Warship Design

The Navy no longer builds warships.  The Navy builds fragile weapon delivery platforms but not warships.  A warship is a vessel that can stand and fight;  one that can take damage and continue to fight;  a ship that is designed to mitigate the damage it receives.

In WWII the Navy built superb warships that could deliver immense amounts of damage, were built to resist damage, and were designed to continue fighting when damaged.  Consider the destroyers on the Pacific picket lines towards the end of the war.  There were numerous examples of these small ships absorbing multiple bombs and kamikaze hits and yet continuing to fight.  Or, what about the cruisers and destroyers involved in the battle for Guadalcanal?  They absorbed tremendous amounts of damage from torpedoes and shellfire while continuing to fight.  Yes, many eventually sank but only after extensive damage and while continuing to fight to the end.

Current Navy ships have almost none of the characteristics of their WWII predecessors.  Armor, other than small amounts of shrapnel protection around key areas, has been abandoned.  Manual/local fire control is largely absent though, to be fair, trying to shoot down missiles in manual control is probably a pointless exercise.  Torpedo protection in the form of blisters is non-existent.  Manning, the most important damage control factor there is, has been “optimized” to the point where damage control has been seriously compromised.  And so on …

Having just touched on some of the features that make for a good warship design, what are the characteristics that would make for a good modern warship design?  Here’s a good starter list.

Separation.  Key pieces of equipment should be physically separated to the extent possible.  The modern Burke, for instance, has all of its Aegis arrays mounted within about a 30 ft diameter or so.  A single hit there would likely take out every array.  The arrays should be separated as on the Ticonderogas which have two arrays on the forward superstructure and two on the aft.  Similarly, two of the three target illuminators are within ten feet of each other on the aft superstructure.  The Harpoon Mk141 rack launchers are always installed in side by side pairs.  A single hit would cost a ship its entire Harpoon loadout.



Note the Aegis Arrays Clustered on the Forward Superstructure



Redundancy.  Redundancy is almost non-existent.  Consider the modern destroyer as typified by the Burke class.  It has a single 5” gun versus the WWII Fletcher’s five 5” guns.  The modern Burke has no redundancy in gunfire.  The main radars of modern ships tend to be single installations with no significant backup. 

Armor.  Modern armor, such as it is, is limited to shrapnel suppression around a few key electronics areas.  There is no general hull or deck armor.  The modern gun mounts consist of fiberglass/composite shells  which provide no protection whatsoever as opposed to their WWII counterparts which were largely proof against shrapnel and ranged from a couple inches for 5” guns to the massive armor of the battleship turrets which could shrug off almost any hit.

Single Point of Failure.  Closely related to redundancy, single points of failure can incapacitate a system or multiple systems.  The example of the single 5” gun illustrates the single point of failure concept wherein an entire magazine of ammo is useless if the gun fails.  More commonly, single points of failure relate to ship’s utilities.  For example, electrical power for multiple systems routed through a common cable run represents a single point of failure.

Damage Control Requires Lots of Manpower

Manning.  As has been vividly demonstrated repeatedly since the start of WWII and through today, manning is one of the most important features of a warship.  Adequate manning allows battle casualties to be replaced.  Most importantly, successful damage control is a function of manpower more than any other factor as demonstrated even today by the Stark or the Cole incidents.



Steel.  WWII ships were built tough.  All ships were armored commensurate with their size.  Today’s ships have only isolated armor segments for protecting electronics from shrapnel.  Modern gun mounts are protected only by fiberglass type enclosures that offer no protection for the gun, whatsoever.  Even setting aside the issue of armor, per se, today’s ships are built with aluminum, composites, plywood cores, and very thin steel skins.  They are built to hold out the elements but that’s about it.  Simply using thicker and stronger steel would be a vast improvement as shown in the earlier post about the Cole.

In summary, if the Navy were serious about building WARships, we would not have the LCS, the Burkes, or for that matter, any of our current ships.  Given the enormous cost of modern ships, it’s puzzling why much greater survivability and toughness aren’t built in.  Ships represent far too big an investment not to make every attempt to ensure that they can fight hard and, if need be, fight hurt.

CBO Shipbuilding Analysis Report

The Congressional Budget Office has published its analysis of the Navy’s current shipbuilding plan.  It’s worth noting several points from the report. 

First, the Navy’s cost estimates are, charitably, incompetent or, more realistically, intentionally misleading, bordering on fraudulent.  The Navy’s estimate is that it will build 268 ships over the next 30 years at an average yearly cost of $16.8B.  CBO estimates the yearly required cost will be $20.0B and even suggests that their estimates may be too low.  By comparison, the current actual yearly cost is $14.9B.  Does anyone believe that figure is going up in the foreseeable future, given the budget problems, looming cuts, and possible sequestration?

Setting aside the incredible unlikelihood of budget increases, does the Navy’s history of cost estimating inspire any confidence?  The LCS, LPD-17, CVN-78, Virginia, etc. all wound up costing 30% - 100% more than the Navy’s estimates.  So, it would seem that CBO’s estimates are likely to closer to reality than the Navy’s. 



300 Ship Fleet?  Not Likely!



Now, the interesting part of this cost estimating is that the Navy knows its own history of estimating failures and yet continues to insist on using the same methods it always has.  That’s either incompetent or fraudulent.  You decide for yourself.

Moving on, the Navy plans to build 268 ships to achieve a 300+ fleet.  However, using the CBO’s estimate of the average cost per ship of $2.2B, the build rate for new ships under the current budget is only 6.7 ships per year which gives a total of 203 over the 30 year period as opposed to the Navy’s goal of 268 ships.  The more realistic CBO numbers show that the Navy is not going come anywhere near a 300 ship fleet.  To be fair, no one knows what the yearly shipbuilding budget will be ten or twenty years from now.  It may be higher than now but, then again, it may well be smaller.  I’m guessing that it will remain unchanged for the next several years.

Speaking of achieving a 300+ ship fleet, CBO notes that the Navy is assuming that the Burke class destroyers will have a service life of 40 years even though no previous destroyer class has even come close to that.  If they have a more realistic life of 25-30 years, the 300+ ship fleet becomes even more of a fantasy.  And, of course, the Navy is now counting the Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV) and ocean surveillance ships as part of the fleet.  Throw in the absolutely toothless LCS which will make up a quarter of the fleet and the fleet numbers may look better on paper but it illustrates how much less capable the future fleet will be.

Finally, CBO notes that the Navy’s cost estimates fail to include the costs for post-delivery fitting out, nuclear refuels, and various other things that come from the new construction account.  These push the actual construction costs up by about $2B per year which means the yearly construction budgets should actually be $18.8B (Navy) and $21.9B (CBO) which are even less likely to be achieved.

The CBO report makes it pretty clear that the Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan is just a fantasy of wishful thinking rather than a realistic plan.  To me, it looks like a political ploy to enable the current administration to be able to claim that they are maintaining the fleet even though it is actually shrinking.  The really sad part is that the uniformed Navy leadership is going along with this.

(1) Congressional Budget Office (CBO) – An Analysis of the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2013 Shipbuilding Plan, July 2012, Pub. No. 4456

Unmanned Carrier Aircraft (UCLASS)

The Navy is working to develop a carrier based, unmanned strike aircraft.  This Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) aircraft would provide long range, stealthy strike capability for use in the Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) scenario.

Before I go any further, let me say this up front - I'm not against UCLASS, at all.  Potentially, they could be very useful.  However, the basic concept as applied to the Chinese A2/AD scenario has some serious challenges to overcome that deserve to be discussed in the face of the Navy’s typical rush to acquisition.  Just as with “littoral” and “AirSea Battle”, I fear that the Navy is latching onto “UCLASS” as another acquisition justification buzzword without adequately exploring the underlying concept. 



UCLASS - The Right Concept?



Let’s take a closer look at the underlying concept.  The Chinese A2/AD zone is visualized as being about 1000 nm out from the mainland.  So, assuming a launch from outside the zone against targets on or deep inside the mainland, an aircraft would need to be able to fly 1000-1500 nm.  Of course, the range of the weapon carried by the aircraft could extend the effective striking range of the UCLASS.  During the course of penetration, the UCLASS would have to pass through many radar zones, hundreds of patrolling aircraft, and hundreds of ground AAA and SAM installations. 



So, we can see that a UCLASS needs extraordinary range, something on the order of a combat radius of 1000-1500 nm.  It will also need highly effective stealth and/or great speed to avoid or outrun threats.  Finally, it would be nice if the payload were greater than one or two weapons.  Having flown many hundreds of miles and evaded hundreds of threats it would be silly to only be able to strike one or two targets.  The risk/reward balance just isn’t there without a much greater payload.  And, lest we’ve forgotten, the UCLASS has to be small enough to fit on a carrier.

The Navy’s current prototype UCLASS is the X-47B Pegasus.  Here’s some of the relevant specifications.

Range (one way) – 2100 nm

Combat Radius (estimated) – 500 nm

Weapons Load – 4500 lb

Speed – subsonic

Cruise – 0.45 mach

Wingspan – 62 ft (31 ft folded)

Comparing the X-47B specs to our desired performance, we can see that the prototype’s combat radius is half to one third of that needed.  Remember, that the A2/AD zone is, essentially, all water.  The targets of interest, aside from the occasional ship, are all on the mainland.  Penetrating half way accomplishes nothing.  Of course, this is a prototype so the range can be increased, right?  Well, yes, but longer range means bigger fuel storage which means a bigger, heavier aircraft and the bigger it is, the harder it’s going to be to operate and fit on a carrier.  The prototype is already larger than an F/A-18E/F Super Hornet (wingspan = 44 ft).  The largest aircraft currently on carriers is the E-2 Hawkeye with a wingspan of 80 ft. 

You may be observing that the range is 2100 nm and thinking that’s a 1050 nm round trip.  That should be plenty of range, right?  You’d be correct except that range is non-combat loaded and assumes a straight line course at the most economical speed and altitude profile.  Adding roundabout waypoints to avoid high threat areas, adding a combat weapons load, and performing evasive or high speed avoidance maneuvers seriously cuts into the range, hence, the estimate of a 500 nm combat radius.  If you don’t believe this, go check out the Hornet’s (or any plane’s) range versus combat radius figures.

Speed is the next obvious deficiency.  A subsonic aircraft (only about 350 kts cruising speed) is going to have a hard time penetrating a thousand mile A2/AD zone and escaping threats along the way.  Let’s be blunt – it can’t.  Unfortunately, there’s a Catch-22 at work, here.  The only way to make the aircraft faster is to increase fuel consumption which decreases the combat radius which leads us right back to having to make a significantly bigger aircraft to carry much more fuel.

Finally, weapons load is extremely light.  The current F/A-18E/F has a weapons capacity of 17,500 lbs which is way bigger than the X-47B’s 4500 lbs.  Again, the only way to increase the payload is to make the aircraft bigger. 

Do you see the trend, here?  The only way to meet the notional requirements for a useful UCLASS is to make it much bigger.  I guess there’s a reason why the B-1 and B-2 deep penetration bombers are so big.

Of course, bigger creates its own set of problems.  The bigger the aircraft, the easier it is to detect.  The bigger the aircraft, the fewer can fit on a carrier.  The bigger the aircraft, the more expensive it is.

Have we left any issues out?  Yes, we have!  How about remote control communications?  Our ability to control UAVs at any distance is currently suspect and at the 1000 + nm ranges that a UCLASS would have to operate, maintaining reliable control communications becomes highly problematic.  In a war, communications satellites and relay nodes will likely be destroyed and heavy jamming will be the norm.  A successful UCLASS will have to overcome those communication challenges.

Closely related to communications is the issue of location awareness.  How will the UCLASS know where it is if GPS satellites go down at the start of conflict as everyone assumes they will?  To be fair, this problem is not unique to the UCLASS but affects every weapon and platform in the US military.  Still, there’s no point penetrating an A2/AD zone if you don’t know precisely where you are. 

I could go on but this serves to illustrate that the basic concept of a long range UCLASS is suspect under the current operating concept and technological capabilities.  A viable UCLASS would need closer to 2000 nm combat radius, much greater stealth or much greater speed to avoid detection/destruction, larger weapons carrying capacity, and reliable control communications over thousands of miles.

Can the Navy get from the initial data point of the X-47B to the desired aircraft?  Possibly, though the challenges are great.  The purpose of this discussion is to point out the magnitude of the challenges and suggest that the Navy not leap into this without addressing the problems and thinking them through.  Failure to do so is what led to the LCS and no one wants to see the flying version of the LCS!

JSF Fun Facts

Just for fun, I’ve summarized a few data points from GAO’s report (1); numbers that taken together give a sort of snapshot of the behemoth program.  I’ll refrain from any analysis and let the numbers speak for themselves.

• 2,457: The total number of F-35s the U.S. government wants to develop and acquire through 2037. That is down from the initial program goal, in 2001, of 2,866 aircraft.

• $395.7 billion: The latest estimate for the total cost to develop and buy the F-35. That’s up from an estimate of $278.5 billion in the 2007 baseline and up from the original program estimate of $233 billion in 2001.

• $1 billion: The cost overruns on the first four annual procurement contracts; taxpayers’ share of that is about $672 million. That adds about $11 million to the price of each of the 63 total aircraft under contract.

• $373 million: Additional costs of “concurrency” – modifications to aircraft DoD has already bought that were made necessary by discoveries in testing that came after they were built.

• 365: The number of F-35 the Pentagon plans to buy (for about $69 billion) before the program’s developmental flight tests are finished.

• 179: The number of aircraft the Pentagon will delay through fiscal 2017 to reduce “concurrency” risks. Here’s what GAO said about that:

“This marked the third time in as many years that near-term procurement quantities had been reduced. Combined with other changes since the 2007 revised baseline, total JSF procurement quantity has been reduced by 410 aircraft through fiscal year 2017. Since the department still plans to eventually acquire the full complement of U.S. aircraft—2,443 production jets—the procurement costs, fielding schedules, and support requirements for the deferred aircraft will be incurred in future years beyond 2017. The new plan also stretches the period of planned procurement another two years to 2037.”

“With the latest reduction, the program now plans to procure a total of 365 aircraft through 2017, about one-fourth of the 1,591 aircraft expected in the 2002 plan.”

• $35,200: The Air Force’s target cost per flight hour for its F-35A. That’s compared to about $22,500 per flight hour for an F-16 today – though program and Pentagon officials say it’s apples-and-oranges trying to compare F-35 costs to “legacy” aircraft.

• 6: Number of primary test objectives the F-35 completed in 2011, out of 11.

• 972: Number of test flights F-35s completed in 2011 – more than double that of the year before. The program completed has more than 21 percent of its total 60,000 planned test points.

• 24 million: Lines of code “necessary for the JSF’s capability,” GAO said; that includes 9.5 million aboard the aircraft itself. The F-35 needs three times as many lines of software code as the F-22 and six times as many as the F/A-18E and F Super Hornet.

• $80 million: The cost to bring the F-35’s initial pilot helmet into spec while at the same time developing “a second, less capable helmet” that crews can use as a stopgap. Whichever helmet ends up in use, it won’t be “integrated into the baseline aircraft” until 2014 or later, “increasing the risks of a major system redesign.”

(1) GAO: Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, Statement of Michael J. Sullivan, Director Acquisition and Sourcing Management, GAO-12-525T, March 20, 2012

CNO's Tenets - Walking or Just Talking?

CNO Greenert has proudly established his three tenets, as he calls them, for the Navy.  In order, they are:

Warfighting First

Operate Forward

Be Ready

Hmm … Not very catchy as slogans go but that’s okay.  If those principles actually guide the Navy, the Navy would be fairly well served.  So, the question becomes does CNO walk it or just talk it?



CNO - Walking or Talking?



Warfighting First.  This certainly seems like an incredibly obvious tenet for a military organization, doesn’t it?  I’ll give CNO full marks and credit for making it first on his list.  He got that part right.  Warfighting, in the absence of an active war, as now, means being fully prepared for war at all times.  Is the Navy fully prepared, right now?  Not even close!  INSURV failures are so frequent that the Navy has classified the reports in order to avoid embarrassment.  Conversations with serving techs reveal chronic spare parts shortages and not just for non-essential equipment.  Many Aegis parts are in short supply and Aegis is the backbone of the Navy.  If there was any system that ought to be well supplied, that’s it, and yet it’s not.  Ship maintenance has gotten so bad that the Navy commissioned special investigations.  The Aegis cruiser USS Port Royal pulled out of a drydock period and promptly ran aground due, in large part, to unfinished maintenance and parts shortages.  Manning is insufficient to properly maintain and operate equipment let alone engage in combat.  Aircraft are running through their arrested landing limits and flight hours at rates that are causing shortages in the squadrons.  Training quality has been steadily reduced.  New ships are being accepted in woefully incomplete states.  An entire class, the LPD-17, is deemed unsuitable for its designed purpose.  Another entire class, the LCS, has no purpose and less capability. 



Warfighting First also refers to priorities.  What should the Navy be spending its time and budget on?  According to this tenet, it should be all about warfighting.  The budget should be directed towards warfighting.  Personnel time should be devoted to preparing for war by high quality, realistic training.  Fleet activities should be focused on one thing only – warfighting.  In reality, the Navy is far more focused on monitoring drinking, conducting sensitivity training, investigating sexual harassment, promoting diversity, pursuing co-ed ships, and providing humanitarian assistance.  None of these activities promote warfighting.  One, in particular, should be totally dropped from the Navy’s mission list and that is humanitarian assistance.  While it sounds harsh, in a time of severely limited budgets and overworked ships, aircraft, and personnel, this is a mission that does not further the Navy’s warfighting readiness.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  Budget funds that could go towards maintenance are being used to conduct humanitarian missions.  Entire carrier or amphibious groups are being devoted to it at enormous daily operating cost.  Precious airframe flight hours are being expended on food distribution.  Thousands of man-hours are being used to distribute supplies instead of training for war.  The Navy simply can’t afford to conduct humanitarian assistance at this time.  In a time of limited budgets and resources, warfighting has to be the priority, just as CNO says but fails to abide by. 

The litany of problems can go on but this illustrates the current state of readiness of the Navy.  The Navy is as unprepared for war as I’ve seen it in my lifetime.

Operate Forward.  This tenet is less obvious in intent.  I don’t know what CNO means by this but I’ll take it at face value.  He’s referring to forward presence, presumably.  Show the flag, gunboat diplomacy, policeman on the corner – that type of thing.  For a nation with a sense of global responsibility as well as global interests, this too seems obvious.  This tenet comes down to two things:  numbers and, to a somewhat lesser extent, quality.  Forward presence can only be achieved by having a sufficient number of ships forward deployed and that requires a critical number of ships.  To a lesser extent, the quality of the ships forward deployed matters.  For instance, a few forward deployed LCSs (Singapore) aren’t going to provide nearly the results that a carrier group would.  No foreign country, friend or enemy, respects or fears an LCS.  Honestly, not knowing what ships are deployed where, I can’t really evaluate CNO’s success in implementing this one.  All I can do is note the trend towards a smaller fleet and a less powerful and impressive one and be concerned that we’re not on a good path moving forward.



USS Port Royal - Ready for War?



Be Ready.  Again, this seems obvious and is strictly the readiness aspect of the fleet and to that extent it overlaps some of the factors and concerns listed above in the Warfighting First section.  Readiness is at a low point with systemic problems in manning, maintenance, parts, and training.  Training, in particular is suffering badly.  We’ve previously discussed various aspects of training and, in particular, realistic training.  Where are the exercises against actual swarms of small craft (Meggitt Hammerheads)?  Readiness also deals with doctrine and the Navy is badly lacking in this area.  Doctrine is a set of pre-determined behaviors and responses to tactical scenarios.  When a missile boat swarm attack is coming what will each ship do?  Every Captain should know what the other Captains will do without having to waste time communicating.  It’s analogous to a well trained athletic team where each player knows what the other players will do at a any given moment.  This point has been discussed on the USNI blog, among others, and the overwhelming consensus is that the Navy is badly lacking a coherent doctrine.  Of course, doctrine must be paired with realistic training to be effective and the Navy is deficient in both.  So, it would appear that the CNO’s Be Ready tenet is not being put into practice.



In summary, then, CNO Greenert is saying the right things but the Navy, under his leadership, is failing to act on those things.  CNO is talking it but not walking it.  This is a failure of leadership at a moment when the Navy desperately needs strong leaders.

The Navy's Death Spiral

Do you know what a death spiral is?  It’s when an organization is locked into a path leading to collapse and each action it takes in an attempt to deal with the situation only makes the situation worse.

Here’s an example.  My business is losing money so I cut costs across the board.  Unfortunately, the reduced salesman travel expenses and smaller advertising budget results in fewer sales so I lose more money which means I have to make more cost cuts which means still fewer sales which means even more cost cuts which means …  Eventually, I’m bankrupt.  I was caught in a death spiral.

The Navy is firmly caught in a death spiral and seems blissfully unaware of it.

The fleet is shrinking faster than new construction can be funded and built.  So, the Navy has to send ships on longer deployments to compensate for having too few ships.  But that wears out the ships even faster and results in more premature retirements and the fleet shrinks further which means the remaining ships have to deploy longer and with shorter maintenance availabilities and so their wear is accelerated even more which means the fleet gets smaller …





Navy - Caught in a Death Spiral?



Cost enters into this, too.  The Navy wants to build more new ships to increase fleet size but they’re on essentially a fixed budget.  So, they early retire ships to free up funds for new construction.  Unfortunately, the new ships are so expensive that fewer ships are being built than are being retired and so the fleet shrinks.  The Navy’s solution?  More early decommissionings and slashed maintenance to fund new ships but that just results in ships wearing out faster and the fleet shrinking even more …

The death spiral also applies to Navy aircraft.  Aircraft only have a certain number of allowable arrested landings and flight hours before they have to be retired.  Because of the last decade of higher than expected op tempos, aircraft are being used up faster than anticipated resulting in aircraft shortages.  As a result, returning air wings are cross decking aircraft to deploying air wings to cover shortages.  However, this simply leads to accelerated landing rates and flight hours which causes more shortages.   

Here’s some of the evidence for what I’m describing.  From a Navy Times article (1)

"The Navy’s top officer says he’s not concerned by the fleet’s operational pace, even though ship deployments are becoming more frequent and longer, stretching out to what officials have described as the new norm of seven months and beyond."

"Over the next two years, 11 ships are scheduled for eight-month deployments — a length once limited to crises and surges — a top personnel official said in February."

"Meanwhile, short-notice deployments are cropping up. The Carl Vinson carrier strike group, for example, deployed in late November, only 5½ months after returning from a 6½-month cruise."

The Navy's policy is for ships to have two months undeployed for every month deployed so as to allow time for crew rest, ship maintenance, and training.  The example of Vinson shows a ratio of less than one as opposed to the desired two.  Maintenance and training are being shorted.  Down the road, when Vinson is early retired due to being in poor physical shape, everyone will wonder how that came to be.  Well, this is how.  This is the definition of a death spiral.  We don't have enough ships so we skip maintenance but skipping maintenance and more frequent deployments means the ships wear out sooner which means we have even fewer ships which means we have to skip more maintenance and deploy even more often which means ...

Not enough evidence for you?  It was just announced that USS Stennis would deploy four months early to cover the carrier gap in the Mid East.  That’s a lot of maintenance and training time lost.  The death spiral is wearing out even (or especially!) our carriers.

But, on the plus side, CNO Greenert isn't concerned!  We're walking off the cliff with smiles on our faces!

Can the death spiral be stopped and, if so, how?

Obviously, the first step is for the Navy to recognize that it’s in a death spiral.  Unfortunately, to all outward appearances the Navy seems unaware of the phenomenon and you can’t fix what you can’t see.  Perhaps the Navy is aware of the problem privately but, if so, none of their public actions or policies show any sign of it.  Longer deployments are becoming the norm.  Several Ticonderoga cruisers are being retired early.  INSURV failures are at an all time high.  Spare parts shortages are common.  If the Navy recognizes the death spiral, none of their actions show it!

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume they were aware of the problem and wanted to break out of the death spiral – what could be done?  It starts by deciding what your true priority is.  Is it fleet size?  Is it fleet quality?  Is it fleet readiness?  Is it, as CNO Greenert claims, “warfighting first”? 

At the risk of grossly oversimplifying, the answer is readiness.  It doesn’t matter how big the fleet is if the ships aren’t ready to fight.  That means that maintenance and training of existing ships and crew is more important than putting new hulls in the water.  Witness the LCS which has no credible combat capability or the LPD-17 class which is currently deemed unsuitable for its intended purpose by the DOT&E/DTE – lots of new hulls with no readiness.

Having identified the proper priority, resources and funds need to be reallocated to support readiness.  Specifically, new construction funding needs to be cut in half, at least, and the resulting freed up funds devoted to bringing the existing fleet up to full maintenance levels and vastly improved training levels.  That will actually increase the fleet numbers by a few since we won’t have to retire usable ships.  Moving forward, new construction needs to be focused on larger numbers of solid, basic ship designs as opposed to win-the-war-single-handed designs that wind up being money pits. 

I won’t go further with details of the solution.  The thrust of the solution is obvious and I’ll leave a more detailed discussion for another time.

(1) Navy Times“CNO Not Concerned by Higher Operational Tempo”, Sam Fellman,  Mar 26, 2012, http://www.navytimes.com/news/2012/03/navy-chief-of-naval-operations-operational-tempo-032612w/

LCS - Looking for a Few Good Missions, Part II

All right, I can see I was wrong.  I thought the Defense News article linked in the preceeding post about the Navy's pessimistic self-assessment of the LCS was self-expanatory and self-evident.  Hence, I didn't comment much on it.  I thought people would read it and come to the, by now, incredibly obvious conclusion that this program is fatally flawed.  I was wrong.  Unbelievably, a few people not only continue to blindly support the program but, against all logic, saw that article as good news in some twisted realm of reasoning.  So, I'll have to provide some additional analysis. 

Consider the following quote from the article (underlining and bold emphasis is my addition),

"... the new assessments conclude the ships are not equal to today’s frigates or mine countermeasures ships, and they are too large to operate as patrol boats.

The LCS, according to the assessments, is not able to fulfill most of the fleet missions required by the Navy’s primary strategy document, the “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” and included in a 2011 revision of the LCS CONOPS document.

Equipped with a surface warfare or maritime security mission package, the ships were judged capable of carrying out theater security cooperation and deterrence missions, and maritime security operations, such as anti-piracy.

But the LCS vessels cannot successfully perform three other core missions envisioned for them — forward presence, sea control or power projection missions — and they can provide only limited humanitarian assistance or disaster relief operations, sources said.

The shortcomings are well known in the fleet, prompting a perception that service leaders are looking for missions to fit LCS, rather than the other way around."

Let me repeat and summarize the highlighted sentences:  the Navy has concluded that the LCS cannot perform its missions.  How much more analysis is needed?  The program is a total failure.

Having said that, here's what's actually going to happen.  The Navy is too heavily invested in this program from both a monetary and, more importantly, credibility standpoint to back out now.  They have quite literally sworn to Congress that the LCS was absolutely vital to our ability to operate in the littorals and, further, that the LCS would dominate the littorals.  To turn around now and admit that all of that was wrong would cost the Navy what little credibility they still have.  Instead, they will look desperately for alternative missions and suggest that that was the plan all along.  Sadly, the types of missions that the LCS can perform are the very low end, peacetime presence and patrol missions that a Coast Guard cutter does. 





LCS - Straight to the Bottom?



Unfortunately, this leaves the Navy with two glaring gaps in capability.  One is the mine counter-measures mission (MCM) and the other is shallow water anti-submarine warfare (ASW).  The Navy bet "all in" on the MCM module and lost, leaving us with only a dozen Avenger class MCM vessels that have been so badly neglected that many of them can't even get underway.  The shallow water ASW module is virtually non-existent and what technology it has is just a re-hash of existing technology.  Worse, the ASW has moved from being an off-board system of remote, unmanned sensors and weapons to a traditional on-board approach but it's on a ship that isn't optimized for ASW.  The LCS has no internal engine and hull quieting, Prairie/Masker type of silencing, or any other ASW optimization.  In short, it's going to be the hunted not the hunter.  No wonder the LCS was deemed unable to fulfill the mission!

While there has been speculation that the program will be terminated after 24 seaframes, I'm not at all certain that that will happen.  This may be the program that the Navy rides right to the bottom.  Potentially, this could mean that a quarter of our future battle fleet will consist of a ship that the Navy, itself, has deemed unable to fulfill its missions.

And yet, some people still support this thing?!