Our Broken Military Industrial Complex

One of the justification for the Zumwalt class destroyers is that they would be able to engage in shore bombardment up to miles inland using their advanced cannon.

In any case, its capabilities proved too expensive, so only 3 ships are going to be constructed, and now we learn that the high tech shells that were to allow for long distance shelling have been canceled because they were too expensive:

The USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) is the US Navy’s latest warship, commissioned just last month—and it comes with the biggest guns the Navy has deployed since the twilight of the battleships. But it turns out the Zumwalt's guns won’t be getting much of a workout any time soon, aside from acceptance testing. That’s because the special projectiles they were intended to fire are so expensive that the Navy has canceled its order.

Back when it was originally conceived, the Zumwalt was supposed to be the modern-day incarnation of the big-gunned cruisers and battleships that once provided fire support for Marines storming hostile beaches. This ability to lob devastating volleys of powerful explosive shells deep inland to take out hardened enemy positions, weapons, and infrastructure was lost after the Gulf War’s end, when the last of the Iowa-class battleships were retired. To bring it back, the Zumwalt’s design included a new gun, the Advanced Gun System (AGS). As we described it in a story two years ago:

The automated AGS can fire 10 rocket-assisted, precision-guided projectiles per minute at targets over 100 miles away. Those projectiles use GPS and inertial guidance to improve the gun’s accuracy to a 50 meter (164 feet) circle of probable error—meaning that half of its GPS-guided shells will fall within that distance from the target.

………

The "less cost" part, however, turned out to be a pipe dream. With the reduction of the Zumwalt class to a total of three ships, the corresponding reduction in requirements for LRLAP production raised the production costs just as the price of the ships they would be deployed to soared. Defense News reports that the Navy is canceling production of the LRLAP because of an $800,000-per-shot price tag—more than 10 times the original projected cost. By comparison, the nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise missile costs approximately $1 million per shot, while the M712 Copperhead laser-guided 155-millimeter projectile and M982 Excalibur GPS-guided rounds cost less than $70,000 per shot. Traditional Navy 5-inch shells cost no more than a few hundred dollars each.

When we are discussing the subject of swamps that need draining, the Pentagon should be at the top of the list.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

It doesn't float, it's just so ugly that it repels the water

2 weeks ago, I noted that the extended range munition which was a large part of the justification for the new Zumwalt class destroyers was too expensive to procure, and now we discover that the latest whiz bang ship broke down because it leaks:

The Navy’s newest and most technologically advanced guided missile destroyer had to be towed from the Panama Canal after experiencing “engineering issues,” a spokesman for the service said Tuesday in a statement.

The USS Zumwalt, which cost $4.4 billion, will remain at Naval Station Rodman, a former U.S. base in Panama, to repair problems that surfaced this week while the ship cruised to its new homeport in San Diego, said Cmdr. Ryan Perry, a spokesman for the Navy’s Third Fleet. He said it was unclear how long the ship would remain in Panama.

“The schedule for the ship will remain flexible to enable testing and evaluation in order to ensure the ship’s safe transit to her new homeport,” Perry said in a statement.

USNI News, a publication of the U.S. Naval Institute, reported the ship was in the canal when it lost propulsion. Crew members also saw water intrusion in bearings that connect electrical motors to drive shafts, it reported.

The 610-foot-long Zumwalt was billed as the most capable surface combat ship in the world when it was commissioned last month in Baltimore. But the most recent issues were not the first it has faced since it left shipbuilder General Dynamics Bath Iron Works in Maine in September.

The Zumwalt suffered a similar seawater leak in September and another unspecified engineering problem in October, according to USNI News.

This is becoming a bit of a theme in US defense procurement, and if it continues, it's going to get very ugly.

Scrapping the Zumwalt

Gene Taylor (D-MS), hairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s seapower subcommittee, is proposing scrap the Zumwalt class (DDG-1000), and replace it with an additional LPD and two resupply ships. The senior Republican on the subcommittee, Rosco "Neanderthal" Bartlett (R-MD), agrees.

I tend to agree. The Zumwalts are too large, too expensive, and too ambitious. They add nothing in overall capability, their weapons and sensor capability will not differ from their predecessors, so all their size gets is a larger store of weapons, at the cost of reduced coverage, since more smaller ships can cover different areas simultaneously.

They are also both pushing for more nuclear combatants, including a scheme to make the Arleigh Burke's nuclear powered, which I'm rather dubious of.

Looks Like the DDG-100 May Be More F$#@ed Up than Previously Found

Well, it looks like the sad saga of the DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyers may become even sadder, as there are now doubts that the two ships purchased may never sail.

Noah Schactman cites a report from Defense News:

Issues have arisen in guaranteeing the seals between the composite construc­tion panels of the huge Zumwalt deckhouse... [where] all of the ship’s major sensors... are em­bedded in the structure, and all of the ship above the first super­structure level is contained...

[O]ne source familiar with the situation said the Navy is so wor­ried about the problem that it has been canvassing other manufac­turers of composite structures to see if an alternate production source could be found.

So will any Zumwalts be built?

... Sen. Susan Collins, R­-Maine, and a key supporter of the DDG-1000, told Defense News, “I still expect the Navy’s going to abandon the DDG-1000.”

It sure sounds to me like the ships cannot be built right now.


Background here.

Navy Wants to Pull Plug on Zumwalt Class

Well, it looks like the Navy is coming to its senses, and that it will be trying to terminate its DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyer at just two ships.

I think that this is a good thing. They are too damn expensive to build many, and whatever capabilities you add, you lose too much coverage. A large ship (14,500 tons) simply can not be in two places at once, while two (or three) smaller Burke class destroyers can.

It's the sensible decision, but I agree with Galrahn that there is a risk that Congress may overrule the Navy, because there are prominent people who want the defense pork, which would be a damn shame.

The Real DDG-1000 Cancellation Reason?

Both of the US Navy's new combat ships, the DDG-1000 Zumwalt and the Littoral Combat Ship are designed to minimize crew size to save cost.

However, the LCS is a conventional hull form, and it has lots of open space in, both for modules, and for a lot of reserve bouyancy.

The Zumwalts, however, appear to be much more tightly packed, with less reserve bouyance relative to their size, and a tumblehome hull form for stealth that is suspected of having stability issues.

Galrahn at Information Dissemination suggests that perhaps the crewing and hull form created a ship with a serious glass jaw, much like the British battlecruisers at the turn of the last century:

More than any other form of damage control, flooding is best known for being managed by active means best represented in manpower. The reduction in crew creates an unstable situation in this regard, and while we are on this subject, let me note that I believe one of the real unspoken reasons Roughead wants to cancel the DDG-1000 is specific to the absence of flood control capabilities with that platform that has a relatively tiny crew. Ever read Friedman about ship design? If so, consider the hull form of DDG-1000 as you reflect upon the thoughts I've noted below.

If his analysis is correct, and I think it is, I find it interesting this is repeating almost in an almost exactly 100 year cycle.

The U.S. Navy Seems to Be Without Procurement Vision

Interesting, it appears that the US Navy, from the CNO on down, is not aggressively pushing more DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyers.

At one Congressional hearing, when asked what the DDG-1000 brings to the Navy, CNO Adm. Gary Roughead said, "is an introduction of new technologies that will be very important to how we go forward."

That is not a sterling endorsement of a ship that will be the largest surface combatant to be fielded in a long time, it's 80% bigger than the Arleigh Burke Class, and a quick Wiki shows that the last hull of its size was built somewhere around 1950.

If you go read the article, it appears that the Navy has no real clue as to what it wants, with fuzzy thinking on anything, whether it be more Burkes, whether the CG(X) should be nuclear powered, LPD landing ships, maritime patrol aircraft, etc.

For some reason, except for carriers and submarines, the Navy seems completely adrift (pun not intended).

The Navy Still Doesn't Know What it Wants

So, the Navy is looking at a 'future surface combatant' (FSC) to replace the DDG-1000 Zumwalt.

It appears to be an improved version of the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke, with possibly a hull stretch and a new engineering plant, and definitely a new radar, the the Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR), which was originally intended to be first fielded on the nuclear powered CG(X) cruiser, which now looks to be pushed back a couple of years.

The idea that they are doing this to the DDG-51 implies that part of the problem with the Zumwalts was insufficient robustness to battle damage.

What is shows however, is that the Navy really does not have a coherent path forward.

Yeah Pretty Much

The good folks at ProPublica list 8 key failures for the rapidly being retired Littoral Combat Ships.

I think that in addition to the specifics, I think that a cultural failure, the insistence of the US Navy at reducing staffing to purchase the latest bling, is at the core of the problem.

That's why the LCS was a failure, and why the Zumwalt Class destroyers, with half the crewing of the previous Burke Class and twice the displacement were canceled after only 3 ships. 

Neither of them are survivable in a near peer conflict

However, the list is useful:

1. Navy officials vastly underestimated the costs to build the ship in estimates provided to Congress. The original price tag more than doubled.
2. The ships were supposed to be equipped with interchangeable weapons systems to allow them to fight, hunt submarines and detect mines. The Navy failed to make this happen.
3. Scores of sailors and officers spent more time trying to fix the ships than sailing them.
4. The Navy relied so heavily on contractors for maintenance and repair that sailors and officers were unable to fix their own ships.
5. A string of high-profile breakdowns at sea beginning in late 2015 laid bare the limits of the ships and their crews.
6. Top Navy commanders pressured subordinates to sail even when the crews and ships were not fully prepared to go to sea.
7. One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more of the ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons systems failed. The Navy wound up with more ships than it wanted, at an estimated lifetime cost of $100 billion.
8. Lawmakers with shipyards in their districts played a key role in expanding the program and protecting it from scrutiny.

The overall picture is one of gross corruption and an inability to think beyond the needs of the defense contractors who should be servants of the defense process, not their masters.

Carrier of the Future, My Ass

The USS Gerald R. Ford, the US Navy's $13. Billion carrier of the future, does not have functioning bomb lifts, another "ground breaking" technology that they still have not gotten to work:

The $13 billion Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, the U.S. Navy’s costliest warship, was delivered last year without elevators needed to lift bombs from below deck magazines for loading on fighter jets.

Previously undisclosed problems with the 11 elevators for the ship built by Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. add to long-standing reliability and technical problems with two other core systems -- the electromagnetic system to launch planes and the arresting gear to catch them when they land.

The Advanced Weapons Elevators, which are moved by magnets rather than cables, were supposed to be installed by the vessel’s original delivery date in May 2017. Instead, final installation was delayed by problems including four instances of unsafe “uncommanded movements” since 2015, according to the Navy.

While progress was being made on the carrier’s other flawed systems, the elevator is “our Achilles heel,” Navy Secretary Richard Spencer told reporters in August without providing details.

The elevator system is “just another example of the Navy pushing technology risk into design and construction -- without fully demonstrating it,” said Shelby Oakley, a director with the U.S. Government Accountability Office who monitors Navy shipbuilding.

Gee, you think?

Every attempt at making a technological leap on the Ford class carrier has been problematic, whether it's the catapults, arrestor gear, and now, the munitions lifts.

We've seen similar things with the LCS and the Zumwalt class destroyer, and it's all driven by an almost pathological need to minimize crewing.

It's a complete cluster-f%$#.

Greatest Military in the World

It looks like the US Navy is at the altar of sophisticated surface combattants and aircraft at the expense of basic seagoing capabilities. 

So the nave has almost dedicated fireboats, only 2 hospital ships and 2 ocean tugs,  etc.

Instead, they are getting the (failed) Zumwalt class cruisers, and the (failed) Littoral Combat Ships, and the (failing F-35).

Logistics, repair, recovery, and firefighting should be core competencies of any navy, but there are commercial equivalents that can do the jobs, so there are no outsized profits, and hence no opportunity for flag officers to secure comfortable post-retirement sinecures:

Over the past few decades, the United States Navy has increasingly abandoned the unsexy working ships it once mastered and deployed around the world. Previously, the Navy had a large fleet of salvage tugs, but now they only have two, and only two Hospital Ships, two Submarine Tenders, [to be fair with a completely nuclear submarine force, there is no need for submarines to refuel at sea, and with a top speed "in excess of 25 knots" they can get to a base to rearm in a few days] and two Ocean Tugs. Some ship classes have been scrapped altogether including Fireboats or, as the Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro inaccurately called them in a letter to congress, “fire boats.”

In the letter, dated April 8th, the Navy responded to a congressional inquiry questioning why no fireboats are maintained in San Diego Harbor, home to hundreds of billions of dollars in warships and taxpayer infrastructure, along with vital shipyards. This letter came after maritime experts, including gCaptain, criticized the Navy for not having fireboats on hand to fight a fire aboard the large amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard (BHR) in 2020.

“Modern fireboats are impressive and so essential to protecting ships that Long Beach purchased them even though the next city north, Los Angeles, already had a state-of-the-art fireboat, and even though the construction cost for the two boats exceeded $50 million,” we wrote in July of last year. “Long Beach is not alone. Nearly every large commercial harbor worldwide now has state-of-the-art fireboats on duty, but the world’s largest US Naval Bases doesn’t own a single one.”

………

More troubling than the fireboat report itself is a pattern of disinformation the US Navy and Department Of Defense have provided Congress when it comes to working ships. In 2015 it told Congress that it had the capability to recover the VDR aboard the sunken American flagship El Faro, but it ended up taking them 10-months to locate and document the wreckage and retrieve the VDR, much longer than experts expected the audio tapes to survive at the bottom of the ocean. It has repeatedly underfunded both Military Sealift Command and MARAD sealift ships which has resulted in a rusting and broken supply ship fleet with massive capacity shortages. For years the Navy repeatedly pushed concerns about icebreaker unavailability off to the US Coast Guard until being forced to work on a joint icebreaker program. The Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin lied to Congress this year when he said after the Navy’s Red Hill Bunker facility leaked, poisoning civilians’ homes and even children, that lost fuel capacity could be “dispersed at sea.” He did this knowing full well that the United States Navy does not have enough tankers to meet current demand capacity, much less take over for major tank closures. They lied about the security concerns behind using a Chinese-built ship and foreign crews to recover the Navy’s most important fighter plane. They lied because they did not have the salvage ships (and possibly not the expertise) to recover it themselves and did not have the gumption to ask MARAD or our large fleet of American offshore support ships to help.

The US Navy has been playing games and dragging its feet with Congress for over a decade on Salvage ships to repalce the two remaining Safeguard class ships which are now 36 years old. Since 2010 the US Navy has told Congress it planned to buy eight special mission salvage ships in the new USNS Navy-class T-ATS. The latest budget published in March, however, only allocates money for one new T-ATS. One. One new working salvage ship to cover the entire 71 percent of the Earth’s surface that is water. One.

A US Navy Fireboat, or a USN hospital ship, needs to be staffed by Navy personnel , but they are commercial vessels, and do not generate the pork that members of Congress, or the level of corruption required by the Military-Industrial complex, so a foundational capability is removed to make space for military bling.

Zumwalt in Trouble

The DDG-1000 class ships are losing Congressional support, with Rep. Murtha proposing that they be delayed for other needs.

There were originally supposed to be 24 of these, then 7, and now 2, and they are being delayed, and the price has gone through the roof, with it now being quoted at $3 billion each, with realistic estimates putting it at $5 billion.

It's a bad program. 80%+ of any surface combatant's benefits are simply a product of their being afloat and available, so going with what are very large boats and fewer numbers gets fewer boats in the water, and this does is not outweighed by the additional capabilities of the larger boats.

The problem is that the US Navy has a fixation on size.

Navy Ship Building Programs Face Budget Scrutiny

It looks like there are a couple of very prominent targets for law makers looking to pay for Iraq, the DDG-1000, and MPF-F.

The DDG-1000, aka the Zumwalt class destroyer, is a very large, about 14,500 tons displacement (the Arleigh Burkes in service are about 8,500 tons, and the Ticonderoga class cruisers are only about 10,000 tons). It's also very expensive, and as a result, the proposed buy has been cut from 32 ships to 7.

It is very much a product of the US Navy's big ship fixation. It now looks to cost about 5x as much as the Burkes, and prices are still rising, and the benefits of a larger ship are largely outweighed by the disadvantages of having fewer ships.

Simply put, you cover less area with fewer ships, though the Maine delegation will certainly fight hard for these, as will Mississippi, as they will likely be manufactured at Bath Iron Works in Maine and Northrop Grumman's Ingalls Shipbuilding in Mississippi.

The MPF-F (Maritime Prepositioning Force-Future) is basically an amphibious invasion fleet that will be standing ready around the clock:

But Democratic leaders of the House and Senate seapower subcommittees are discussing cutting their authorizations for the destroyer program to redirect funds elsewhere, and they have notably complained about shifting MPF-F definitions to a degree that they seem less enthusiastic about them than Littoral Combat Ships, for instance, which also have experienced programmatic troubles but appear to continue to enjoy congressional backing.

“I am concerned with the plans for the so called Maritime Prepositioning Force (Future) commonly known as the MPF(F),” House seapower chairman Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) said. “I am not convinced that the Navy and Marine Corps are in sync with the requirements for this force and I am not sure that the Navy has a reasonable plan to build these ships efficiently,” he said last month.

This is basically a way of saying that he does not think that the Navy has its sh%$ together on what it really needs from this.

My take is that the DDG-1000 is arguably inferior and more expensive solution to buying more Burkes, and I'm not sure that investing in "amphibious invasion fleets in a box" is something our current budget realities can support.

Contract Awarded For Nimitz Sucessor

The Gerald R. Ford, which will succeed the Nimitz Class, and contain such bits of tech as (quoting from article):

a new flight deck with an improved weapon handling system, advanced arresting gear, a newly developed electromagnetic aircraft launch system, new and simplified nuclear propulsion plants and a new electrical power generation system.

One hopes that its progress will be smoother than the Littoral Combat Ship or the DDG-1000 Zumwalt's, but I doubt it.

DDG-1000 Cancellation to Figure Prominently in Maine Senate Race

The US Navy has proposed ending production at 2 Zumwalt class DDG-1000, and making up the difference with additional DDG-51s, and incumbent Republican Susan Collins opposes this while Democratic challenger Tom Allen supports it.

The total amount of dollars from the Navy would be similar, but the Burkes have more local content, as the Zumwalts are made from modules from all around the country (the better to spread the pork around to many Congressional districts)and then assembled at Bath Iron Works, so the Burkes mean more money for Maine, which should be a selling point for Allen.

A 23 Year Long Multi-Billion Dollar Long Contract Dispute Settled

And, surprise, surprise, it is a sweetheart deal for the defense contractors: (paid subscription required)

After more than two decades and numerous attempts at a settlement, the U.S. government finally agreed to accept $400 million from General Dynamics and Boeing in the dispute over the Navy's cancellation of the $4.8 billion A-12 Avenger II program.

The settlement is a fraction of what the government sought when the lawsuit began, demanding $1.3 billion in restitution ($2.2 billion in 2014 dollars) for money spent on the stealthy carrier-based aircraft program that had yet to deliver an aircraft. And it is even smaller when compared with an agreement for $2.9 billion that was nearly negotiated in 2003.

………

The Navy will receive three EA-18G Growlers that will be delivered on top of the 21 Boeing aircraft that were funded by Congress for fiscal 2014 and are expected to be delivered in 2016, according to the Navy.

General Dynamics will provide $198 million in credits to the Navy toward the design, construction and delivery portions of the Zumwalt-class DDG-1000 destroyer.

………

The dispute began in 1991, when then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled the $4.8 billion stealth attack aircraft, run by General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas, which has since been acquired by Boeing. It was terminated in part due to the government's conclusion that contractors were not meeting cost and schedule targets. The Navy demanded that contractors repay $1.3 billion to the government.

The prime contractors sued the government, arguing the government should make penalty payments because the contract was canceled for “convenience,” not a failure to perform. The case festered in the court system, eventually reaching the Supreme Court.

………

In 2011, 20 years after the start of the dispute, the Supreme Court considered the case. The Navy argued that the contractors had not completed the work they had promised. The contractors argued that the government held back classified information about stealth technology that hampered their effectiveness. Ultimately, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, where it remained until now.

They met none of their technical requirements, they missed their schedule, and they were hideously over budget, and the punishment for the (now effectively admitted with the settlement) misfeasance and malfeasance is that the contractors get to secure the status of existing programs.

Can't Make Ships

The Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyer is an old ship.

The first of the class entered was laid down in 1988.

After the failures of the Zumwalt class destroyer and the Littoral Combat Ship, the Navy is acquiring more Burkes, and the costs are skyrocketing.

The U.S. Navy’s Flight III Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) class destroyers are facing cost increases and delays, jumping from an average of $2.1 billion per ship to $2.5 billion per hull, with even steeper cost increases coming in the future, according to a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report. The report analyzes the Navy’s 2025 shipbuilding plan, which calls for a 390-battle force ship fleet by 2054, and includes nine more vessels than in last year’s plan.

Beyond destroyers, the versatile workhorses of the Navy’s combat fleet, the CBO’s assessment notes cost hikes among other platforms, as well as systemic American shipbuilding industry shortfalls that could impede the service’s fleet size goal. All this long-term planning comes as the sea service races to prepare for a near-term war with China if Beijing invades Taiwan in the coming years. These destroyers and their anti-air, anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare capabilities would be crucial to such a future fight.

The Navy currently has 74 destroyers of the Arleigh Burke class, in Flight I, Flight II, Flight IIA and Flight III variants. Two Flight IIAs and 18 Flight IIIs are already either under construction or their purchase has already been authorized by Congress. CBO’s assessment also found that, overall, the 23 Flight IIIs laid out in the 30-year shipbuilding plan will end up costing $2.7 billion on average.

“The Navy stated in a briefing to CBO and [the Congressional Research Service] that the increase in its estimates of the cost of the DDG-51 Flight IIIs was attributable to shipbuilding inflation’s outpacing economywide inflation as well as declining shipyard performance,” the CBO report states.

"Declining shipyard performance," huh?

That's bureaucrat-speak for the shipyards can't build properly any more.

Rather unsurprisingly, this increase in cost has been accompanied by a schedule slippage.

Time is money, so missing schedule means busting the budget.

The military industrial complex is running on fumes.

DDG-1000 Procurement Halted at 2 Ships

This is a good move, the ships are too big and too expensive, costing at least 2½ times that of the Arleigh Burkes that they are to replace.

Susan Collins, the Senator from Bath Iron Works Maine, one of the two shipyards constructing the Zumwalt's, appears to be resigned to the termination of the program, though she wants more Burkes to be constructed, which are also made at BIW, which indicates that Congress won't ram more DDG-1000s this down the Navy's throat.

I would expect to see some investigation on integrating some of the DDG 1000 specific systems into the Burkes, specifically, the SPY-3 radar and the 155mm Advanced Gun System.

Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Gary Roughead, has been highly critical of the program since his appointment in September, 2007, and sent a letter to Sen. Ted Kennedy saying that the DDG-1000 would not be cheaper to opperate than the DDG-51 Burkes.

The Elephant in the Room

As a part of of the US Navy's fetish with reducing crewing to an absolute minimum, we have the  Zumwalt class destroyers and the two types of Litoral Combat Ships.

The former was canceled after 3 ships out of a planned 32, and they are already retiring some of the LCS after less than a decade because they don't work.

The problem is that for a major surface combatant, you need to crew for maintenance and damage control in combat.

Now the USN is planning to aggressively move into unmanned warships, which wiojld further magnify the problems they are already experiencing.

This will not end well:

Two subjects are nearly inescapable in commentary about the U.S. Navy today. The first is the much-maligned, 15-year saga of the littoral combat ship (LCS), which has provided an unfortunate case study for interest group capture, misalignment of ends and means, cost overruns, and engineering failures.

The second subject is more hopeful: proposals for unmanned surface vessels that will deliver cost savings and increase the size of the fleet. As China leap-frogs the United States in raw numbers of ships built and deployed, this subject has acquired great urgency. It includes concepts such as human-machine teaming and autonomous swarming as proposed cost-effective solutions to the numerical asymmetry at sea.

Very little commentary, however, explicitly connects the two subjects. This is unfortunate because, while the LCS is not unmanned, it is further on the unmanned spectrum than any other U.S. Navy vessel in operational use, making it the closest real-world test case for future surface fleet architecture. In fact, the central argument for zero-manning — that removing sailors from ships will save money, allowing the Navy to purchase and field large quantities of vessels for distributed maritime operations — is exactly what the LCS program promised.

In the case of the LCS, this promise was a fallacy for two reasons. First, replacing sailors with technology reduced maintenance at the operator level, but increased it at the regional maintenance center and original equipment manufacturer levels. This raised costs overall, meaning fewer platforms could be purchased. Second, minimal manning made platforms less resilient. Fewer sailors meant fewer problems spotted, and less capacity to fix them while underway. Hence, if fielded in anything approximating combat conditions, the LCS would not remain effective for long. We argue that these two challenges are as — if not more — likely to occur on unmanned ships as they did on minimally manned ones.

………

Many of the early documents about and analysis of the LCS program stressed affordability, driven by optimal manning, rotational crew-deployment models, and reliance on shore support to reduce the overall life-cycle costs of the platform. There is a simple logic to this: Fewer personnel equals fewer habitability requirements — and hence greater room for combat systems — as well as reduced pay and fewer replenishments at sea.

But removing personnel from ships also means something else: more complex technical systems. Any unmanned piece of equipment is usually more complex than a manned machine assigned to do an equivalent task. This can make routine and corrective maintenance more costly, and also carries hidden costs by way of the high-level training required to conduct maintenance. The LCS was a case in point, as minimal manning drove procurement of systems that required technical expertise from the original equipment manufacturers.

With time, the projected life-cycle cost savings slowly began to diminish as core crew numbers increased by 25 percent, and the number of required shore-support personnel tripled. A similar dynamic is already playing out with early-stage planning for unmanned vessels. But even assuming that these are temporary speed bumps on the way to more mature technology, we can envision other areas where the deficiencies highlighted in the LCS’ minimal-manning model are unlikely to be alleviated by the zero-manning model.

In concept, the LCS manning model envisioned the transition of sailors, and engineers in particular, from a “maintainer-operator” role to that of “operator only.” However, the early LCS hulls faced many equipment casualties at sea, demonstrating the continued need for underway maintenance. Breaking the operator-only mindset proved difficult, as the original equipment manufacturers preserved their monopoly on expertise by keeping a close hold on the intellectual property — in the form of technical manuals, parts, and tools — necessary for maintenance and training. In other words, reducing maintenance at the operator level simply increased it at the intermediate and original manufacturer levels. Manning was not reduced, just transposed.

Of course, the transposition of personnel from the Navy to contractors increases the profit margins of those contractors, which increases the money that they have to create comfortable sinecures for retired admirals, so it's a win-win for everyone except for the Navy and the taxpayer.

………

The LCS, for its part, has a famously poor record of resilience, an ongoing problem attributable in part to minimal manning. With fewer sailors onboard to inspect engineering spaces, for example, one hull type suffered repeated engine casualties that simply went unnoticed. Another particularly salient example was the USS Fort Worth’s catastrophic engine failure in 2016, which an investigation attributed to insufficient oversight over watchstanders, reliance on personnel to perform a task they were not officially assigned to and briefed on (such as starting equipment), and the ship’s leadership’s absence from supporting roles due to their focus on a separate engineering casualty. In endorsing the investigation, the commander of the Pacific fleet specifically highlighted the impact that the smaller crew numbers played in the casualty. This was three years after the Navy had already adjusted LCS manning requirements due to crew fatigue and watchstanding shortfalls.

The primary cause of the Fort Worth casualty was operator error, but the Navy has attributed most other LCS engineering failures to design flaws or installation mistakes. In these cases, the problems could not be fixed at sea by design: the LCS operational construct explicitly backstopped minimal-manning with the promise of shore-based contractor support for both preventive and corrective maintenance. As the late Sen. John McCain pointed out, casualties from poor design or installation would disrupt operations far less if the sailors could fix the problem while underway. And the LCS’ survivability testing, which measures a ship and her crew’s ability to “avoid, withstand, and recover from” damage sustained by rough seas or combat, suggests that its minimal crew size would inhibit damage control efforts. 

That last bit is why I think that one of the reasons that the Zumwalt's run was cut short was because it had a glass jaw:  It had ½ the crewing of the Burke's in a hull that was 50% larger, leaving no margin for the necessarily extremely demanding conditions of battle damage.

Warships operations require a different operating model is different from commercial ships.  Additional crew is an asset for the former and a cost for the latter, as evidence by the example of the container ship Ever Given, which has a displacement 27½ times of the Arleigh Burk class, and has crewing 1⁄16 of the destroyer.

I think that both economically and socially we are increasingly unable to sustain this sort of wasteful procurement.

Reality Is a Bitch

So, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the modular, whiz bank, high tech wonder that manages to cram all the weaponry of a corvette into a hull the size of a frigate^*, is heading out to sea on its 1^st deployment, and they had to add an additional 20 crew to the nominal compliment of 75, an increase of 27%, in order not to overwork the crew to the point of uselessness. (see also here and here):

Good said Freedom’s 20 extra sailors would sleep in two 12-rack berthing modules, about the size of shipping containers, which will ride in the ship’s multiuse mission spaces. While the 75 core crew members will stay in the ship’s integral berthing spaces — which include double-tall racks, rooms of no more than eight sailors, and a head and shower to each berthing area — the VBSS sailors’ lodging will be more like those of sailors on a destroyer, he said.

Note that these spaces will not have heads or showers, and that the multiuse mission spaces are intended for the addition of capabilities to the platform for modular upgrades.

It seems to me that we are seeing the US Navy's fetish on getting the number of crew on ships down coming back to bite them in the ass, much as it did with the now-canceled Zumwalt class (an overview here).

In any case, this yet another example where, to paraphrase Commander Salamander, truth trumps PowerPoint slide thinking.

Not only does this show an increase in crew costs, it also reduces the "flexibility and modularity" which was supposed to be the primary justification for the program, because some of those "plug and play" spaces must now be occupied by additional crew.

These problems are in addition to the cost overruns and schedule slippage that the program is seeing, of course.

^*A corvette is a lot smaller than a frigate.