CG(X): a crisis of confidence in competance

As if you needed another window into the crisis in Navy Shipbuilding;

BEHOLD!!

We hold a conference titled "The Road to CG(X)" and ....

Although the cruiser program “represents the very heart of the future surface Navy,” Sullivan repeatedly mentioned items that would not be discussed at the conference, including details of the super-secret Analysis of Alternatives for the ship, or discussions of the cruiser’s hull form, radar or missiles.

Then why spend all the money for the conference? I think this sums it up for me.

“The longer the Navy delays the CG(X), it looks to others like they’re waiting for the next administration to take office,” Ron O’Rourke, chief naval analyst for the Congressional Research Service, said during a panel discussion following Sullivan’s address.

“There’s a road out there to the CG(X), but at present it is a decidedly unclear one,” O’Rourke said, speaking at the conference in his personal capacity.

The delay in the analysis, O’Rourke opined, isn’t due to some kind of paralysis.

“The Navy, I think, has its reasons for holding back, even if it won’t share those reasons with others.”

O’Rourke decried the Navy’s ambiguous positions on its shipbuilding programs.

“This is my 25th year of tracking Navy programs,” he told the audience of several hundred engineers. “I can’t remember a time when the issue of surface combatant procurement appeared as unsettled as it does now.”

Trying to figure out what the Navy is thinking, O’Rourke said, is “Kremlinology.”

Leadership.

The Cluebat of History™ is a tough teacher. All the "Transformational" chickens are roosting. Revolutionary always has a higher risk than evolutionary - now you are seeing what happens when you wind up on the short end of risk.

Meanwhile, the fleet provides Byron job security.