfortunately fixed price contracts don't work for new cutting edge defense systems. No major defense contractor would ever take on that level of risk so there would be zero bids. Fixed price contracts only become practical after the R&D work is complete.

But you're right that concurrency has largely been a failure.

> Unfortunately fixed price contracts don't work for new cutting edge defense systems.

New defense systems don't actually have to be cutting edge. The cutting edge stuff is more properly deployed as upgrades to existing systems (this tightens the feedback loop that produces learning). By the time the tech is influencing newly designed systems, it shouldn't be cutting edge anymore.

Anyone complaining about how this slows the adoption and deployment of new technology should take a close look at what made the F-16 and F-18 successful platforms for so long. Not only were they regularly upgraded, but in many ways their upgradability was upgraded over time, and new planes coming off the assembly line were far from being frozen in time, but rather reflected an evolution of those platforms.

No that's not how it works in the real world. You're never going to get something like a 5th generation fighter by making incremental improvements to 4th generation systems. At some point you run out of headroom and have to start over from scratch in order to maintain a qualitative advantage over potential adversaries. This is high risk and doesn't always work but there is no alternative.

I'm not saying that incremental improvements are the sole strategy.

I'm saying that before you design a 5th gen system, the tech[0] you want to use should be proven as an upgrade to a 4th gen system.

I'm saying that running out of headroom is a normal part of the lifecycle, and trying to cram in the latest everything into a newly designed system in an attempt to put off the inevitable is futile and counterproductive.

I'm also saying that you may not run out of headroom as soon as you think.

[0] Note that I'm aware that I am drawing a distinction here between 'tech' and 'design' that isn't really so clearcut.

> Unfortunately fixed price contracts don't work for new cutting edge defense systems. No major defense contractor would ever take on that level of risk so there would be zero bids. Fixed price contracts only become practical after the R&D work is complete.

That's demonstrably false.

All civil aviation works by companies shouldering the weight of development then selling their wares. Heck, the whole non-military economy works this way. And even a good chunk of the military economy where they buy modified civilian goods.

There's nothing special about weapons systems. There's a market. You do market research. You know you can sell X units for Y cost. You build the thing. You sell it.

There's only something special about the DoD. They're not being held accountable and they don't give a damn about the long-term financial welfare of the country.

That’s true of the past but not the present. The U.S. military is clearly and consistently including cost in its decisions today. Anyone who argues against this simply hasn’t looked into it.

The criticism in the article seems misplaced to me - it falls victim to the sunk cost fallacy.

These ships were problematic from the beginning. I remember them being commissioned without a working gun, alongside reports of ship-wide computer failures leaving the ships dead in the water. If they are costly to operate and ineffective in service, it doesn't really matter how much they cost to build in the first place.

That said, it's really a symptom of American corruption / decline / corporate capture in my mind. This program alone funneled billions of dollars into defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, with very little incentive for efficiency. What a waste of American wealth!

> I remember them being commissioned without a working gun

I think you're confusing the LCS with the Zumwalt class... both of which were troubled and mostly cancelled, but for slightly different reasons.

You're right - I was definitely thinking about the Zumwalt's cannon!

There are many angles.

Two important ones are that the defense contractors are jobs programs, giving good salaries to skilled workers and investing in education distributed across the country. They are also defense preparedness programs: we buy and build constantly whether or not we need things right now because when we do need them, we don't want to build knowhow and whole industries from scratch.

Claiming that it is all being done well is of course absurd, but it is also very hard to build programs that last for decades and through many administrations, many political changes, involving millions of people. And folks are always eager to point out "failures" that aren't always a sign of anything being done wrong, especially from people who have little idea what it's like building an enormous ship/plane/weapon meant to be serviceable for half a century.

No, the real name for this is corruption. There are several ways for the government to create jobs without relying on the war industry. And this without talking about the forever war mongering caused by this war industry lobby, that has costed millions of innocent lives around the world.

People won't vote for Green New Deal. They'll vote for Military. Democracy in action.

Up until the last sentence you had me. Thanks for the laugh CCP.

Um, no. Patriotism doesn't equal support for wasteful government programs, and criticism of one's government doesn't equal support for another country's government.

Understanding that is part of the cultural 'high ground' that the US maintains over China!

Part of the reason for this is that US military is shifting focus from the Persian Gulf where littoral combat was a thing, to great power competition in more open waters, both Atlantic and Pacific.

Even if these ships performed as promised, there's a reasonable chance they'd still be cancelled as the force structure changes.

Also, the US Air Force has been experimenting with digital design, where they not only use CAD and similar tools to design the aircraft, but also the entire manufacturing process [1][2]. i wonder if the Navy can adopt that methodology for ships and subs too.

[1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24491337

[2]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505184

For anyone else who caught on "littoral," it means: "relating to or situated on the shore of the sea or a lake"

There was quite a heavy advertising campaign for the littoral combat ship in the early 2000s. They even had ads in the subway! I think this is a fairly common word.

I'm a foreigner and I'd have had to look it up.

It was not a term that at least I was not familiar with and am glad someone spelt it out!

Did seeing the ad for littoral combat ships influence your likelihood to buy one? Choose a number between 1 and 10, 1 means strongly disagree, 10 means strongly agree.

Which subway? DC metro?

Not OP, but likely yes. The DC metro is chock full of advertising targeted at the pentagon. It’s kind of surreal.

Same word in French, except we use it as a noun. Curious. Did it cross with the Normans or later?

Also it seems that American naval projects with foreign names aren't such a success (littoral combat ship, zumwalt...).

Strange, considering the next big thing in military thinking (other than urban) is a shift to littoral focus, preparing for the Pacific shores to become the battleground. Read up on the Marines' major self redefinition currently going on.

These ships were designed for asymmetric littoral. The new threat is likely peer+ littoral.

Got it, interesting.

Sure, but the Marines' Force Design 2030 is centered on the PRC, and the Taiwan invasion in particular. Littoral ships would be disastrously awful for that mission? The PRC strategy is land-based antiship missiles, and LCS are survivability level 1 ships with aluminum hull/superstructure and a single CIWS turret. In a shooting war with China they would evaporate.

I don't think that's their only focus: https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2021...

Edit: littoral appears in their documents extensively. But you are correct that China is the focus, for sure.

This is a classic blue water vs green water navy doctrinal battle.

The USA has always been a blue water navy at heart, despite these halting experiments at green water doctrine.

For anyone looking for the "why" in this thread, here it is ^.

These ships are useful, but only during _acutal_ combat. For force projection, not so much.

It makes sense, given that all the US's probable enemies are across a major ocean. Certainly all the probable enemies with anything close to the same military.

The US and others have fallen into the trap of preparing for the next big war by looking at the last (WWII). Did anyone see the recent opening ceremonies at the Olympics? It included a presentation of 1800 drones flying in precise coordination. It does not take much imagination to see potential of drone swarms on the battlefield.

No one has great plans for swarms but everyone is looking into ways of dealing with them. One reason they're not giving up on it entirely is that using tons of quadcopters like make up those aerial displays is they have pretty low capacity which limits the damage they can do. Control software is also still an issue because it's unlikely gps will be still usable around ships so you need way better software guidance than the display swarms have.

They're definitely going to be one of the major challenges in the next major war but we're still in the early stages of both offense and defense for drones and drone swarms.

Drone swarms are useless for blue water naval combat. Drones cheap enough to build in large numbers don't have sufficient range, speed, or sensors. But navies are actively developing large, expensive drones to supplement or replace manned tactical aircraft.

What makes you think the US government isn't investing in drones? Heck, just google "drone strikes"

TFA says that the ship is being decommissioned after 11 years of service. Could someone with more knowledge/experience with the Navy explain whether that's a normal period of service for this kind of ship? To my civilian brain, that seems like an extraordinarily short period.

The article mentioned 25 years.

>It’s been used as a testbed for mission package development and leaving the fleet well ahead of its expected 25-year service life.

This is also against the backdrop of Navy life extensions for cruisers and other small craft towards 35 years from 25 (and much longer for some systems https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/06/07/the-us-navys-sh... ). The LCS program was plagued by problems to a degree that the designs are no longer being used as a base for future craft the major defense contractors are proposing. I think the intent is to replace a lot of what the Littoral Combat Ships mission should have been with Constellation Class Frigates instead.

It is a very short period for a ship, especially a non-nuclear one (which sometimes have no means for refuel, and have a fixed service life). If you poke around the list of US destroyers, the successful classes last about 30 years. USS Arleigh Burke for example was commissioned in 1991, and it’s still on the register.

I am personally surprised they’re giving up on the Littoral ships before they gave up on the Zumwalt class, the destroyers that don’t even have any ammunition for their main guns.

The Navy hasn't completely given up on the LCS. More are still being built whereas Zumwalt procurement was stopped at 3. The current thinking is to remove the main guns and install missile launchers in their place.

It is. If you go read about these, on balance the information is negative. The projects suffered from design creep and cost overruns, and turned out not to be well-suited to the types of missions we allegedly needed them for.

The US Navy is already well into a new project to develop a new guided-missile frigate [FFG(X)] to replace these LCS ships.

> Could someone with more knowledge/experience with the Navy explain whether that's a normal period of service for this kind of ship

These ships were commissioned to counter shallow-water adversaries. Iranian speedboats, pirates, et cetera. In the context of balancing Russia and China, they’re underpowered.

The orientation shift from terrorists and regional powers to countering a regional hegemon and emerging superpower explains part of the lifespan. The rest is it being a garbage ship.

> CNO Adm. Mike Gilday told USNI News in an interview it would take $2.5 billion to upgrade the first four ships – money he would rather put toward the emerging Constellation-class frigate (FFG-62) program.

OK I'll have a crack.

That thing is a tri-hull: not your usual armoured ship. That is designed for speed, it is designed to plane and not displace (think speed boat but a lot bigger). It is described as "littoral" which is Latin for around the shore. It's got trendy slopey sides so slightly stealthy and also those angles will help in slightly deflecting kinetic incoming nasties.

So we have a weapon platform that can move really fast close to shore.

When you are running something as big as a national cough defensive cough thingie, you will have many experiments running in peacetime. Note the word peacetime. These experiments will cost billions of ickies (pick your currency - it doesn't matter.) This ship class is pretty obviously one such experiment.

You also have to remember it takes a very long time to get from "we need this" to the thing floating in the water or flying or breaking down on Salisbury Plain. In wartime, timescales are shortened. In (lol) peacetime it takes longer. For example in 1940s Britain, if you need a fighter/bomber which has decent firepower and a small bomb load and have a fair range and be bloody fast then you suddenly get the Mosquitto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito . It was made of wood and was also considered two kills if one was shot down - that's how bad the Mossie looked to the Germans.

Any bit of war gear - ship, plane, rifle, grenade etc takes ages to go from plan to usage. Some become classics for example the AK47.

The other thing to consider is that people are employed to conceive, design and build these things. The US is a bunch of states and sometimes politicians ensure local jobs are secured for federal reasons/concerns.

Both LCS designs are primarily displacement hulls. They can get onto a partial plane at speed but are too large to get up on a full plane.

No modern warship carries much armor. It's too heavy. And a sloped side will do precisely nothing to deflect incoming missiles.

One of the things I developed a deeper understanding of when I got a chance to work for a defense contractor was just how difficult and complicated it is to develop a new system for the US Government. Unlike "regular" development where you have a project lead, and maybe a VP, CTO, and CEO to get on board, the government needs congress people on board (the money), the service on board (their generals), all of the participating contractors on board (the builders), and a timeline where you may be funded one year and not the next. It is exceptionally challenging!

Getting this ship commissioned was pretty impressive, getting it decommissioned in some ways even more so.

I would love to know about what that thing is in the prow. Is it an anchor?

I love the hull shape. It looks like it would deal with some nasty seas. If it hit a 50' wall of water, those upwards pointing planes should point it upwards and along with the inherent buoyancy, get the ship back to the surface.

The piccy:

https://news.usni.org/2021/07/31/navy-quietly-decommissions-...

... shows that there is a chain going down and some rope warps and springs.

Yep that's the anchor. Just can't see the flukes due to the angle the picture was taken from. Check https://i.redd.it/99rhoexauq2z.jpg for a better view.

Why is the anchor gold? The Retention Excellence Award (previously known as the Golden Anchor Award); an award given by the United States Department of the Navy for sustaining superior levels of military retention. The award was established by the United States Fleet Forces Command through the Fleet Retention Excellence Program. Deployable Navy ships are authorized to paint their anchors gold as a symbol of earning the award.

The decommissioning of a ship got me to thinking of the lifecycle of buildings dedicated to business.

The large buildings dedicated to a single company where tens of thousands of person-years of adult life by good people were spent. Sometimes I think that these buildings deserve a formal decommissioning, maybe even a desacralization. Or perhaps a Bastille-ization in some cases.

I actually toured the USS Independence when it was docked at Pier 80 in SF during Fleet Week a few years ago - really cool propulsion system the crew described to us as a jet ski with similar speed and maneuverability implications.

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