The USN repeats the Seawolf fiasco

[Jim Raynor]

What the fuck is supposed to replace the current shit, most of which is over 30 years old?

F-22: Production brought down to a measly 179 planes.

M1 Abrams: No tank replacement even being planned, while the Army messes around with FCS.

Zumwalt destroyer: Will end at 2 ships.

Now, I'm not an expert on this, but doesn't prematurely canceling classes and having to design replacement versions add a shitload of fixed costs?

[Jim Raynor]

Damn, no edit function. After reading Stuart's horror stories, maybe this was for the best.

[FedRebel]

What the fuck is supposed to replace the current shit, most of which is over 30 years old?

F-22: Production brought down to a measly 179 planes.

M1 Abrams: No tank replacement even being planned, while the Army messes around with FCS.

Zumwalt destroyer: Will end at 2 ships.

The B-52 is down to less then a hundred aircraft with no replacement until the 2040's at the earliest

The B-1B and B-2A are dead ends

Politics have also caused a delay in a KC-135 replacement

But don't fret! Cause the USAF will make sure all top brass and VIP's travel in style aboard one of it's transports in "comfort capsules"


At this rate in fifty years the Army will just be a police force, the Navy will be absorbed by the Coast Guard, the Marines are destablished, and the USAF is a struggling Airline facing the prospect of being bought out by Delta.

[Wyrm]

Is there any reason why there can't be new vehicles/systems from the old lines to replace the old stuff?

[Darth Wong]

Wow, Stuart's post was very informative ... and disturbing. I wonder what the design process for this thing looked like. It sounds like it was the result of a brainstorming session, but without the subsequent critical analysis.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Sounds like the ship, from Stuart's description, will be among the most expensive white elephants ever built, if not the most expensive.

[Patrick Degan]

Wow, Stuart's post was very informative ... and disturbing. I wonder what the design process for this thing looked like. It sounds like it was the result of a brainstorming session, but without the subsequent critical analysis.

Almost as if they took the principles of writing a script for Star Trek and applied them to military design.

[montypython]

I swear that I've seen better military design concepts from anime compared to stuff like FCS; seriously, are they passing the buck on development accountability or does that not exist at all?

[Pelranius]

I expect Representative Allen and Senator Collins from my temporary home state of Maine, as well as their Alabaman counterparts, to raise holy hell.

Of course, the cost overruns will just get the rest of Congress to tell them to take a hike.

[starslayer]

You know, I thought that design engineers and every other proper engineer knew basic physics. Obviously, I thought wrong. How the hell can you not understand that having lots of broadcasting equipment in one place will interfere with itself if you've taken basic EM? Why in God's name would anyone consider tumblehome now that you have no real danger of being boarded during combat? Why would anyone miss the gaping flaw Stuart pointed out involving the VLS and a wave-piercing bow? Seriously, what the fuck?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Basically every single notion the ship is based around is that you can make a "stealth warship", when the proper defence for a warship is enough firepower to blast enemy missiles out of the sky.

Frankly, for 5 billion + a unit, why aren't we getting 13,000 ton nuclear-powered cruisers which have point-defence lasers?

(but conventional hulls and VLS).

[Falkenhayn]

Isn't there also a CGX/CGNX program that was supposed to be heavily influenced by the Zumwalts?

[Sidewinder]

I imagine the admirals and the engineers are throwing shit at each other for the fuckups built into the Zumwalt class. Meanwhile, the builders are going to get a class action suit or ten when one of the wretched things goes down with a good number of its crew.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Basically every single notion the ship is based around is that you can make a "stealth warship", when the proper defence for a warship is enough firepower to blast enemy missiles out of the sky.

Frankly, for 5 billion + a unit, why aren't we getting 13,000 ton nuclear-powered cruisers which have point-defence lasers?

(but conventional hulls and VLS).

Solid state lasers are very far from eventual deployment. And Chemical lasers are pretty dangerous to deploy in confined spaces.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

:shock: I imagine the admirals and the engineers are throwing shit at each other for the fuckups built into the Zumwalt class. Meanwhile, the builders are going to get a class action suit or ten when one of the wretched things goes down with a good number of its crew.

Which it almost certainly would if it was hit by a bomb like the Cole was. By capsizing, no less, like a Russian battleship.

[Vympel]

Well increasing costs have been plagueing weapons development the world over for years now. When the USAF of all services has planes whoose pilots are literally flying the same plane their father once flew, you know it's bad.

[Starglider]

Solid state lasers are very far from eventual deployment. And Chemical lasers are pretty dangerous to deploy in confined spaces.

I saw this interesting nugget in the Wikipedia entry for the USS Port Royal the last Ticonderoga-class CG built;

Originally, Port Royal was planned to be outfitted with the experimental shipboard mounted HELWEP (High Energy Laser Weapon System). HELWEPS is based on a megawatt-class deuterium/ fluorine chemical laser, replacing the standard 5-in forward gun mount. HELWEPS, it is said, could be used to destroy missiles out to a range of about 4 km. It could also be used to burn out electro-optical sensors at about 10 km. The outfitting, scheduled to occur in Port Hueneme, California in 1994 was cancelled, along with any plans of incorporating HELWEPS onto a Ticonderoga-Class Cruiser Hull.

Unfortunately I can't find any other sources that describe this system or why it was cancelled. Anyone else know about it?

[Shroom Man 777]

Laser weapon system... in 1994? Aren't we just getting some progress with that nowadays?

[MKSheppard]

You know, I thought that design engineers and every other proper engineer knew basic physics.

Actually, I think they do. Why else would the deckhouse be so huge?



The problem is even with such a huge deck house, due to the positioning, you'll get a lot of interference with beams from all the antennas on it; and working out the integration problems is where the $$$ for ship 1+2 come from. Stuart was talking about Multi-Function Antennas -- which make a lot of sense -- for certain things, you don't need a constant data rate and you can have the antenna do:

Time Cycle A: System A
Time Cycle B: System B
Time Cycle C: System C
Time Cycle D: System A

and so on and consolidate three antennas into one. The big problem is once again, systems integration -- getting it all to work is $$$.

It's possible we might see all the money spent on DDG-1000 back in the form of all this research into solving these problems; allowing for integrated deckhouses by 2014 or so...

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Laser weapon system... in 1994? Aren't we just getting some progress with that nowadays?

Here's the crux of the problem. From the point of a navy captain, the chemicals in these chemical lasers are pretty dangerous. Now these chemicals aren't easy to even clean and they may even corrode the deck in event of a leak. This is quite different from deploying these lasers on the ground (who cares if the ground gets contaminated?) The same would apply to putting one of these things in a plane and though they are making some progress, this danger of leakage will put a damper on it.

Then comes solid state lasers. They are small, and a lot safer, but there's the issue of power and beam quality. Squeezing a lot of power into one Neodynium:YAG rod (of the order of KW) and even with cooling, will distort the beam quality and thus your quality of the beam. With Solid State Optical Fiber lasers, you have the issue of distortions due to some nonlinear effects. There are techniques to attempt to around the problem, but the engineering issues are difficult and are taking a lot of time to solve.

[Lonestar]

Well, the Maine congressional delegation thinks the USN is going to order an addition 9 Burkes.

Boston Globe
July 24, 2008
Pg. 1

Navy Cancels $20B Purchase Of Destroyers

Move hits Raytheon hard, imperils Bath shipyard jobs

By Robert Weisman and Bryan Bender, Globe Staff

A stunning Navy decision to abort a $20 billion plan for a new fleet of destroyers yesterday threw into question the future of Raytheon Co.'s largest defense program and renewed longstanding concerns about the fate of the Bath Iron Works shipyard in Maine.

Waltham-based Raytheon is the prime contractor for the ship's combat systems, which are being developed at its Tewksbury and Andover plants. Assembly work on the guided-missile destroyers was to have been divided between the 124-year-old Bath shipyard, owned by General Dynamics Corp., and a yard in Mississippi.

Cancellation of the 14,000-ton, Zumwalt-class destroyer, called the DDG-1000, after just two ships were funded, was made public by Maine's two Republican senators, Olympia J. Snowe and Susan M. Collins, and US Representative Thomas H. Allen, a Democrat whose district includes the Bath shipyard. The lawmakers said they were informed by top Navy officials that with costs rising 50 percent, to $3 bil lion per ship, the program has become too expensive and would make it impossible for the Navy to meet its overall goal of a 313-ship fleet. The service currently has about 280 ships.

The lawmakers said they were also told that the Navy had concluded the destroyer's design was not well suited to combating the evolving threat of long-range missiles.

Navy representatives declined to confirm they were scrapping the program, nor would spokesmen for Raytheon and General Dynamics.

"We won't discuss the content of our internal budget briefings," Lieutenant Clay Doss, a Navy spokesman, said yesterday. "That said, we continue to discuss all options to develop the surface ship force for the future that will meet all identified requirements."

The news set off a flurry of activity. Dugan Shipway, Bath Iron Works president, flew to Washington yesterday to discuss the impact of the cancellation with Maine lawmakers. The lawmakers and their staffs scheduled a series of meetings with the Navy to get more answers.

Collins, after meeting with Shipway, said the Navy plans instead to build more of the older Arleigh Burke class of destroyers, designated the DDG-51s. Some of those may be built at Bath, which would offset the loss of the DDG-1000 program. But she said the shipyard would have to be guaranteed the work on virtually all the additional DDG-51s to maintain its current workload and prevent job losses.

Allen said he was assured by Navy officials that the service would request funds to construct an additional nine DDG-51s through fiscal year 2015. "I am confident that the return to the DDG-51 program will maintain a stable workforce at Bath for years to come," Allen said. Employment at the Bath Iron Works shipyard has dropped to less than 6,000 from a post-World War II peak of 12,000 in 1991.

Raytheon, meanwhile, has assigned about 2,000 employees - in Tewksbury, Andover, Portsmouth, R.I., and elsewhere - to work on the new destroyer's combat systems. The company had counted on the Zumwalt program to help catapult it into the ranks of top military contractors, which not only build weapons but integrate sophisticated technology into larger systems. It was the biggest of the company's thousands of military contracting programs.

The older Arleigh Burke models, which cost less than half the price of the DDG-1000s, have combat systems developed by a Raytheon rival, Lockheed Martin Corp.

"A decision to stop DDG-1000 procurement and restart DDG-51 could shift combat system work from Raytheon to Lockheed," said Ronald O'Rourke, a naval specialist at the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, the research arm of Congress.

Jonathan D. Kasle, a Raytheon spokesman, said the company planned to continue its work on combat systems for the two destroyers that have been funded. But he suggested the new systems might also be used in other Navy vessels.

"We don't believe the Navy can afford to put old technologies onto any ships," he said. "Zumwalt technologies advance mission capabilities to address current and evolving threats, and support a necessary trend to lower ship personnel levels in an effort to reduce operating costs. These technologies can be leveraged for future or existing ships."

Raytheon has not disclosed how much in total it has received from the Navy so far for its work on the Zumwalt program. But the company won a $3 billion development contract in 2005 and a nearly $1 billion production contract last year for the combat systems.

The new DDG-1000 destroyer was conceived in the early 1990s as a land attack ship that would fend off Soviet-style threats. It later evolved into an all-purpose vessel that could accompany a carrier group in deep water against conventional enemies while also being able to launch special operations to thwart terrorists closer to shore. The first ship in the class has been scheduled for delivery to the Navy in 2013.

But the estimated cost for each Zumwalt-class destroyer had jumped from $2 billion to more than $3 billion. Even before the cancellation, the Navy had decided to scale back the program from an original goal of 32 ships to just seven. Congress has approved only two, and a House committee recently balked at funding the third.

The decision puts the spotlight on military procurement problems that have festered for decades: program mismanagement, ballooning costs, and increasingly sophisticated and rapidly changing technology that has outstripped the government's ability to pay for it.

"You'd have to say the Pentagon acquisition system is broken," said former naval architect Jon B. Kutler, chairman of Admiralty Partners, a private equity firm specializing in aerospace and defense. "They're spending a lot of money and have very little to show for it."

Cancellation of the Zumwalt-class destroyer potentially could have a greater impact on Raytheon than on General Dynamics, some analysts said. "This is bad news for Raytheon," said Loren B. Thompson, chief operating officer at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., think tank.

But program executives at Raytheon have maintained that shipboard systems it has designed for the Zumwalt class could be used on future Navy vessels and "backfitted" to older models such as the DDG-51. While several analysts questioned that, others said Raytheon's development work is seen as critical to future Navy combat.

"They want the technology Raytheon is developing to mature," said Patrick J. McCarthy, defense analyst for the Washington investment bank Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group.

The termination of the Zumwalt program is the latest sign of trouble for the Navy's plans to achieve a 313-ship fleet. The Navy's shipbuilding program has been under intense scrutiny from Congress following construction delays and skyrocketing costs.

Last year the Navy was forced to restructure the Littoral Combat Ship, a next-generation fleet of small, fast attack vessels, opting to acquire just two ships rather than six after engineering problems

and

Wall Street Journal
July 24, 2008
Pg. 2

Budget Pressures Weigh On Navy

By August Cole

The Navy wants to curtail plans for a series of high-tech destroyers in the latest sign that budget pressures are reining in some of the defense industry's most ambitious weapons systems.

Previous plans had called for General Dynamics Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. to build seven Zumwalt-class destroyers, futuristic ships that have more advanced electronic systems and are able to operate with a smaller crew, which reduces costs. The Navy says the cost of the first two ships will be $3.3 billion each, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates a price of $5 billion apiece. The Navy now wants just one from each company's shipyards, according to Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who was briefed by the service.

Instead, the Navy will buy nine ships of an existing destroyer design through 2015, according to Sen. Collins, whose state includes the General Dynamics Bath Iron Works shipyard. Northrop's Ingalls shipyard in Mississippi also will vie for the work. The cheaper, and less sophisticated, alternative, the Arleigh Burke class that has been around since the 1980s, would cost about $2.4 billion in fiscal-year 2007 dollars, according to the Navy.

According to people familiar with the Navy's plans, the Navy has reconsidered whether such advanced ships are necessary for current missions given their cost and complexity, and that a greater number of upgraded Arleigh Burke ships would be better suited to certain missions, such as missile defense.

Sen. Collins said in a statement that the Navy's cancellation of the program was tied to a lack of funding in the House defense authorization bill; the Senate had set aside $2.6 billion for a third ship.

The Navy said it would be inappropriate to discuss "internal budget briefings" but that it is considering "all options to develop the surface-ship force for the future that will meet all identified requirements."

According to a Senate staffer, the Navy's plans may bring greater scrutiny of weapons-systems modernization efforts on existing Arleigh Burke-class ships.

Taking this tack offers no guarantees, however, that ship building won't drain the Navy's budget in the coming years as the industry and the service struggle to keep costs under control. The Navy today has 280 ships. To reach the goal of 313 ships in 30 years while retiring older ships at a steady pace, the Navy also wants to buy as many as 55 of a near-shore combat ship, but budget and schedule overruns have raised questions about how many actually will be bought.

Northrop Grumman said it "stands ready to support the customer in the direction it will take."

General Dynamics Chief Executive Nick Chabraja said during an investor conference call Wednesday that "this could be a plus" if the company winds up building copies of the less-expensive ship, but added, "I just don't know enough yet to really comment."

The House Subcommittee on Seapower and Expeditionary Forces is expected next week to hold a hearing on the Navy's plans.

[Ford Prefect]

You know it's a pity that the Zumwalt is basically death at sea, because it is also one hell of a sexy looking boat.

Though like everybody else, I just have to wonder how they actually managed to come up with it. Are designers honestly this focussed that they don't notice important shit like this?

Really, some sort of submersible, hydrofoil guided-missile destroyer seems more feasible.

[Alan Bolte]

check HPCA and you'll note I told everybody a week before teh official announcement that this was going to happen).

My google-fu is a little weak here, what's HPCA?

[Stuart]

Sounds like the ship, from Stuart's description, will be among the most expensive white elephants ever built, if not the most expensive.

You know where the expression "white elephant" comes from? Most white elephants come from Thailand where they are considered to be both royal and sacred. So, in the good old days, when Thailand was still Siam and the French were still in France (in-joke for any Thai readers) the King would look over his aristocracy and decide if any of them were getting to be rich enough and powerful enough to be a threat to him. If they were, he would give them a white elephant. Now, since it was a royal gift, the recipient wouldn't be able to kill it, that would be an act of treason adn give the king an excuse to execute him. Since it was sacred, the recipient would be unable to send the elephant out to work, that would be sacrilege and give the king an excuse to execute him. Since it was an elephant, it would eat him into bankruptcy.

So, you see, white elephants served a strategic purpose; DDG-1000 doesn't.

Almost as if they took the principles of writing a script for Star Trek and applied them to military design.

That's pretty close to the truth. There's a small number of ideas that come up for the "new super-technology of the future" that will create a uber-ship if only the hidebound traditionalists in the design bureaus would etc etc etc" They crop up at regular intervals with only the time cycle differing. The short fat ship crops up regularly at roughly 18 year intervals (I was at a Parliamentary sub-committee once takinge vidence on the 1988 incarnation of the idea when one of the other witnesses read a report on the alleged advantages of the short fat ship. After it had been applauded by Giles, he revealed it had been written by Barnaby in 1886), the multi-hull comes up at roughly 23 year intervals etc. Now, what has happened over the last few years is that all those cycles coincided and everybody came up with all these ideas at once.

This is where Star Trek design art comes in. Science fiction films tend to give people the idea that if something looks futuristic enough and weird enough, it must be an advance on what we have now. All that is needed is the technology to make it work. So, people took all these weird ideas (it's not a coincidence that the two weirdest and least practical of the LCS designs were ordered into production while the practical, proven design was the first to be dropped), kludged them up into a single hull and then looked for the technology to make it work. After all, it looked futuristic, it looked different it had to be good, right? And if it looks as if it should be good, there has to be a way to make it work, right?

Now, sometimes one can get away with that; one can start a design process on something that should be workable and try to solve the problems as one goes. It isn't a bad idea in many ways, the USN did that with the Lewis and Clark AKEs; they took a conventional AKE design and put a wholly-electric engineering system into it. That's all, but getting it to work was a swine. Delayed the ships by about two years. But, it was the only thing that was radical in those ships so everybody concentrated on the problem and solved it. Once the problem was solved, NASSCO poured the ships off the line and the program is now ahead of schedule and so far under budget that the Navy is able to order two additional ships using the money saved from the first group.

The trouble with DDG-1000 is that everything is new; its literally as different from DDG-51s as the Startrek Enterprise is from CVN-65. Now, the catch is that individually, we can solve the problems; the trouble is that all the solutions contradict each other. The designers tride to hide it with technobabble and they gota way with it for several years. Then, too many people started looking at the technobabble and saying "hey, hang on a moment, I read that in 'The Trouble With Tribbles'" and the whole scam was busted. It only needed a few people to make the remark and everybody else started looking and spotted the problems. The result of that has been the Navy's credibility in Congress has been flushed down the toilet. Congress just doesn't believe Navy testimony any more. They question everything and make their own plans. In a very real sense, Congress is actually running the Navy now (certainly the shipbuilding side of it) and shaping the navy the way it thinks teh navy should be shaped. That's the real story behind the death of DDG-1000. Congress simply lost patience with the Navy.

How the hell can you not understand that having lots of broadcasting equipment in one place will interfere with itself if you've taken basic EM?

The logic is that one can timeshare the antennas. In the old days when radars, EW sets etc were hardware-controlled, that wasn't really an option, one had to switch one system off before using another (Sheffield sank because of that. Sort of). Today, with software-controlled systems, we can flash systems on and off so that we can have two systems running apparently simultaneously but in fact they're alternating transmissions on a microsecond basis. A lso, one can steer antenna beams so that they don't interfere. Now, all that is very easy to say. Its also very easy to put a calico dress on a pig and call it Florence but its still a pig. Multi-tasking antennas is a lot harder in reality than it sounds in practice (for example, the primary beams may be clear of interefence but the side-lobes and harmonics may not be. Those things shift with transmission modes and what may be clean in one application may not be in another. So, what sounded like a good idea, turned out to be very hard to implement. To give you some idea, the first MFAs were suppose dto be used on the USS Harry S Truman (CVN-75). They still weren't ready for CVN-77 and their use on CVN-78 is looking iffy.

Why in God's name would anyone consider tumblehome now that you have no real danger of being boarded during combat?

Tumblehome was adopted because of the over-riding requirement was to reduce radar cross section. Now, ina conventional hull design with flared hull sides, the outward slope forms an acute angle with the surface of the sea. That provides a strong radar reflection. A tumblehome hull with its sides sloping inwards forms an obtuse angle with the surface of the sea and that gives a weak radar reflection. (All right, who can spot the horrible flaw in that argument; I'll think of a nice prize for the first person to get it.). That's why the DDG-1000 had a wave-piercing bow. A comventional flared bow requires an outward slope. We can't marry a tumblehome hull witha flared bow because the transition between teh two will be structurally weak and have a nightmarish radar cross section. So, once a tumblehome hull has been selected, we HAVE to use a wave piercing bow. And now we've come to the horrible secret. The DDG-1000 hull wasn't designed by naval architects, it was designed by electronics engineers. They designed the perfect hull for reduced radar cross section and then gave it to the naval deisgners and more or less said "make it work" the answer "it can't" not being acceptable..

Isn't there also a CGX/CGNX program that was supposed to be heavily influenced by the Zumwalts?

There's a new cruiser coming. Probably nuclear powered. Plans to use the DDG-1000 hull have been dropped.

My google-fu is a little weak here, what's HPCA?

History, Politics and Current Affairs. My internet community. It can be found BEWARE HERE BE REPUBLICANS

Well, the Maine congressional delegation thinks the USN is going to order an addition 9 Burkes.

The figure I have is 12 but its up for grabs. Also, the word is that, cash allowing, they'll be built in a series of small sub-flights that progressively introduce the technologies intended for DDG-1000 and develop tehm so tehy can be back-fitted to the earlier -51s.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Sounds like the ship, from Stuart's description, will be among the most expensive white elephants ever built, if not the most expensive.

You know where the expression "white elephant" comes from? Most white elephants come from Thailand where they are considered to be both royal and sacred. So, in the good old days, when Thailand was still Siam and the French were still in France (in-joke for any Thai readers) the King would look over his aristocracy and decide if any of them were getting to be rich enough and powerful enough to be a threat to him. If they were, he would give them a white elephant. Now, since it was a royal gift, the recipient wouldn't be able to kill it, that would be an act of treason adn give the king an excuse to execute him. Since it was sacred, the recipient would be unable to send the elephant out to work, that would be sacrilege and give the king an excuse to execute him. Since it was an elephant, it would eat him into bankruptcy.

So, you see, white elephants served a strategic purpose; DDG-1000 doesn't.

Well, that depends who you are talking to, of course. In this case, it will be a "waste" if you are that said aristocrat who got too fat for his own good.

I guess the joke is referring to the French Indochina?