Right All Along

The Navy has finally and officially acknowledged that ComNavOps was right all along.  Of course, ComNavOps is right about everything, so what, specifically, is the Navy acknowledging that ComNavOps was right about?  - The need for in-house naval engineering to design and oversee ship acquisition programs.

ComNavOps has long preached that the Navy abdicated its responsibilities by abolishing BuShips and turning over design and construction responsibility to the manufacturers.  This began with the Spruance class, which actually turned out quite well, and has culminated the LCS, LPD-17, Ford, and Zumwalt fiascos.

Now, the Navy has recognized that the lack of in-house engineering expertise is at the root of these acquisition disasters (1).  How bad had the engineering loss gotten?

“Vice Adm. Tom Moore, commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, said NAVSEA’s engineering directorate (SEA 05) had dropped to a fifth of its size from 1990 to 2005.”

“…in SEA 05, where there had been 1,292 engineers in 1990 and only 251 in 2005 …”

The Navy is now looking to hire engineers with a goal of 750 by 2025.  Of course, that’s still only around half of what they had in 1990 and none of those new hires will have naval warship design and construction experience so there won’t be any quick turnaround in design and construction expertise.  Still, it’s a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, the Navy is only looking to go half way to solving the problem.  The full solution requires reconstituting BuShips and the General Board.  The Navy, however, is only going to add engineers without the BuShips organization that made the warship design process so effective and without the General Board that made warship conceptual designs so linked to operational needs.

Why did the Navy go down the ill fated path that they did?

““In one of our many eras of acquisition reform – and at that time, the vogue in acquisition reform back in the mid-90s was, hey, industry knows best, just throw it over the fence to them and let them build the ships and we’ll be fine …”

I know, it sounds idiotic, doesn’t it?  Unfortunately, the concept went even further off the rails when the Navy not only threw the responsibility over the fence to the manufacturer but they threw it to companies that had never built a warship before.  Neither Lockheed Martin nor Austal had built a warship before they started building the LCS.  What did the Navy think was going to happen?

I’ve never built a nuclear reactor before.  What do you think will happen if you hire me to build one?

You know, there’s some failings that are obvious in hindsight but may not have been obvious at the time and then there’s ideas that are so blindingly stupid that hindsight is not required:  non-warship companies building warships, minimal manning, deferred maintenance, and so on.  It was obvious from the start that abdicating design responsibility would not turn out well. 

While it’s good that the Navy is finally recognizing the error of their ways, that error has cost the Navy an entire generation of flawed ships.  The LCS will never be useful.  The LPD-17 was a quality control disaster whose effects are still being felt (and we’re using it as the basis for future ship classes!!!!).  The Ford is an unaffordable budget disaster that is sounding the death knell of carriers.  The Zumwalt is the poster child for “I don’t really know what I want” and cost the Navy an entire generation of cruisers.

Make no mistake.  This decades long disaster lies squarely with Navy flag leadership.  The extent of their incompetence is/was staggering and will continue to be felt for decades to come.

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(1)USNI website, “Navy to Impose More Rigorous Oversight in New Ship Classes; Will Hire More Engineers”, Megan Eckstein, February 20, 2017,

https://news.usni.org/2017/02/20/navy-oversight-in-new-ship-engineering-classes

Save the Industrial Base?

As we discuss the costs of various programs, such as the JSF, LCS, or Zumwalt, one of the common points that keeps recurring is that we can’t afford to cancel the programs because of the impact on the manufacturing base.  We’re down to one or two manufacturers in many of our key areas.  If we were to cancel a program, the manufacturer would fold or downsize to the point that we would lose vital expertise.  Thus, we’re forced to procure weapons and systems that may only be marginally useful in order to support the manufacturer.  The military is, in effect, operating a jobs program simply to maintain an industrial base.

In principle, this is an easy issue.  The military is under no obligation and, indeed, has no tasking or responsibility to ensure the solvency of commercial companies.  If a company can’t survive, it should fail.  That’s the Darwinian law of the free market.

Of course, the reality is that much of the manufacturing and technical expertise that the military depends on is narrowly focused (can’t be transferred into the general market place) and highly concentrated in a very few manufacturers.  If one does fold, it will have an enormous impact on our ability to design and produce new weapons and systems. 

We see, then, that a policy of propping up companies does, in fact, have some validity and strategic worth.  Unfortunately, this leads to two very bad consequences:  high costs due to lack of competition and the procurement of systems of questionable utility.  There is a third, perhaps worse, consequence and that is the concentration of expertise in commercial companies rather than within the military.  Currently, the Navy does not have the engineering expertise to design or even evaluate a ship design.  The Navy does not have the expertise to design new radars, missiles, launch systems, aircraft, or even more mundane and lower tech items such as turbines, motors, valves, etc.  The military has become totally dependent on commercial companies for expertise.  Too often, tech reps keep the Navy running instead of our own sailors.

What has lead us to this situation?  How did we go from having many shipyards, manufacturers, and widespread commercial expertise plus extensive in-house expertise in the 1940’s to the current situation?  There’s many factors, of course, but two main developments have dictated the trend. 

First, the abolishment of BuShips (see here) meant that the Navy gave up its internal ship design expertise.  As we said, not only can the Navy not design new ships, it can’t even evaluate industry designs (no cathodic corrosion protection on the LCS???  no bridge wings on the LCS? vibration so severe on the LCS that the 57mm gun can’t hit a target?).  The Navy forfeited its technical competence to industry. 

Second, the Navy embarked on a pursuit of high end, multi-function, extremely high tech ships and planes which resulted in a spiral of fewer numbers and ever increasing costs.  As the costs increase, the numbers decrease.  That’s a death spiral.  It also means that fewer and fewer ships and aircraft are built which means that fewer and fewer manufacturers can be supported.  Again, a death spiral.

OK, so now we clearly see the problem and recognize the dilemma but no one seems to have a solution.  Is there nothing we can do but wring our hands and ride the death spiral down to the inevitable end?  That’s what the Navy is doing!

Well, having recognized the cause of the problem, what if we reversed it?  What if the Navy stopped the pursuit of technology (or at least tempered it!) and regained its in-house expertise?  Would that have any positive impact?  What if we built more ships and planes?  That would support a larger industrial base, wouldn’t it?  Well, sure, but where would the money come from to build more ships and planes?  We haven’t got enough money to even build sufficient numbers to maintain the fleet size let alone increase it!  So, yeah, I guess those actions would improve the situation but they’re not really practical or even possible … … …     Are they?

To build more ships without increasing the shipbuilding budget just requires a philosophical adjustment.  Let’s give up a few of the top end ships in exchange for greater numbers of solid, highly useful ships that don’t have to be technological wonders.  For example, the three Zumwalts are going to add a very marginal improvement in capability to the fleet.  At a construction cost of $12B or so (not to mention the R&D costs!), we could have bought twelve modern, highly useful $1B frigates or twenty four basic but still quite useful $500M frigates.  If we gave up a single $14B Ford class carrier we could afford a lot of AFSBs, MLPs, four air wings worth of brand new Super Hornets, an entire new class of MCM vessels, and so on.  If we gave up the LCS we could afford to build dozens of dedicated MCM vessels and low end dedicated ASW vessels.  I could go on with example after example but you get the idea.  Note that I’m not advocating giving up technology or high end ships – just saying that not every ship and plane needs to be ultra high end.  A judicious restraint on our technology pursuit fetish can still give us the high end we need, provide lots of extra ships and planes to support our industrial base, and significantly expand the fleet size while still providing useful platforms.  Throw in more upgrades rather than early retirements and the industrial base is further supported.

Reconstituting BuShips would provide the Navy with the in-house expertise it needs to better monitor the products and services it gets from industry.  If we had had in-house naval engineering expertise, how much money would we have saved on the LCS corrosion debacle?  Yeah, I know, a drop in the bucket compared to overall budgets and costs.  However, over time, enough drops eventually equal a bucket.  With in-house expertise, perhaps we wouldn’t have had to accept a clearly sub-standard LCS design, or EMALS that has no electromagnetic shielding and glows like an electromagnetic beacon, or an F-35C that doesn’t have enough rear end to get its tailhook to engage, or an LPD-17 design that has a boat launch that is inherently dangerous, or a Burke Flt III AMDR that is too small for the required task, or ….  All of those things cost extra money to fix – some drops of money and some quite a lot.  The more money we save, the more money we have available for additional ships and planes thereby strengthening the industrial base.

Greater in-house expertise also offers another, radical possibility.  If we can’t fully support the industrial base we need, what about absorbing it?  Why can’t the Navy actually design and build their own ships?.  Sure, we’d have to essentially create a shipbuilding company within the Navy but we would no longer have to pay the profit portion of the costs.  I don’t know what the profit margin on a ship is, for instance, but it’s got to be at least 20% or industry wouldn’t do it.  My guess is that it’s a lot higher than that.  Regardless, do the math.  A profit of 20% on a $12B carrier is $2.4B.  That could buy a lot of additional planes and ships or fund a great deal of maintenance and upgrades so that our existing fleet could last longer!  Instead of having to try to separate industry sales spin from reality maybe the Navy would have the expertise to know the straight story - not that the Navy is exactly renowned for straight talking or wise decisions but, you know, theoretically…

It comes down to this:  we can all say that the current system is too fragile to change – while riding the death spiral to complete failure – or we can peek outside the box and consider some more radical changes.  Would they be easy to implement?  Probably not but faced with a death spiral, isn’t it worth trying something different?  The Navy has 285 or so ships now and can’t meet the mission demand.  What’s going to happen when the fleet shrinks to 230?  Yeah, those are the numbers that even CNO is throwing around although he seems not to understand the reason why it’s happening.

The choice is simple:  die or change.  I’d like to try changing.

General Board and BuShips

Once upon a time (hey, that’s how any good fairy tale starts), the Navy designed ships in-house.  They debated needs and requirements, collected opinions from the fleet, settled on specifications, and drew up designs.  The designs were then offered to industry to bid on the actual construction.  Along the way, the Navy’s in-house experts monitored the progress of construction, compared the product to the specifications, and eventually passed judgment on whether the product quality was acceptable.  Because of the in-house knowledge and expertise, the Navy knew exactly how the ship should be built, what materials were appropriate, and how the ship would perform.  There were two groups largely responsible for this approach to ship procurement:  the General Board and BuShips.

The General Board of the Navy was established as an advisory group in 1900 and disbanded in 1951 by order of then CNO Forrest Sherman.  The board consisted of senior admirals and others, often near the end of their careers or retired who had a wealth of experience, relatively little politicking left to do, and sufficient time to consider issues facing the Navy.  While they were tasked with contemplation of any issue brought before them, their greatest value lay in the guidance and direction they provided for the Navy’s shipbuilding programs.  Anyone who has read any of Norman Friedman’s series on the design history of the various classes of ships will be well familiar with the role the General Board played in evaluating the various ship design proposals and then establishing the final requirements.  It is worthwhile to note that the General Board was abolished by the office of the CNO which viewed the Board as a threat to the CNO’s power.



The General Board - The Navy's Best Hope?



The Navy’s Bureau of Ships (BuShips) was established by Congress in 1940 and consolidated the Bureau of Construction and Repair and the Bureau of Engineering.  The Bureau was responsible for the design, construction, procurement, maintenance, and repair of ships as well as establishing relevant specifications for materials, fuel, etc.  BuShips was eliminated by order of the Dept. of Defense in 1966 as part of a general reorganization of the Navy and was replaced by what is now known as the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA). 

Beginning somewhere around the time of the Spruance class procurement, the Navy decided to farm out its design responsibilities to industry.  The Spruance was the result of a general set of wishes provided to industry with industry allowed to design the ship.  On the plus side, the Navy hoped that this would lead to more unconventional designs and cost savings.  On the minus side, there was no guarantee that any of the industry designs would turn out to be acceptable.  As it happened with the Spruance, a fairly good design did result.  Also on the minus side was the loss of ship design expertise and familiarity with the specifics of the design.  Thus, the Navy no longer had in-house experts who could evaluate a design and recognize good from bad.  Further, the Navy had no person or group intimately familiar with the details of a given ship class’ design.  The Navy would have to depend on industry to understand the details – the Navy knowingly and willingly abandoned the concept of attention-to-detail.  This trend of farming out design responsibilities to industry has continued to this day and has given us the LCS, LPD, DDG-1000, and other notable failures.

Here’s a simple and minor example of what happens when no one inside the Navy is responsible for, and knowledgeable about, ship design.  The Navy just recently announced that it would retrofit bridge wings to the LCS-2’s that have already been built or are under construction.  Apparently, bridge wings are necessary for vision when maneuvering the ships in tight spaces.  Of course, every sailor since Columbus has known this and yet the Navy failed to include bridge wings in the LCS-2 design.

Not to pick on the LCS, but consider the corrosion problems due to galvanic corrosion, a phenomenon that has been well understood for centuries.  The lack of in-house naval engineers with responsibility for the design led to a fundamental oversight that shouldn’t have happened.

I could go on with example after example but you get the point.

The lack of in-house technical and engineering expertise is bad enough but there is another, equally serious, problem resulting from the absence of a dedicated design group.  The people who are nominally in charge of developing requirements and overseeing the ship designs don’t stick around long enough to see their work through and take responsibility for it.  Instead, they serve their short term assignment and move on.  The people supposedly responsible for the LCS are long gone.  There is no continuity or accountability and attention to detail suffers.  Wouldn’t we all like to ask the originators of the LCS design what they were thinking?  Compare that model of ship design to the BuShips approach.  With BuShips, the designers worked in the Bureau for years and were readily accountable for their designs.  Further, for naval engineers BuShips represented the pinnacle of their careers rather than a short term stop on the way to other career paths.

I mentioned NAVSEA which replaced BuShips.  Shouldn’t they be performing the same responsibilities?  Sadly, no.  NAVSEA does not design ships.  In fact, as I understand their function, they don’t even get involved with a ship design until it’s already built.  NAVSEA verifies that the newly constructed ships meet the contract specifications but by then it’s too late to improve the design.  Worse, NAVSEA doesn’t even do this properly.  The first few LPDs were accepted by NAVSEA despite the fact that the ships weren’t even remotely close to being completed – they required thousands of post-acceptance man-hours just to physically complete the construction.  Similarly, the LCSs have been accepted with entire compartments incomplete.  NAVSEA’s acceptance evaluations have become a joke and a political and public relations tool of a politicized Navy leadership.

The Navy urgently needs to reconstitute both the General Board and BuShips if it is to have any hope of living happily ever after.