33
votes
The US Navy spent billions on a combat ship, and is now getting rid of them long before the end of their expected lifespans
Link information
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- Title
- The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the "Little Crappy Ship"
- Authors
- Joaquin Sapien
- Word count
- 9763 words
Long article, but good.
The story of the LCS is a cautionary tale of how even people making reasonable decisions for the right reasons, in an environment of uncertainty, can accidentally create a huge mess.
I wonder if the Well, there's your problem Engineering disasters podcast will cover this. There's plenty of good material here.
You make an excellent point, I suppose the responsible thing would have been to create the trial ships and wait, and then cancel the program when they proved to be less effective than hoped. Though I understand the social, business and political reasons for why this is difficult.
One thing which jumped out at me is that it seemed that the combined engine system was fundamentally flawed, as there were repeated examples of the combinatorial gear (pardon, I read this yesterday) failing. That suggests to me that independent of the concept of the ship as a whole, parts of the design clearly needed improvement, which had the program happened more slowly could have happened.
I also sort of agree with the inciting admiral that none of these vessels are survivable versus modern missiles, so to an extent this all is a waste of time and money. That said, I doubt the US is ready to move to an entirely ballistic missile submarine navy just yet.
I do feel bad for the servicemembers who had their careers harmed by serving on these ships. It definitely seems like they were set up to fail.
Oh definitely. What I wrote notwithstanding, there were definitely aspects of the program which were mismanaged and/or poorly directed.
I got curious about the mentioned Danish modular system, and did some reading on Wikipedia. It does sound quite clever! Makes me wonder why not more NATO navies have licensed it.
Specifically, I assume the ship admiral Clark was shows was one of the Flyvefisken class, which was already aging at the time, so I can understand why the US navy would commission a new design instead of licensing this specific design.
Great article, well worth the lengthy read. And another chance to shill for Readup, which is useful for articles that are so long they probably can't be finished in a single reading session.