(02-14-2020 03:02 AM)Attackcoog Wrote: How wrong can admirals or generals be? Maybe 30 billion wrong? The Navy leadership recently came about as close to saying they made a huge mistake as you will ever see.
The US Navy has built 32 Littoral Combat Ships---with 3 more still to be built. The ships were to last 25-30 years. They were originally conceived as low cost small heavily armed high speed ships that could operate in shallow water--yet still duke it out in a deep water affair with larger vessels. During the design process they morphed into large fast ships with minimal armament featuring "mission bay modules" that could be easily swapped out to convert the ships quickly into submarine hunters, mine sweepers, or a surface combatant---depending on need.
Fast forward to today. Costs have ballooned. They arent cheap. They have built around 32 of them, with 3 more to come. The high speed engines are unreliable. A decade after ships began entering service, none can really fulfill any mission because none of the mission modules work. Last year none were sent on patrol because they couldnt really perform any mission reliably. Worse yet---the resurgence of modern Russian and Chinese blue water navies have made the ships seriously undergunned in any fight vs their Chinese/Russian peers.
So, the Navy has decided fixing the flaws in these 32 ships (soon to be 35 ships) is not worth the money and will decommission some of these near worthless vessels. Of the 4 ships the Navy proposes to retire, all theoretically have nearly 2 decades of life left--and one is only 6 years old. In all---the 30 billion spent on these vessels (about triple what they were supposed to cost) is likely a complete waste of treasure.
So admirals and generals can make mistakes. Sometimes our general and admirals are flat out wrong. In the case of the Littoral Combat Ship----this decision was right down the fat middle of these guys area of expertise. Imagine how wrong they can sometimes be when they are discussing the course a White House administration should take—-an area that is far afield of a general’s expertise. Im as big a supporter of those who serve as anyone---but we have to remember, anyone can be wrong.
https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/1...ade-early/
OK, so their mission modules don't work. But it's really worse than that. The one advantage they have is speed, and the last thing you want to do in a minefield is go running around at 45 knots. And the engines that give those 45 knots--when they work--are so noisy that the prevent proper sonar performance for anti-submarine warfare (ASW). And for anti-surface warfare (ASuW) they have a 57 mm popgun that is roughly half the size of WWII destroyer guns. And they are so ill-suited to damage control/repair that the doctrine is that if they take a hit, you abandon ship. So they're basically worthless. The most common recommendation I see in naval discussion groups recently is to give them to the Coast Guard, which needs cutters. Only problem is the Coast Guard doesn't want them, either.
But that may not be the biggest mistake the Navy has made in procurement. The Nimitz class aircraft carriers are perfectly good ships, and they cost about $9 billion each. There is an alternative proposed by the RAND corporation called the CVN-LX that has a hybrid nuclear/gas turbine/electric propulsion system and updates in other areas that is about the same price. Instead of building more of either, the Navy has opted to build 3-4 Gerald Ford class carriers, that are coming in at about $15 billion each. And so far, everything on them works just fine--except the catapults, arresting (landing) gear, weapons lifts from magazines to flight deck, and main engines.
The Navy also built three Zumwalt class "destroyers" with 155mm guns. The only problem is that they have no bullets for the guns. The estimated cost for the three ships is $12 billion, or $4 billion each.
I'm more familiar with Navy foul-ups in procurement than I am with the other services, but I'm told that similar errors have been made in the other services. One problem I am aware of is that in a misguided effort to cut costs with a common design for a fighter/attack aircraft for Air Force, Navy, and Marine needs, which were different. So we ended up with the F-35 in three different versions, one for each service, and the tradeoffs made to meet each one's needs adversely impact the other two branches. Not to mention that it is coming in at something like $120 million a pop, when there are perfectly useful fighters at half that cost.
We have more people in the Pentagon today than it took to win WWII. A recent study by McKinsey broke down defense costs of various OECD (advanced) nations into combat, combat support, and other (administrative overhead) costs. The average for OECD countries was 14% combat, 23% combat support, and 63% admin/other/overhead, which is bad enough. The US numbers were 9% combat, 14% combat support, and 77% admin/other/overhead.
If you are getting the impression that we could cut defense spending by something probably on the order of $150 billion a year and end up with better national security, I think you're right. But the problem is that if you try to cut back on defense spending, the people determining where the cuts go are that overhead. And the idiots who made those procurement decisions are still in charge over there. This may be controversial, but what you have at the Pentagon is a whole bunch of paper shufflers like Vindman, who maybe had one combat tour, when the real war heroes have been pulling three or four, and they are making incredibly bad decisions because they don't have a clue what they are doing.
If I were president, I would hack the Pentagon staff back to no more than WWII levels, I would cut outside consultant fees in half, I would fire every officer who signed off on the LCS, Ford, and Zumwalt programs, I would tell the officer promotion boards that we want to promote warriors and not paper shufflers, I would put a stop to wars that we don't intend to win, and I would demand that the military come up with a viable grand strategy and concepts of operations (CONOPS) to implement that strategy.