From an economic point of view, I fully understand the concept of sunk cost - but this still makes me shake my head.
They are the two ships no one wanted, almost constantly embroiled in one dispute or another for the past 25 years. The two Navy behemoths have never gone on a mission, were never even completed, yet they cost taxpayers at least $300 million.
Now the vessels, the Benjamin Isherwood and the Henry Eckford, are destined to leave Virginia waters for good and be scrapped at a Texas salvage yard, with no money coming back to the U.S. Treasury.
...
The Isherwood and Eckford were part of an 18-ship class known as the Henry J. Kaiser fleet of replenishment oilers, titans that carry oil for Navy vessels around the globe.
They were the only two that went unfinished, and were part of a 1985 budget request from the Navy for three oilers for a combined $567 million, according to records.
The two were built at the Pennsylvania Shipbuilding Co. in Philadelphia, which defaulted on its Navy contract in 1989. The ships were then sent to Florida to be finished. But disputes over costs and materials in Tampa led to the termination of that contract in 1993, according to records.
The Navy thought about turning the Isherwood and Eckford into ammunition ships, but that proved too expensive. In 1997, three years after the ships had been mothballed in the James River ghost fleet, the Navy cut its ownership ties.
Since then, the two star-crossed ships have sat idle in the middle of the James - until this week.
25 comments:
Absolutely dumb. The Navy keeps saying it does not need oilers and wants to lay them up or sell them. But guess what with the Navy being more dispersed and maybe getting more underway time, they need more auxiliraries. Can’t tell the great thinkers in OPNAV that. They want to lay up more now because the Navy has fewer warships.
It’s not how many ships in service, but where they are around the world, and what they need to keep going that should determine the number of auxiliaries needed.
You had better believe the Med ops ongoing had NFAF ships to support them. But one rarely finds those MSC ships iested in open source info. A Navy policy not to disclose NFAF movements I am told.
LEE....GOT THAT RIGHT ..........
Its ironic one of these is named Isherwood...
I've long argued that the conflict between Isherwood the engineer and Porter the artrisan has reached the maximum end of the arc that Isherwood initiated....
That pic of two new ships going to the scrappers is vivid proof its time to start swinging back the other way.
Besides...they would've made fine LCS tenders.
(thats a snark lee...I'm sure they would've been sub-optimmal at best)
Q: Who is going to jail?
A: ...crickets...
WHoa! Before we go lamenting the loss of these two hulls, let's review a bit.
The original builder did such crappy work that they got fired. Another outfit was hired to try to fix them and went broke and the ships were still incomplete pieces of $h!t. It sounds to me like the NAVSEA QA folks at least got this one right to refuse to accept them. And, given the basic crappy level of workmanship to start with, trying to keep them running would be an expensive nightmare anyway.
Throw in the "green friendly" double hull mandate that drives up costs (but keeps fish clean) it really does look like it does not make economic sense to continue to throw scarce dollars after what is already sunk costs. [pun intended]
And, all that ignores the fact that legions of contract lawyers will be getting rich for many more years fighting over who screwed up what on these ships, potentially delaying their use even if they were ever completed even marginally satisfactory.
As much as we desperately need ships, the Navy should not be stuck with crappy ships (little or otherwise) just because some Congresscritter managed to get them funded.
At some point somebody just has to bite the bullet and cut the losses. In this case the OPA thing about double bottoms, if they were built single bottom, pushed it over the line.
At least somebody had the sense to quit throwing good money after bad. Unlike, say, the LCS.
All the rest of the entire episode is just wrong. A sin and a shame, a sin and a shame.
Couple bites in the food for thought category...
1. Besides the James River Ghost Fleet, I'd like to see CDR Salamander do an exposee on the ALEP--Amphibious Lift Expansion Program. ALEP is a power point / spreadsheet drill which takes recently decommissioned amphibious ships and instead of scrapping them, keeps them in an "upgraded" mothballed condition (6 months to bring them back, yeah right) which is congressionally mandated in order to meet the USMC MEB requirement. To date, we have not brought a single ship out of ALEP, and are basically using that fleet to canibalize parts from (requires a lot of paperwork, but in today's fiscally constrained environment is often times necessary). ALEP is a waste of money, resources. Either increase the active fleet or shit can the ships entirely. But paying extra to basically have almost the same amount of readiness as the ghost fleet is ridiculous.
2. SECNAV made the wrong conclusions when he was briefed on energy efficiency being a COCOM demand signal. the COCOMs are talking about reducing the requirement to tether CLF to the strike groups and combatants. Greater fuel efficiency = greater independence = less risk for our most vulnerable and possibly prized possessions. Instead, he saw it as a "bold, earth loving rainbow initiative" whereby the Navy wanted to save turtles and reduce CO2 emissions. Negative, Ghostrider. The Navy needs oilers. Badly. We needed these ships or ships like these. Allowing ourselves to get bogged down for all this time is criminal. We end up paying for the ships to sit pierside. Bad ju-ju, and expensive (like ALEP). however, unlike ALEP, we can't canibalize the ships, we can only scrap them.
I had no idea that HJK was that old. I operated with her for two years in a row, and it was always a pain to locate her c/s -- she wasn't listed in the applicable refs. So I figured she was a relatively new ship.
Or did they just transfer the name to one of the new T-AKEs?
sub-optimal>nothing
Here is link to story concerning two ships that also did not meet expectations:
http://www.workboat.com/Hawaii-Superferries-going-on-auction-block.aspx
<span><span>You couldn't be any more dead wrong Mike...
There is a pause in this world for a bit of time to stop...actually think what we are doing...and then move forward.
Cut metal on "sub-optimal" ships now...
And thats all you will have when a foe comes along and quickly kicks your ass.
Plan on it...
The <span>"sub-optimal"</span> navy you advocate will inevitably end up like this one....</span></span>
SUBOPTIMAL=<span>SUNK</span>
*awkward*
Salty Gator, The ALEP was not a ppt. I was meant to fille the gap between time when old gatores went out of service and new ones like LPD17 came into service. The program was the result of an agreement bwt Adm Borda and Genl Krulak. ALEP is no longer is functional in point of fact it was killed off by OPNAV shortly after AdmBroda's death (bad pun).
There were two ships converted to T-LKAs I worked on them. MSC was told to lay them up UNFINISHED at NSMF Philly were they sit today. There were also some Newport class LSTs which were kept in the Naval Reserve program
GPB you are correct about OPA which did not take full affect until recently obsoleting single hulls. BUT they could have be added on to the end of the Kaiser build at Avondale and converted to double hulls as was done with the last three T-AOs.
The Brits did not care if they were single hull, nor do the Chileans who just took Higgins on FMS.
I belive the Tampa contract was supposed to correct Penn Ship problems? Tampa Ship contract was terminated due to shipyard's poor financial condition - not enough money to keep the yard going..
Its been awhile not but I believe the Navy got the last three Kaisers converted to double hull for about $21 mil?
All modern naval auxiliaries are being built to OPA 90 standards.
Non-double hull tankers can be refused entry into foreign ports (to load POL). Do we really want to limit where our naval auxiliaries can go?
Part of the sin, part of the shame.
To be fair, what killed the ferrys was the company blowing off doing a complete and detailed environmental impact statement. They thought they could piggyback on an existing statement, if I remember. That became the club used by a combination of environmentalist groups and anti-development groups to stop the operation. With out revenue the company could not afford the protracted fight. As far as the ships, everything I've read is that the performed very well when they were in service.
The "environmental impact statement" is a process by which anti-capitalists and "environmentalists" (the difference is shrinking) force companies to spend hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, sometimes tens of millions of dollars to produce a report that allows those groups to criticise as incomplete, or (gasp!) misleading, so that it has to be done again, for additional cost, or can be used as that club to prevent any development whatsoever.
The purpose of such an environmental impact statement is to drive the cost of any business project up to the point where it is too expensive to consider, so the plan for economic expansion is abandoned. Environmentalists are happy, anti-Capitalists are happy. And when that business winds up going overseas, where little of such silliness prevents business expansion, these groups put on their proletariat working man-themed T-shirts on and protest the "greedy corporations" for outsourcing American jobs.
A win all around.
Leesea. You do not know what you are talking about. ALEP is still funded. Try again. And look at your copy of the federal budget next time you want to correct me.
i heard a seastory many years ago that at the beginning of the last century the chengs on the british capitol ships had to keep enough fuel on board to reach the home islands from wherever they were operating. this really crimped their style when they were in the far east to say the least.
C
Since you were not in the room at the Pentagon when MSC was told to shut down the T-LKA portion, I will have to say you are wrong. There was no more money expeneded other than to lay them up. They went back into Category B status as Mobilization Reserve one notch above cannibalization.
The LSTs were kept in the Naval Reserve awhile at the instance of Senator Inonuye. All the Newport LSTs have since been sold, stricken or sunk according to the NVR.
Which ships do you think are left in the ALEP?
Which section of the "national budget" are you referring to? OMN? OPN? SCN? Kindly point me to that?
The Kaiser class hull form was briefly considered as a test bed for the Arsenal ship.
The $900 mil seven years to build tenders proposed by NASVSEA would seem to be exquisite at the other end of the specturm from sub-optimal.
P.S. I checked but did not find any tenders in the SCN, did you look/find?
you asked for it.
LHAs, shipmate. IF you doubt me I will e mail Sal the instruction, the document, and the frickin PE lines.
Obviously not SCN. I will get you the OMN and OPN lines too. Why do you think it takes so much paperwork just to rob a few Q-70 consoles from Tarawa?
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