THE PRICE OF DOG TAGS

THE PRICE OF DOG TAGS: Today’s NY Times provides more information on how poorly constructed the Hawai`i Superferry was and how essentially it was a failed demonstration project to get congress back on track for a plan to use commercial-high-speed ferry designs for warships.

The article, “Lesson on How Not to Build a Navy Ship” reviews the current competition between Lockheed and General Dynamics - which is building their version of the warships at HSf builders Austal- to build 55 of these boats based on the HSf designs.

The article states “the troubled birth of the coastal ships was rooted in the Navy’s misbegotten faith in a feat of maritime alchemy: building a hardened warship by adapting the design of a high-speed commercial ferry. As Representative Gene Taylor, the Mississippi Democrat who leads the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Expeditionary Forces, put it, “Thinking these ships could be built to commercial specs was a dumb move.

“Behind the numbers in the Accountability Office study, experts say, is a dynamic of mutually re-enforcing deficiencies: ever-changing Pentagon design requirements; unrealistic cost estimates and production schedules abetted by companies eager to win contracts, and a fondness for commercial technologies that often, as with the ferry concept, prove unsuitable for specialized military projects. “...

An examination of the littoral combat ships by The New York Times, including interviews with many of the principal Navy and industry officials involved, found that the project was hobbled from the outset by the Navy’s zeal to build the ships as fast and inexpensively as possible and the contractors’ desire — driven by competitive pressures — to stay on schedule, even as the ferry designs proved impractical and construction problems multiplied

It also speaks in a way to the “rush-jobs” at Austal that fired welder Wayne Jenkins referred to and further ties the HSf to the Naval boats, in what many think was a demonstration project for congress since one of the ways the HSf was originally “sold” to investors and the public was its ability to transport military personal and the new Stryker Brigade now set for deployment in Hawai`i

In their haste to get the ships into the water, the Navy and contractors redesigned and built them at the same time — akin to building an office tower while reworking the blueprints. To meet its deadline, Lockheed abandoned the normal sequence of shipbuilding steps: instead of largely finishing sections and then assembling the ship, much of the work was left to be done after the ship was welded together. That slowed construction and vastly drove up costs.

“It’s not good to be building as you’re designing,” said Vice Adm. Paul E. Sullivan, commander of the Navy branch that supervises shipbuilding...

“The littoral combat ship is an imaginative answer to emerging military requirements, but it has the most fouled-up acquisition strategy I have ever seen in a major military program,” said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a policy research center.

The extensive research in the article reveals how Congress had pulled the plug on the project until after the Superferry was built and running- at the behest and investment of ex Chief of the Navy John Lehman- the first commercial high speed ferry to operate in the open waters of the ocean.

Little did they know the brand new boat would leak and break it’s rudder- or that word of the slip-shod design and workmanship would be covered up for weeks until the day after Congress okayed spending for the warships

The rest of the article describes how Congress after much political maneuvering re-authorized the program and thus began the apparently insurmountable problems in using a commercial design for warships, describing much of Lockheed’s stumbling and bumbling on their competing version.

The article also talks about the foolishness of trying to use the commercial design saying

“(A)s Lockheed and the Navy were completing contract negotiations in 2004, the rules changed drastically. Commercial ferry standards, the Navy determined, would not do.
The underlying principle behind the decision, Admiral Sullivan said, was that the new ships had to be able to “hang tough in a storm and take some battle damage and still survive long enough” for the crew to be rescued.

A military expert said the Navy had badly miscalculated.

“They were eager to take advantage of commercial practices and the lower cost of buying off the shelf, but they did a lousy job of understanding the war-fighting requirements,” said the military expert, who asked not be named because he was involved with the program. “It was like, ‘You mean you want to put wheels on that car?’ ”
Adm. Gary Roughead, the current chief of naval operations, said: “We had thought that the commercial variant would not be that far away from what we needed. I’ll tell you, that was underestimated.””

The article concludes with a quote from Navy Secretary Winters.

“If we do not figure out how to establish credibility in our shipbuilding programs and plans, and restore confidence in our ability to deliver on our commitments, we cannot expect Congress or the nation to provide us with the resources we so urgently need"

According to the article Austal is scheduled to put the General Dynamics version of the littoral combat ship in the water tomorrow