Great piece in the NYT on the problems with the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship.
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Trouble on the Coast
25 Apr 2008 10:50 am
Comments (15)
Which is why they should stick to Figurative Combat Ships.
Damn, you beat me to it.
Great moments in Pentagon history: turning procurement management over to the world's largest defense contractor.
An in-law of mine used to do communications and PR work for the American Littoral Society.
Note the top line on the web site's main frame.
I suspect she left primarily because of the incessant 'How nice. After all, you were an English major' comments.
Many readers may not recall that the awesome Republican skill at contracting has also screwed up the Coast Guard's new cutter.
Deepwater, the Coast Guard's largest ever acquisition, was launched as a joint venture of Los Angeles-based Northrop, the Navy's top warship maker, and Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed, the nation's No. 1 defense contractor. The cost was originally projected at $17 billion over 25 years before the Coast Guard last year increased the price by $7 billion and extended the time frame to 30 years.
Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, today urged Allen to drop Lockheed and Northrop and put the contract out for competitive bids.
``Private contractors should not be allowed to feed at the taxpayer trough,'' Kerry said at the Commerce subcommittee on oceans hearing.
Cracked Hulls
The combined cost of the first two vessels under the program has risen to $775 million from $517 million, an audit by the service's inspector general said last month. The first eight of 49 revamped cutters were retired after they were found to have cracked hulls.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aacrBNqA877A&refer=us
Look, the basic idea wasn't too bad. We spend far too much money building capabilities into warships that we never actually employ, on the theoretical chance that we might someday employ them. (When was the last time that a pair of surface combatants engaged in a gunfight? Or even launched long range munitions like missiles at each other? The Falklands?) There's a good case to be made that the Navy is fast designing itself into obsolescence - its warships are becoming so expensive to build, without delivering corresponding increases in effectiveness or utility, that it's becoming cheaper to pay off a corrupt regime and put an airbase in that to deploy a carrier task force.
These ships were intended to be fast, agile, and cheap - that last characteristic was among the most important. That would allow mass procurement of the class, a crucial advantage over existing designs. Then they'd be deployed in-shore, giving the navy a role in the sorts of low-intensity warfare in which we're likely to be engaged in the future (a role, that is, other than the most prominent they've played lately - large, relatively slow targets).
The problem here, ultimately, is that we can't decide what we really want. Using upgraded civilian hulls is a fine idea if you want fast, cheap, and felixble. But if you're going to sacrifice some of that in favor of force protection, you might as well design from scratch. Reading the piece, it sounds like the brass started off in a new direction, and then decided that they weren't willing to trade agility and cost-effectiveness for survivability. Which is a fair choice. But it also leads me to question the remaining rationale for these ships. If they're going to be heavily-armored behemoths, with high operating expenses and slower speeds, then why are we building them in the first place?
Cynic, there were no surface-to-surface naval engagements in the Falklands - it was all air-to surface or submarine-to-surface. The frigates' and destroyers' 114mm guns came in handy for fire support to troops on shore.
The LCS is pretty massive - 3000 tons displacement, bigger than a WW2 destroyer. It's supposed to be able to clear mines, fly and house two helicopters, land armoured vehicles and troops, shoot down aircraft, sink ships, kill submarines... unsurprisingly, it's big and costly, three or four times as expensive as a proper corvette.
ajay-
Thanks for the correction. And yes, the massive nature of the LCS is precisely the point. Building a fleet of corvette-like ships seems like a pretty good idea. It's how the army solved the problem of multiple missions - instead of building and deploying enormous tractor-trailers, it developed Strykers, and deploys them as needed. So you could have a corvette with a fared-over afterdeck for a helicopter, an SOC-corvette, a mine-sweeping corvette, etc. What we're getting instead is an enormous, expensive mess that's capable of fulfilling any and all of these roles, but only one at a time. (The modules can't be replaced on the fly.) Plus, it's not exactly ideal for any particular role, because it needs to retain the capabilities of all the other roles, so it can't be permanently modified.
The theoretical cost-savings of a multiple-mission-capable craft seem to me to be largely illusory. You could build three or four corvettes, each outfitted specifically for a different mission, for the cost of one of these behemoths. So yeah, it's cheaper than a DD(X). But is that really the best standard?
I substantially agree with those above on the "nice idea" concept. In one regard, having a low personnel "investment" on a single platform makes it easier to take operational risks (e.g., ordering a traversal of the straits of hormuz in a hot war). This is also a major double-edged sword -- personnel can tell that they are on the equivalent of PT boats (in ww2), i.e., expendable. With the addition of sensitive weaponry, the 40 person crew is also susceptible to being overwhelmed by a small force raid and having the boat and weoponry stolen and used against us.
It seems to me, stepping into James Fallow's "National Defense" mode, that the Navy hasn't figured out what it really wants and is layering down a good idea with a lot of other stuff.
El Cid -- if memory serves, the true beauty of the Deepwater clusterfuck is how Lockheed was allowed to police itself when it came time to assess how well it met its requirements. Might've worked, if the sea hadn't revealed some unpleasant realities....
Since the services are starting to procure European equipment anyway, I don't see why the navy and coast guard aren't looking at some of the German and Dutch frigate and diesel submarine designs. Oh yeah -- you can't buy off congresscreatures so easily that way.
Yet another reason that a large peacetime military establishment is a bad idea
Maintaining significant military forces when we are not actually at war, or war is not actively threatened, is a bad idea for many reasons. It's horrifically expensive. A permanent, professional military, as opposed to armies of citizen-soldiers raised only to meet specific emergencies, is likely to develope, and perhaps one day use its might to act on, interests separate from those of the general citizenry.
Usually, the matter is presented as being a question of balancing these two disadvantages against the supposed enhanced security that supposedly derives from having a large professionally-trained force always at the ready, and not needing months or years to train up to combat-readiness. This case of the Littoral Combat Ship is yet another refutation of even that supposed advantage. We don't and can't know what forces we will need for the next war until the next war shows up. So this large standing force can either be trained and equipped to fight the last war -- and therefore ineffective because any potential adversary knows all about how the last war played out and won't get in a fight with us unless they are prepared for what our standing force can do -- or, it can be trained and equipped to fight the war that some decisionistic theoretician imagines that we will one day fight, or ought to fight -- in which case the standing force will be ineffective because reality is always other than the decisionistic theoretician's imaginings.
The Navy would undoubtedly have done a better job of overseeing the developement of this warship if it had any clear idea of what it needed to be developing. It's ironic, but utterly predictable, that even if your decisionistic theoretician's leading theory sets forth smallness, flexibility, and cheapness of construction as the leading ideas for the new weapon system, you end up with something bloated and expensive because, in the absence of actual experience of what is needed, a mind undisciplined by experience inevitably projects too many design priorities onto the system, and we end up with a bloated anti-bloat system. Military establishments are always criticized for wanting to fight the last war, and wanting to build at most marginal improvements on familiar systems. But this criticism is essentially ignorant. The last war is the only war we know how to fight. Systems designed to win that last war are the only ones that can be built without collapsing into ungovernable and directionless bloat.
The solution is simple -- don't have much of any ongoing military establishment (beyond a very small cadre), and rely instead on figuring out what kind of force you need only when the need presents itself. The Wehrmacht wouldn't have done so well in WWII had it not been limited by the Versailles Treaty to 100,000 during most ot the inter-war years, and only expanded from that in the period just before the war. They were able to start with a clean slate, and organize and equip without the dead weight of the ongoing bloated draft-based militaries that surrounded them. The US Army had the same advantage in that war, with the draft only restarted in 1940, after the early campaigns of WWII had demonstrated what new systems and organization were needed. And we didn't have the huge peacetime military establishment that would already have been decisively committed to the outmoded thinking.
If we had had a larger military establishment prior to Hitler's rise, it wouldn't have contributed at all to stopping him earlier. It would have been simply 20 more allied divisions put in the bag in northern France in 1940. Our Navy would simply have had more useless battleships. Yes, we had our decisionistic visionaries in the run-up to WWII, but their only contribution, the strategic bomber, didn't help us win the war, it just got us our piece of that war's genocide.
Well, Glen's notion of having a core cadre and then upgrading once you know what you need is theoretically a good idea. The problem is reality in several aspects.
One, if you're dealing with 4th Gen War, you'll never know what you need in time to make a difference. 4th Gen War actors are more nimble.
Second, if you can see who is likely to be your next enemy, and that enemy is likely to be large (say, China's huge military), you'd better be equipped to deal with them in advance of their decision to deal with you.
Third, the advent of nanotech weaponry, as predicted by K. Eric Drexler in his book, "Engines of Creation", pretty much is going to make things much worse. You could get wiped out in the time it takes to change your approach. As Drexler pointed out, a year or even a day of technological lag could given an enemy an overwhelming advantage. Of course, my opinion is that such technology obsoletes a lot of things that would lead to that situation, but the point is still technically valid.
The real need is for a military designed along different lines. A modern, rationally-designed military for the current world would be oriented around two goals:
1) Be able to take out non-state actors who have military-level capability (warlords in Afghanistan, for example.) Non-state actors without military-level capability can be handled by law enforcement and counterintelligence forces.
2) Be able to take out the STATES - not the militaries of those states, but the STATES - who are direct military threats to the country.
It's never the people of a country who really want war with another country. It's always the political leaders of that country. If your military can take the bulk of the leaders of a country out, wars could be significantly shortened. If the top leadership of the Nazi Party had been taken out early in WWII, it's likely that their successors could have been persuaded to moderate their goals. If not, you take them out until you have successors who can be so persuaded.
Of course, a problem with the latter strategy occurs when your enemies adopt the same principles.
Also, it's not clear that such capabilities are useful for nuclear capable enemies. Nuclear weapons pretty much rule out any sort of "war" between nuclear armed nations. The end result is either "economic war" or "proxy war", the latter in which the approaches described do have merit.
The reality is that very few militaries exist for the sake of "defending the country." They exist, for all of the larger industrialized states, as means of acting in an imperial manner, coercing via "aggressive diplomacy" for access to resources, or simply being used for straight greed and power seeking hegemony.
They exist in THIS country (and probably in many others) specifically for transferring the wealth of the taxpayer to certain corporations who in turn tithe a certain amount back to the politicians whose policies result in the need for their products.
Until that situation is rectified, it's pointless to complain about military cost overruns. You're supporting an entire system that creates such situations. And there's no evidence that either of the political parties in this country can be modified to eliminate that system.
Standing armies
The idea that standing armies are not a good idea is hardly a mere untested theory. It was this nation's practice until the late 1940s. Even then, the militarists felt that they needed the pretext of a "Cold" War to justify not continuing the post-war demobilization that had been our practice after all of our previous wars. Demilitarization between wars is the universal practice now of most of the world, at least the developed world. It seems to work out pretty well for them in practice, and is arguably the reason that these nations are developed, while the more martial parts of the world are left behind. It could be argued that the only practical effect of the course of ruinous militarism that our nation has followed the past 60 years is that we are hastening to join the third world and leave the ranks of the developed nations. Borrowing money like there's no tomorrow to fund a military establishment that does nothing but harm, is an excellent way to insure that we indeed have no desirable tomorrow.
On the contrary, the ideas that you advance to support the notion that we need a standing army are not merely highly theoretical and divorced from practical experience, they are not even theoretically self-consistent. If there is something real behind this 4GW notion, I would think that it would support the idea that the way for us to become even more nimble than our potential adversaries is to have even smaller standing armies than they do. I would think that China would have to telegraph, by building up the huge combat forces and even huger support infrastructure, any intention to attack us in plenty of time for us to build what we need to counter such capabilities. We could start our counter-build-up later, thereby gaining the ability to incorporate more advanced technology, and still be able to thwart them, given the huge preponderance in forces they would need to project their military across an ocean. As for the place of nanotechnology, or other exotic transformative new technologies or new organizational paradigms, I wouild think tha the more you believe these arguably airy things to be substantial factors, the more you would agree with me that the carrier battle groups and armored divisions of our standing military establishment are a vast waste of money and talent.
I don't doubt that is we ever find ourselves faced with the need to fight a war, we will indeed need our military to be designed along very different lines than our present standing army. I simply don't believe that there is any way to know what those lines are today, when we don't have any enemies, at least not any enemies who are not gratuitous enemies of our own needless creation, and no prospective enemies who do not fit that same description. For this reason I think that our ability to respond to any future contingency in which we do acquire real enemies would be enhanced the less of a standing army we have committed to ways of doing thigs that probably won't work against that enemy.
A couple of points, Glen.
What was done before nuclear weapons is not necessarily relevant today. Back in the 1940's, you really didn't have "superpowers" like you did since WWII. The US and Russia and China became superpowers as a result of WWII, although economically the US was one before then.
I entirely agree with you that a huge standing army simply isn't a good idea. I'm not arguing that point. I'm saying that a country does need a military (at least arguing from the point that a country has a state, since I'm an anarchist), but that military should be designed to deal with the reality of today and the reality of tomorrow.
I agree that our military should be smaller - but BETTER - than anyone else's. That's my whole point. BETTER is BETTER and CHEAPER than LARGE and EXPENSIVE.
I agree to some extent that we don't have any real enemies today who can threaten us with anything other than nukes - and our nuke advantage neutralizes them completely. However, technology may change that. I agree that it's hard to predict how and when that will occur. But we can't assume that the statists who run China and Russia might not decide to get as stupid and imperialistic as our own statists. So a standing military is necessary.
It's also conceivable that war will evolve into something that isn't "total war" - when nations directly attack each other's home lands. War could become a chess game of military strikes on proxy countries (similar to Iraq) or on the high seas, with various nuclear threats being made but never acted upon because the MAD costs are still too high. In such a scenario, a standing military would be important, but the advantage would still go to the military which is better.
And by better, I don't mean size, or even technology. I mean better in terms of the strategy, tactics, and training of personnel that are involved. That's why 4th Gen War is so important to study - it's never about military size or technology; it's all about strategy, tactics, motivation, and credibility.
The latter is emphasized by most 4th Gen War theorists. If you can't convince people you're the "good guys", you lose. What "good guys" means may vary from society to society. The US can't assume they're the "good guys" in everybody's - or anyone's - eyes any more. It has nothing to do with what US citizens think about it.
What would your standing army stand around doing?
Sure, some totally unexpected technology could come down the pike and suddenly make us vulnerable to attack. But until and unless you can tell us what that technology is, there isn't anything operational, there's no program, that that bare and abstract possibility tells us to put in place. It's great to say that our military should be BETTER than anybody else's, but even if we get past the fact that different nations will have very different needs, and therefore define "better" very differently, you can't tell me what particular BETTER capabilites, and therefore weapon systems and force structure, this BETTER army needs.
You could follow this line of thinking about new technologies rendering everything before them obsolete as the paramount security insight, to the conclusion that a re-engineered DoD would be some giant think tank whose main program and purpose would be to keep tabs on technological innovation in order to get the BETTER stuff for our side first. But I think that if you follow this idea far enough for it to be really workable, what you end up with is my idea of disbanding the standing army in order to fund technological innovation in general. The most militarily revolutionary innovations will inherently come from fields not now thought of as having much if any military application. The stuff we know has military application has already been discounted by the market, so to speak. If we want that breakthrough that will render everything that has gone before it obsolete (Not that I'm very sanguine about that possibility. Nukes have moved the ball exactly zero yards in that respect, as you note in mentioning the nuclear stalemate.), we need to be aggressive about funding everything but our military establishment. If we fund the search for some green alternative to oil, for example, we not only get technology which, unlike, say, SDI, actually strengthens the nation, but we set our scientists and engineers to solving a real problem, and work on any real problen is much more likely to lead to a militarily useful breakthrough than spending on the already worked-over fields that have already probably exhausted their ability to give us anything new of any use, military or otherwise.
Do we need anything close to the million-man military we now have, to meet your ideas? How does what you want and envision for our security needs differ, operationally, from the idea that we should cut back the DoD to what it needs to defend our shores from the current capabilities of our (real) potential adversaries, and use the vast sums we save to work on the nation's real problems? I'll spot you some sort of think tank working in DoD on narrowly military applications of new technology, and new force structure ideas, to deal with potential enemies. That's, say, 100 people (any more would be counter-productive), to add to the 25-ship Navy and one-brigade Army we actually need to deal with present "threats". What else do we need of a standing military in terms of capabilites and force structure? I mean what else besides that the current monstrosity stand down so the resources now wasted on it can be redirected to actually benefitting our country, and leaving it strong enough to deal with the challenges we may face from enemies in the future.
Comments closed May 09, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Which is why they should stick to Figurative Combat Ships.
Posted by eric | April 25, 2008 11:01 AM