The Three Wounds of our Amphibious Navy

To see where we are and where we need to go, it is always helpful to remind ourselves how we got here.

First let's look where we are; the Navy telling Congress to bugger-off;

Via Caitlin Kenny at DefenseOne;

The Navy is proposing to drop its amphibious fleet below 31 ships, despite an agreement with the Marine Corps and a potential violation of last year’s defense policy law. 

Sent to Congress on Monday, the Navy’s proposed $255.8 billion 2024 budget aims to retire eight warships before the end of their intended service life, including three Whidbey Island-class dock landing ships, or LSDs, that it proposed to scrap last year but which were saved by the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act

There are a lot of people out there so far this week doing great work reading the entrails of the latest budget, so I won't try to replicate their fine work here. 

This did not happen by accident. This is not happening as a result only of a lack of funds. This did not happen because a black cat walked in front of the CNO.

No. This is the predictable result of three things Big Navy has control of, but by acts of commission and omission, consistently made the wrong decision.

Wound One: Material Condition:

(We) did a ship-by-ship review, to understand the material state of each of the ships. What we found on the LSDs is that they are challenged in terms of readiness.

As we have covered here for the better part of two decades, as have others, the Navy decided to take savings from maintenance, hide once UNCLAS INSURV behind a classified wall, and - like someone avoiding the dentist or a regular physical - more than willing make things easy by doing nothing now, knowing full well that it will only be worse later on. Unlike tooth pain or colon cancer though, the person making things easy now is not the same as the person who will take the pain later. Kind of like a programmatic/leadership "Narcissistic Personality Disorder with Sociopathic Tendencies." 

Leadership let their fleet rot, and then pretends as if it was something that happened to the Navy, not allowed by the Navy.

Wound Two: The Tiffany Amphib:

“What we are making sure that we are doing as we move forward with our budget plans, is making sure that we have the right capabilities at the right price aligned to not only meeting military requirements, but working with industry,” Raven said. “And for LPD, we're taking a look at the acquisition strategy moving forward, again, to make sure that we would have the right capabilities at the right price and working with industry partners to put together that plan moving forward.”

From the start of the LPD-17 program, our ongoing criticism was that this was way to expensive on a per-hull basis for the mission of a LPD. From the titanium firemain on, the entire design had no respect for budget challenges to buy the numbers needed so in a future conflict, we were not one or two ships sunk from being mission ineffective, but here we are. 

It took a lot of seabags full of money and Sailor sweat to fix the ship, but her cost remains a sea-anchor if you wanted more ships in 2024. If you need 10-ships, but price each unit such that you can only buy 7 ships - you own that 3 ship delta.

Would Three: Institutional Parochialism: 

Berger on Monday reiterated the reasoning behind the 31-ship requirement for amphibs.

“Anything less incurs risk to national defense by limiting the options for our combatant commanders,” he said in a statement to Defense One. “Per strategic guidance, the Marine Corps must be able to provide the nation with crisis response capabilities and build partnerships with allies and partners in support of integrated deterrence—difficult to achieve without the requisite number of amphibious warships.”

...

Buying amphibious ships tends to be the last priority for the Navy after spending shipbuilding funds on aircraft carriers, submarines, and destroyers, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Bryan Clark said March 9 during Defense One’s State of the Navy event.

“Whatever gets left over is what can go towards the amphibious ships and the support ships. And when you do all the numbers for that, you always end up with you know maybe not quite enough for the amphibious ships, because if you're building one LHA every four or five years that you can incrementally fund, that's a chunk of money that's on the scale of you know, $500 million a year. And then you've got maybe $500 million or a billion dollars leftover for one more amphibious ship, which isn't quite an LPD,” Clark said.

From promotion rates to "prestige" - the Gator Navy has always been like that really good offensive lineman. They do their job and no one ever hears about them. Though they are paid less and don't get endorsements, without them no quarterback would be able to shine - no team achieve victory - and yet, the bias remains.

How exactly are we supposed to take and hold territory across the vast Pacific littoral? Who will do that, with what, and in how many places?

There are a lot of emoting going on about problems now that are directly the predicable results of decisions we've made.

As we review our budget, perhaps we also need to review our institutional system of incentives and disincentives that drive such decisions; the rewards and punishments that result in the selection of the leaders who make them.

The Surface Force's Lost Generation

Over at Defense News, Megan Eckstein has your must read to start your week. I hope she does not mind, but I'm going to pull a lot from her article. Read it in full, but there is so much here that validates what we have spent the last two decades on the Front Porch and on Midrats discussing, we need to spend some time to take a deep dive.

Back in 2009 we warned everyone that the Navy's decision to classify INSURV was nothing more than a smokescreen to hide the results of bad decisions on maintaining the readiness of our Navy from the taxpayers and allowed senior leadership to play other games as opposed to their core responsibilities. To say that almost two decades after the Cold War all of a sudden INSURV was classified was just, in a word, insulting.

In 2009, the U.S. Navy faced a readiness crisis.

The cruiser Chosin and destroyer Stout were both deemed unfit for combat operations by the service’s Board of Inspection and Survey, which at the time checked ships’ material conditions every five years.

And they weren’t the only ones. From 2005 through 2009, nearly 14% of surface ships failed their inspections, up dramatically from 6.2% from 2000 to 2004 and 3.5% from 1995 to 1999.

The crisis came after the Navy discontinued several of its Cold War-era organizations focused on maintenance and training in an effort to save money during a time without a significant threat to U.S. security.

No, the "without a significant threat" line is simply BS, an excuse, and for many who knew better ... a lie. We all saw what the People's Republic of China was building. FFS, contemporarily we were a few years in to "The Long Game" series here and we were just riding the wave smarter people set in motion.

"Without?" No, that dog just won't hunt.

This excuse was designed only to cover people who were focused on little more than building personal clout in their present job, while shifting Navy problems in to someone else's PCS cycle to solve. Sure, there was myopia by an ill-informed or just wrong cohort, but for most it was simply, as we say in horse country, "shooting up the horse."

There were some who tried at the time to fix it inside the system, but ultimately came up short. 

There were good guys, a lot of them - they just didn't get to 50.1%; 

Adm. John Harvey, who led U.S. Fleet Forces Command at the time, helped charter a fleet review panel to determine how the Navy ended up in this position.

... 

In 2010, the fleet review panel’s report, dubbed the Balisle Report after lead author retired Vice Adm. Phil Balisle, shocked the surface fleet with its data on the poor state of ship readiness and crew training. It painted a dire picture of a surface navy that needed to be fixed; otherwise, there was a risk someone could get hurt or killed.

Let's freeze that for a moment. The summer of 2010. That is 12 and a half years ago. Here is what we wrote about this in June and July of 2010. What is that, between three and four WorldWars length of time?

The review, released in 2010, was condemnatory. “The panel is in full agreement that surface force material readiness is in decline. [T]he message is clear: the trend is in the wrong direction.”

Chief among the review’s recommendations was a call for the return of readiness squadrons, which oversaw surface ship maintenance and basic training. The review found that when these squadrons were eliminated in 1995, so too was the fleet’s focus on and accountability for making deployable ships and crews.

So many of the problems we have today can be traced back to the post-Cold War arrogance of the 1990s,  Perry's Last Supper, TQL, the triumph of the accountants, layered with the Transformationalist snake oil of the following decade.  

In 2010, Harvey pushed to reinstall the readiness squadrons, but he couldn’t rally enough support from the Navy’s manning, engineering and budgeting leaders, among others. The recommendation was never implemented.

But in summer 2017, two separate collisions by Navy ships in the Western Pacific killed 17 sailors. The service once again had to dig out of a ship readiness hole, and a key leader again called for the return of the readiness squadrons. Again, the idea went nowhere.

The lives of 17 Sailors and two WorldWars after 2010 later. "Nowhere" has one hell of a butcher's bill.

“The Balisle Report gave us this tremendous look at a history, really since 2000 or so, of these various decisions that were made in various different parts of the Navy,” Harvey told Defense News. “The collective impact was very, very negative in terms of our ability to keep our ships properly manned, trained and equipped.”

...

“Bringing back the readiness squadrons,” Harvey said, “if you talked to Adm. Balisle, it was his No. 1 recommendation to do. And I agreed with that.”

Still, Harvey added, the urgency to make this major change was “overcome by other events at that time.”

"Other events..." indeed; as we documented at the time linked to above.

The U.S. Navy has not made significant progress toward growing its fleet size above 300 ships. The FY23 National Defense Authorization Act allows the service to shed 12 of the 24 ships it proposed retiring. Even with a slower retirement rate and marginally higher shipbuilding and construction funding from Congress, it will prove difficult for the Navy to grow the fleet toward 355 ships. That was the last publicly stated force structure objective, back in 2016; since then, the Navy has not officially stated a revised target. (Source: Doug Berenson/Oliver Wyman)

It is a hard sell to beg for more ships when from a material condition to a maintenance support perspective we seem to have trouble taking care of what the taxpayers have already bought us by borrowing money in the name of children yet unborn.

Kitchener said there are two key differences this time around: an advanced adversary in China that’s forcing the Navy to think about its near-term readiness to fight; and data analytics and modeling that prove the surface groups will be worth the investment.

I'm sorry, but bullsh1t.

The threat from the PRC was as well known in 2016 as it is now. I will add to this that no one has confidence on the "analytics and modeling" coming from the Navy. 

The Age of Transformationalism, gutting of maintenance, and the vaporware that was "optimal manning" have blown all credibility in the Navy's "muh metrics" claims. Kitchener's numbers may very well be perfect, but no one has any reason to believe any of them from Main St. to Congress. Sorry, but institutionally we blew that credibility over the last two decades and it will take a long time to get it back.

We would make much better headway by simply saying, "For most of this century we blew it. We were wrong. We are trying to do better." 

Some, like Harvey, gave the Navy a window to save itself a dozen+ years ago and we didn't take advantage of it.

We have years of work to do ... but Step-1 here is to admit our mistakes. Until we do that, everyone can very reasonably assume we will do it again.

Data is central to Kitchener’s new effort. He told Defense News in an interview that various efforts have identified the ways to improve ship maintenance: building up a larger inventory of select spare parts, adding capacity in key shops and departments that are potential chokepoints, increasing training and growing expertise in certain technical areas, and more.

Ahh...the "Just in Time - -TQL" hangover. What takes one year to destroy, takes five years to rebuild. All that Kitchener is saying is not new. It is, just like readiness squadrons, returning to the last baseline that worked.

Are we in the process of a "baseline reset?" That would be a good thing.

Take Destroyer Squadron 9, for example, located in Everett, Washington. Its ships are scattered geographically: one located in Everett, five in San Diego and two in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

I'll let you do a distance and time zone review of that for yourself. Norfolk-Mayport was hard enough.

There are reasons this exists, but none of them are satisfactory when an overall net cost is considered.

Kitchener said he’s awaiting the final recommendations of his working group this summer, but expects each fleet concentration area to have a single surface group responsible for maintaining and training all surface ships, including cruisers, destroyers, littoral combat ships and amphibious warships, based in those cities. These home ports include San Diego; Norfolk, Virginia; Mayport, Florida; Everett; Pearl Harbor; Yokosuka, Japan; Manama, Bahrain; and Rota, Spain.

I am trying to hard not to just snark old-school...but really - we have reached the point that giving commanders a chance to "walk the pier" without getting on an aircraft is something "new."

Instead of gratuitous snark, have a meme.

I mean, this is how it should be ... and seems to be heading back in the correct direction. It should be applauded. 

Each surface group would devote itself entirely to readiness. ... in the case of a maintenance casualty, the surface group back home would work to find the quickest solution, allowing the destroyer or amphibious squadron staff to continue focusing on operations. 

“This is oversight and responsibility and accountability throughout the entire” readiness cycle, Kitchener said. “The idea is, this exists in the fleet concentration area, it’s got a cadre of people that are constantly on our ships assessing, understanding what the problems are; we’re pulling the trend analysis here at the headquarters, giving them focus areas. It’s a very active, not just some sort of bureaucratic, organization.”

For those who were JOSs in the 90s, I guess a bureaucratic system focused on maintenance excellence is new and radical, but it has a track record. This is simply good stuff. We tried everything else and failed, why not try what worked?

Also, can we also make progress in the "Syllabels Reduction Act of 2023?" Can we simply go back to calling things "bases" as opposed to "Fleet Concentration Areas?" 

2 syllables and one word > 8 syllabels and three words.

As there is a lot of ruin in a nation, there was a lot in institutional capital previous generations built up prior to the 1990s that could be drawn on to pay for bad decisions, but that account is pretty much drawn down to almost nothing. 

Talk to anyone on The Hill ... it's gone.

The Navy has observed improvements in maintenance performance, but is also facing new setbacks as labor and supply chain challenges across the manufacturing sector continue to take a toll on the ship repair industry.

Rear Adm. Bill Greene, the fleet maintenance officer for U.S. Fleet Forces Command, said in the fall that only 36% of surface ships are expected to complete maintenance availabilities on time in fiscal 2022, down from 44% in fiscal 2021.

... 

 This duality is also reflected in the most recent Board of Inspection and Survey report, which noted surface ships are seeing higher overall readiness scores than the six-year average, but have more functional areas deemed “degraded” than the six-year average, using a scoring method of satisfactory, degraded or unsatisfactory.

Time for a reminder ... we need to make INSURV publicly available again. Less accountability gave us less readiness, and as a result our nation and its Navy is less secure.

What vexes the Navy, Kitchener said, is variance in maintenance performance: ... Kitchener outlined a three-step process to address this. The first step was already done under Performance to Plan ... P2P has highlighted the need to prioritize people or materials for a certain ship availability, and then coordinate activities across multiple shops at a shipyard to get a specific repair done on time.

The second step is allowing surface groups to devote their full attention to implementing the actions identified through P2P in hopes of achieving better on-time maintenance rates.

The third step, on which Kitchener said he’d offer more details soon, is creating a surface response plan that prioritizes certain ships’ readiness over others.

If a contingency arose and a combatant commander needed three destroyers, the three ships at the top of the list would be called upon to deploy on short notice. Those ships higher up on the list would be expected to stay in a peak-readiness state, and the maintenance and supply communities would act accordingly. Ships lower on the list and less likely to be called upon for unexpected tasking may be in a lower readiness condition if the fleet is short on personnel or materials, for example.

For those outside the Minotaur maze that is the US Navy's decision making, you are allowed to ask, "Why didn't we do this already?"

I know. I know.

So, what will this look like?

Kitchener said the future SURFGRU Southeast, currently named Naval Surface Squadron 14, is the “most robust” organization and has served as a model for the working group, which determined how many supply specialists, logistics personnel, diesel engine (versus gas turbine) experts, and so on, were needed to keep ships properly ready.

Kitchener said the Mayport group has 105 billets for a squadron that tends to about 10 destroyers — compared to just 10 personnel tending to nine destroyers and cruisers in Everett. The exact number of billets in each group would depend on the number of ships at a particular port, but Kitchener said the groups would more closely resemble the Mayport squadron than the Everett unit.

Mayport ... the best Sea & Anchor Detail in the Navy. 

The Navy was skipping training and maintenance to achieve unsustainable levels of at-sea presence, and it was down about 12,000 sailors thanks to the individual augmentee program that sent personnel to support joint operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sequestration cuts to the federal budget in 2012 further diminished readiness, Harvey explained.

No one said, "No." No one defended our Sailors or our Navy. We let the COCOMs abuse the running room they made for themselves as a result of Goldwater-Nichols and the whole accretions encumbered COCOM structure and Cult of the Joint that came with it. 

Yes, I am beating that horse and will continue to beat it until we get something fit for the 21st Century. 

No senior leader was willing to put their "career" - whatever that is after you have 4-stars - on the line to defend their Navy. We needed "Admiral No" and instead got "Admiral Hinge."

It wasn't something that happened to our Navy. No, it was something we allowed to happen to our Navy. Heck, during some of the worst of it, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was a USN 4-star.

“It was going to take more billets, more people. … And there just was not a clean, widespread agreement among everybody who had to agree that this was the right way to go,” Harvey said. “In the greater scheme of things and what was going on, it just never rose to the level where it had a critical mass of leadership who all said: ‘Yes.’ ”

No, plenty of billets were found for other "priorities and distractions" - they were just more important than manning, training, maintaining, and equipping a fleet to fight and win. As I've offered for years, give me the top-cover and the manning documents ashore, and I'll find your billets. Just let me recode and reassign as needed. If I need more, I'll look at afloat and DC staff. They're there - you just have to be ready to upset a different group of people who don't add warfighting value anyway.

In the end, this is the cost of distraction and ill-focus;

Retired Vice Adm. Rich Brown, who investigated one of the two fatal ship collisions in 2017 and then took command of Naval Surface Forces in 2018, resurrected the push to bring back readiness squadrons. He said that, by 2017, virtually all Balisle’s recommendations were implemented — with the readiness squadrons being the major exception.

Brown told Defense News a robust readiness squadron likely would have prevented the fatal collisions involving the destroyers Fitzgerald and John S. McCain.

In summary, yep.

The existing structure asks destroyer squadrons to oversee the maintenance and certification of ships and serve as the sea combat commander for a carrier strike group. If the squadron needs a ship to fulfill a warfighting requirement, it creates a conflict of interest that can put maintenance and training needs at risk.

Brown said this construct “failed, and we recognized that it was failing, and so that’s why the Balisle Report said, and later I said, we’ve got to do this. And we just didn’t do it.”

He called the 1980s readiness squadrons “a proven model” that restored the Navy from having a hollow fleet in the 1970s to having a robust surface force by the 1980s.

There it is again; baseline reset.

A future “high-end fight requires so much dedicated concentration and focus that we need these additional commands. They’re going to come at a cost — it’s going to come at a huge manpower cost, and the Navy’s got to buy that manpower because it’s the right thing to do for our carrier strike groups,” Brown said.

Yes, buy manpower ... but also repurpose existing bloat ashore. Yes, recoding BA/NMP is a pain - but it can be done. Yes, rice bowls and rent seekers will be upset. All it needs to be is a senior leadership priority. And at the end of the day, shouldn't the ability to fight and win at sea be number 1?

We cannot change the past, but we must acknowledge, name, and recognize past errors so that they won't be repeated. 

There is some good stuff going on as outlined in Megan's reporting, and we should see more in this direction, but no more happy talk. No more multi-syllabic bullsh1t bingo lingo. No more petty distractions.

There are a lot of smart, good people in important positions who want to do great things. They just need the right higher direction and guidance to execute.

Three Card NGAD

When something you know is mundane, ordinary, and clearly unclassified is all of a sudden stamped with a classification, your first reaction should be, “What are they hiding?”, not, "What neat things are they doing!" 

Know your history.

I have spent a week waiting for someone to tell me the latest on NGAD isn’t exactly what I think it is, and no one even tries to explain it away.  They know.

Via Mallory Shelbourne at USNINews;

The Navy is keeping classified the amount of Fiscal Year 2022 money it wants to develop the next-generation fighter aircraft set to replace the fleet of F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, according to service budget documents.

The Navy’s FY 2022 budget justification documents withhold the amount of dollars the service is putting toward the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. This is the second consecutive budget cycle in which the Navy has classified information about its investment into the service’s sixth-generation fighter.

It was over a dozen years ago that we saw what I consider the most egregious cover-up of our Navy’s fundamental failure to properly understand its responsibility for stewardship of the professional capital the taxpayers bought for them - the classification of INSURV. The previous link has my comments at the time.

An entire generation of leaders now have grown up - and been promoted - in this climate of cover-up in our Navy. That is what it is, no reason to sugar coat it.

After eight years of classified INSURV and the problems they hid, Rep. Whitman (R-VA) clearly identified what it was;

…he (Whittman) noted that Board of Inspection and Survey (INSURV) reports used to be unclassified and but have been classified for almost a decade. 

“During peacetime INSURVs should be declassified, and that makes sure there’s transparency there that we know what’s going on,” Wittman said. 

“That creates, again, that direction, that focus to make sure that maintenance is being done, maintenance availabilities aren’t being missed, material readiness is being maintained. All those things are critical.” 

“All of us have to look at this as an opportunity to really do some groundbreaking things in how the surface navy operates,” Wittman said. 

“It doesn’t hurt for us to get to points where we feel a little uncomfortable – in fact, I would argue we have to get to a point where we feel uncomfortable to make sure we are exploring all the different avenues that we have to explore.”

Yes, we commented on INSURV back in the day, but that was part of the process. Fear and shame are great motivators, and there is nothing classified about poor maintenance practices…unless you are doing such a horrible job that your warships are almost helpless … but that just tells we need more transparency, not less.

I remain convinced that you can draw a straight line from the horrible events of the summer of 2017 to not just the direct second and third order effects of hiding INSURV, but to the cultural mindset it enabled. 

Making uncomfortable facts classified is just a way to protect the powerful from being accountable - nothing more. We still have not addressed all the maintenance and material condition issues we “learned” from the summer of 2017's waste of 17 Sailors drowned in their racks, heck … we are still playing hide the ball on the manning issues.

We cannot afford to screw up NGAD, and I was hoping against experience that we would not. The fact we are on year two where we won’t even say what we’re spending on what is supposed to be a replacement for the Super Hornet only drags me in to further concern;

Look at this timeline;

The Navy finished its analysis of alternatives (AOA) for NGAD in July 2019 and as of August 2020, it had already started convening industry days for the program, USNI News reported last year.

The Navy has been seeking a replacement for the Super Hornet fleet for nearly a decade. The service put out its first request for information for the F/A-XX program in 2012

Nine years ago.

As we’ve stated over and over - next to reforming Goldwater-Nichols and the COCOM structure, we have to rip up root and branch our hide-bound and accretions hobbled acquisition system. 

It isn’t just inefficient and ineffective, it is a threat to national security. Just look at what it has done to our surface fleet the last quarter century. 

The aviation side of the house doesn’t have all that much better of a record. We’ve forgotten and thrown away range right when it became even more important. The light attack mafia won their tribalistic battles, but have left a flight deck that can't refuel a strike package, find and kill a submarine, or reach far enough without endangering mother. 

We’ve convinced ourselves that there was no way smaller aircraft carriers could park decks full of large footprint A-3, RA-5, F-14, EA-6B next to smaller aircraft - so we shrink our airwing in not just capability, but size, to the point of making its utility questionable. But hey ... the VFA guys got rid of all those VA & VF bubbas that teased them so much. They got rid of those goofy S-3s that kept taking up space ... so ... yea team.

Fewer aircraft with shorter legs is not how you win west of Wake.

With NGAD, it appears we have listened to industry oversell the promise of AI and unmanned systems, just assuming away very real issues such as bandwidth, reach back, ROE, engineering, and loss rates - all on the promise that technology risk is for losers and other people’s PCS cycle. 

This is what is driving what looks like a NGAD cock-up; the LCS of CG(X)s.

If you read the below and don’t get the sickening feeling that the same mindset and system that begat the clown show that was CG(X) isn’t slowly enveloping NGAD, then you’re not paying attention;

“As we look at it right now, the Next-Gen Air Dominance is a family of systems, which has as its centerpiece the F/A-XX – which may or may not be manned – platform. It’s the fixed-wing portion of the Next-Gen Air Dominance family of systems,” Harris said during a Navy League breakfast event at the end of March.

“But we truly see NGAD as more than just a single aircraft. We believe that as manned-unmanned teaming comes online, we will integrate those aspects of manned and unmanned teaming into that,” he added. “Whether that – we euphemistically refer to it as our little buddy – is an adjunct air-to-air platform, an adjunct [electronic warfare] platform, discussion of could it be an adjunct advanced early warning platform. We’ll have to replace the E-2D [Advanced Hawkeye] at some point in the future, so as we look to what replaces that.”

Harris at the time said the Navy divided its work on the NGAD program into two increments – increment one will evaluate a successor for the Super Hornet fleet and increment two will determine a replacement for the EA-18G Growler. The Navy has used F/A-XX to refer to the F/A-18 E/F replacement, while NGAD refers to the whole family of systems.

Someone get hold of NGAD while there is still time.

Not much time, but there is still time.

Have we learned nothing from the F-35 program? Did we not learn anything at all about “one stop shopping?”

They are over thinking NGAD. What we need now is an aircraft with legs that can deliver a tactically significant number of strike missiles that can hold an enemy's fleet, ports, and economic infrastructure at risk from distance. Design for 2-seats. Think of a 21st Century version of the SU-34. Go heavy now, that is the requirement.

If we feel we need an "air dominance" fighter for the fleet, then design one that does that with a lesser included secondary strike capability. We can have more than one aircraft under design and production at at time. If we are still trying to make the cult of efficiency happy by designing Swiss Army knives, then we are fools.

Are we compromising the good now for the future perfect that will never come?  If so, those in charge are steering us right in to a huge crisis at 2030 where the surface community finds itself today.

We don’t have time for that. Congress has no patience with the Navy for that. 

Remember, this is the team that brought us the FORD Class CVN that cannot even launch and recover the F-35C. A ship whose elevators and electrical systems seem designed to aviation tolerances and office park sensitivities that may not make it through shock trials, and if not, be able to deploy by mid-decade.

I, and others it seems, were giving them the benefit of the doubt. We were wrong. 

Congress needs to demand transparency. We cannot end up in 2030 with nothing to replace the Super Hornet. Its replacement should already be at IOC, but we playing three-card-monte with budget numbers.

If we screw this up - then why should the US Navy ever get more money in the budget? Any more responsibility? Any amount of respect and benefit of the doubt on Capitol Hill?

The Terrible 20s are fleshing out roughly as we saw a decade ago, and we appear to be compounding the problem through wholesale institutional incompetence.

Declassify now - not because it is in our self-interest (which it is) - but because we are a republic of a free people. The people and their representatives are not subjects.

Overclassification is a symptom of a larger problem. As outlined at CSIS’s Defense360 article from DEC09 by Patrick G. Eddington, Christopher A. Preble, and Seamus P. Daniels;

The overclassification of information poses a serious problem for national security. Restricting access to information prevents timely analysis and impedes decision-making by limiting debate on key policy issues to small groups of people within the government, and it inhibits public scrutiny of classified information and the decisions made from it. While it is critical to protect sensitive sources and methods, much of the information gleaned from these sources can still be made available in declassified formats. Still other information is already, and should properly be kept, in the public domain. Secrecy is inconsistent with the fundamental principles of transparency and democratic accountability, and the perception that government officials are using it to hide their own malfeasance contributes to widespread public disillusionment.

I am not sure what Congress is waiting for. 

Take the bad news and discomfort for a few retirement eligible Flag Officers now than the trainwreck to our Navy and the national security it underwrites that will come at the end of the decade if NGAD just becomes CG(X) with flight pay.

Behold the fruit of thy priorities

If you have not read the latest on the FITZGERALD collision brought to us by ProPublica, head on over to my post at USNIBlog for the details.

Sad, yet predictable.

Short manning. Hide INSURV results. Get rid of training and readiness requirements. Strangle depot level maintenance.

What can go wrong?

UPDATE: Make sure and read their follow on article; Years of Warnings, Deaths, and Disaster. 

HASC Has Some Ideas ...

Last week the House Armed Services Committee Subcommittee for Readiness released its proposals for the Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

To keep this focused, let's just look at DON related items;

The Readiness Subcommittee's proposal: 

...

Directing the Navy to provide a clear chain of command for operations, for building readiness, and for shipyard maintenance;

Requiring the Navy’s Board of Inspection and Survey (INSURV) Inspections be conducted on a no-notice basis make details of those inspections unclassified and available to the public;

Requiring the Secretary of the Navy to provide a report on ways to optimize surface Navy vessel inspection and crew certifications to reduce redundancies and the burden on inspection visits that ships undergo;

Limiting the amount of time a Navy vessel is forward deployed overseas to no more than 10 years;

Ensuring the Navy retains sufficient ship repair capability and capacity in the Western Pacific by prohibiting the redevelopment of the Former Ship Repair Facility on Guam.

Ensure infrastructure supports military readiness by:

Recommending the Full Committee increase funds for facility sustainment above the fiscal year 2019 request;

This is, by and large, a Salamander endorsed list.

Two items:

1. The return to unclassifed INSURV. It was a huge strategic error to classify INSURV last decade. From day-1, I have been adamant that it had nothing to do with keeping classified information from anyone - it had everything to do with providing cover as we starved our fleet of the readiness support it required. You can, and I will, draw a direct line from that decision and the attitude it encouraged to what happened in WESTPAC in 2017. Keeping INSURV out of the taxpayer's eyes only prevents accountability. It shields the Flag Officers from the results of their inability to make the case to our civilian leaders to give our Navy what it needs to sustain readiness. It is way too easy to just fire CDR/CAPT without having to answer questions why they were never properly resourced to begin with.  BZ for this proposal.

2. No more lost bases. This acknowledges that once we lose a facility, we aren't getting it back. It isn't just Guam. Load a logistics professional up with a few beers and then ask them what BRAC threw away on the West Coast that we will never get back. Stand the line in Guam. Stand the line in CONUS.

Especially on our coasts, we are no longer a thinly populated nation with plenty of room to grow if needed. If you cave to developers and the myopic, you will have huge problems when the next global war comes.

Yes, its coming; we just don't know when.

Rep. Whittman (R-VA) Goes Salamander

It has been almost 9-yrs since our Navy classified its INSURV and I'm still embarrassed we did such an institutionally cowardly act.

Time has shown that we were right about why we were classifying INSURV; it was because the Navy could not handle answering questions about why our Navy was being allowed to slowly degrade. As Chap said so well at that time;

...INSURV results have to be not only unclassified but public; only embarrassment will fix some problems. Classification, especially the insidious “unclassified but special” categories we invented after 9/11, can invite overcontrol of information, improper use and worse. Special places to go look at stuff invite special tweaking. Every boat I knew at one point took the exercise equipment out of the engine room for the inspection, then put it right back in afterward…and everyone knew it, and so did the inspectors. This example is silly, not dangerous; however, there are dangerous ones out there. What are they and how do we correct them?

At last, we seem to have some top-cover on The Hill;

House Armed Services Committee members Reps. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) and Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) talked to a room of Surface Warfare officers on proposed changes in how the Navy organizes its surface force, handles maintenance and certifications of its ships and thinks and speaks about its capabilities, ... he (Whittman) noted that Board of Inspection and Survey (INSURV) reports used to be unclassified and but have been classified for almost a decade. 

“During peacetime INSURVs should be declassified, and that makes sure there’s transparency there that we know what’s going on,” Wittman said. 

“That creates, again, that direction, that focus to make sure that maintenance is being done, maintenance availabilities aren’t being missed, material readiness is being maintained. All those things are critical.” 

“All of us have to look at this as an opportunity to really do some groundbreaking things in how the surface navy operates,” Wittman said. 

“It doesn’t hurt for us to get to points where we feel a little uncomfortable – in fact, I would argue we have to get to a point where we feel uncomfortable to make sure we are exploring all the different avenues that we have to explore.”

Excellent. Now, follow through on The Hill before the Democrats take power after the 2018 elections.

Farsi Island Investigation Released

The Navy released the redacted and declassified report on the Farsi Island incident.

You can find it all over at the FOIA website, but you'll have to poke around to find it (click "Read" on the circa-1998 style page).

I've included the Executive Summary below for your review.

I do have a pullquote for you to consider as well, from the bottom of page 75 and top of page 76;

As the boats approached, some crewmembers observed a flag and eventually identified the vessels as Iranian Revolutionary Gurad Corps (IRGCN). [redacted] ordered the RCB 802 gunners to back away from their weapons so as not to appear intimidating. At the same time, [redacted] ordered the RCB 805 gunners not to chamber rounds in their weapons because he believed the approaching boats had the advantage and he did not want to escalate the situation. RCB 805's Coxswain attempted to maneuver between the boats and RCB 802, but could not block both IRGCN patrol craft at the same time. Many crewmembers believed, contrary to their pre-deployment training and the CJCS Standing Rules of Engagement that they could not engage in serlf-defense unless the Iranians fired first.
...
As RCB 802 attempted to accelerate, the two Iranian boats maneuvered into its path and pointed their weapons at the crew; [redacted] directed RCB 805 to "go, go, go" via bridge-to-bridge radio. [redacted], seeing the Iranians charge their weapons and point them at RCB 802 crewmembers, refused to move RCB 802. [redacted] reinforced the need to move, but [redacted] refused, believing that he would have gotten a fellow crewmember shot. He later characterized the exchange as "this dumb conversation with [redacted] about how I am not going to drive."

I highly encourage everyone to read this. There is a lot to rage about from a leadership, seamanship, training, maintenance, and crew planning perspectives, but I'm not going to do that. I don't need to - and here is when things get positive.

I don't need to because the report does so for me. This is a good report. Open and clear eyed, and at my first reading in line with how things should be done. It is the only way we learn from these things, and it says a lot about the best parts of our service culture that we have this out in the open for all.

Read it. Learn from it. Be glad you serve in a navy that would publish this.

Executive Summary Declass w Lter_stamp Redacted by CDR Salamander

Now, let's revisit the decision a few years ago to classify INSURV so I wouldn't blog about them ....

Waking up from the waking up of history

Take a deep breath ... because some of you - MTH call your office - are going to be upset. Join me in a little bit of bone picking with the CNO.

I first got wind of something that made me nod with approval in the latest Armed Forces Journal;

... the service is embracing — or re-embracing — the Cold War-era discipline known as emissions control.

In a recent exercise, for example, the crew of the aircraft carrier Nimitz practiced turning off all its trackable emissions, from radars and navigation systems to computers and even Wi-Fi. What initially took an hour eventually took just three minutes.

It’s a skill once employed against the Soviet Navy, then left to atrophy. Now it is being championed by Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations. “What our potential adversaries are bringing in, more than anything else, is something that finds and tracks a radar,” Greenert told attendees at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space convention. “If you control your own emissions, you control the future of warfare.”

Maybe, maybe not. But resurrecting EMCON is a good step.

No kidding. EMCON is one of those things in the last decade and a half we got overconfident on; lazy and sloppy - so it is outstanding news that we are making an effort to, sigh, re-invent the wheel. Wheels are good. It looks like we are going to re-learn EMCON. Good; BZ to all and trophies for everyone.

My second thought was what happened to "those guys" who used to give us a good "EMCON Audit," for the lack of a better description, to let us know if we are REALLY conducting EMCON?  I hope we fully utilized those guys, otherwise we are just doing the EMCON equivalent of writing our own FITREP. All those bluetooth devices and such .... good though, very good start.

Then I found the speech the above quote came from; the CNO's speech at the Sea Air Space Lunch on 08 April 2013.

Like all well mentored Evangelicals, when someone quotes you a Chapter and Verse, make sure and go to the original text and read then 10 Verses before and after so you can get the proper context.

Well, that is when Tigger became Eeyore again. The quote;

But you’ve got to change the mindset. The kids have got to understand the
significance of it because we haven’t really looked at this for well, generations. So many of them sort of understand it. If they’re a cyber warrior they get it big time. But the day - to - day people out at sea, we really haven’t laid that out for them. They don’t understand the idea of real EM hygiene.

They know cyber hygiene now. They know how to put a thumb drive in, at least many of them do, and insert their own virus. But similarly, we’ve got to understand you don’t just turn stuff on. You just don’t start radiating, rotating and radiating.

When I get the intel summaries today and they find out somebody’s got a new whatever, by far what our potential adversaries are bringing in, more than anything else, is some [inaudible] finds and tracks a radar or something that provides a seeker, is a seeker that is outside our frequency band, low probability of intercept, something that we just [inaudible], we don’t have there.
It’s not a new boom as much. It’s in a whole new realm. That’s kind of where a lot of our potential adversaries are going.

You go to school today. If you’re going to study Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, you’re going to employ it on a ship. Forty weeks. Today if you go to school, we send our kids to school, and you’re going to look at what’s called a SLQ-32 which is our electronic warfare main piece of gear, to a two week school. So we’ve got to get kind of the mindset changed out there and see what we think about it.

No, no, no, and damblit, no!

1. Stop calling young Sailors "kids." These are men and women, all Sailors. Don't sound so bloody patronizing to those who put their lives on the line every day, and tomorrow you may order to kill and be killed, it is disrespectful.

2. It hasn't been "generations" it has been singular - "Generation." We stopped taking EMCON seriously when I was a mid-grade LT, the mid-1990s. If you consider that a generation takes leadership control when they are at roughly the 30-yr of service mark; that would be the earliest cohort who started service in 1965. That would be ... yes; the Baby Boomer generation.  Funny, for a generation that spent the balance of their career in the Cold War, one would think they would cling to EMCON - but oh well, I guess they were going to try to transform out of that hard work. Let's see, Gen-X hits the 30-yr mark in about three years .... 'Nuff said.

3. It isn't that "the kids" don't "understand" EM hygiene - it is that their leadership has not made it a priority and trained them on it. If you fail INSURV, you don't say, "The kids just don't understand PMS .... " Really. Don't blame the younger generation - they are fine - it is the leadership's priority for the last couple of decades that is the issue.

4. So, intel is reminding us that our potential enemies are learning institutions that won't just sit there and let us kill them? You mean they won't grant us supremacy in all warfare areas? How is that fair? Really? What great insight; that must rate a warfare pin or something.

5. TLAM school takes as much time as from Pearl Harbor to the Battle of Henderson Field? Ummmm .... which one is that again? 40-weeks? Really?  As for the SLQ-32 at 2-weeks; I'm OK with that. If you don't like the product - revamp the curricula. BTW, SLQ-32 has been around since the 1960s and the program to replace it was started in the 1990s, I think. I'm not sure how many cancels and restarts we are on this, but SLQ-32 will be around awhile longer methinks. 

I'm sorry, but I'm in a nit-picking mood. If this wasn't the CNO - the most senior uniformed officer in the Navy - and from a navy.mil URL, then perhaps it wouldn't bother me; but .... who is approving the transcripts from the CNO?

So years and year ago, the Cold War, we actually had our mission control down pat. That’s a picture of the America in a fjord, way back in the ‘70s, early ’80s, where we snuck this thing upunder [MCON] and parked her up there. We measured very closely if anybody knew that ship was being followed of [inaudible], if anybody could track this thing, and we found that they couldn’t. We were pretty good at [MCON] and we’ve gone away from it. Now we need to get back.

So recently we took the Nimitz and we said okay, we’re going to, in an exercise called Valiant Shield. We said we want you to turn all of your [EN] stuff off. So they said, in [inaudible] condition and whatever. It took over an hour to get everything turned off. You turn the big stuff off, and it starts coming down, and somebody’s going what the hell is that? Somebody turn that off. What is that? It’s anything from WiFis to computers to you name it that we’re pulling out there.

Hey, I love what they did for VALIANT SHIELD, and I hope they do it as a normal part of workups - but can we first of all take care of something a 1943 WAVE YN3 would never let cross her desk?

Sub-par Staff work people. It is EMCON not MCON. Never say your boss is [inaudible], that is just rude. Talk to the Staff, they'll tell you what he meant. If this is what we do for our top officer, what are we doing for lesser mortals? Very bad messaging.

Oh, speaking of EMCON and aircraft carriers - we've got EMALS all patched up now? How about with rail guns in the future?

With a red hat; targeting with nothing but EW ... a little sporty, but very effective.

EMCON is back? Good - so is tracking ballistic missile submarines in open ocean. If you need some pointers on that, drop me a line.

---

UPDATE: More fail over at SB if you need additional facepalm to get your week started off right.

Your New INSURV ...

Though I would like them to be UNCLAS again - overall, the Salamander nods in approval.

The president of the Board of Inspection and Survey (INSURV) rolled out major changes to the frequency and grading method of the INSURV program effective Jan. 1, 2013.

INSURV President Rear Adm. Robert Wray said changes to the frequency of the inspections and the grading system were implemented to improve the readiness of Navy ships and crews and to provide Navy and congressional leaders with an accurate reflection of that readiness.

Under the old program, INSURV teams conducted exhaustive inspections and surveys of ships every five years and reported their material readiness to Congress. Now ships will be inspected about every 30 months.

Under the new inspection timeline, INSURV inspectors will conduct a traditional "Material Inspection" during a unit's Fleet Readiness Plan cycle. In the alternating cycle, a similar inspection will be conducted by the unit's type commander with INSURV support.

"The major change for the average sailor will be twofold," Wray said. "First, each ship, prior to each deployment, will have a full-blown material inspection in which the ship will be expected to get under way, do full power, anchor, shoot guns, operate combat systems, etc., for a team of external inspectors. Second, ships will be expected to do this on their own, without months of external preparation and assistance."

While twice as many inspections may sound like a bad thing, Wray stressed that the new process will benefit the sailors who have to prepare the ship for INSURV.

"We want the pre-deployment material inspection to be a normal part of doing business, like the Composite Training Unit Exercise (COMPTUEX), something ships know how to do on their own," he said. "In a larger sense, we want to create a 'culture of material readiness' in which ships and their crews are always thinking about being ready for INSURV. The concept is to create a culture for material readiness, in which any ship, at any time in the appropriate part of the FRP, could successfully shoot their guns, do full-power runs, anchor, and demonstrate her combat systems."

Hat tip H2.

GAO to the Navy: Child Please!

A lot ... and I mean A LOT of you are rightly focused on the latest GAO report; Navy Needs to Assess Risks to Its Strategy to Improve Ship Readiness. I think I might have a little revolt on the front porch if I don't post on it; so here we go.

It is important reading that will enlighten some, and drive others to distraction. Put me in the second category as it puts out there what many of us have been writing about for over half a decade. None. Of. This. Should. Be. A. Shock. It. Was. Predictable. By. Any. Honest. Objective. Overview. Of. The. Direction. Our. Leadership. Was. Taking. Us.

In 2010, a Navy report found that the material readiness of its surface force had declined over the previous ten years and was well below the levels necessary to support reliable, sustained operations at sea and achieve expected ship service lives. Among other things, the report found that the declines in material readiness were attributable to reductions in the number of assessments and inspections, deferrals of scheduled maintenance, and reductions in the length of major repair periods from 15 to 9 weeks.

Good stuff here for review. You know that little buggabear about technology risk we were yammer'n about WRT LCS, DDG-1000 and others? Well, that is just part of a larger problem we have in talking about and mitigating risk. A culture steeped in happy-talk does just that - avoids talking about risk. This is a cultural problem.

... the Navy has not undertaken a comprehensive assessment of risks to the implementation of its strategy, nor has it developed alternatives to mitigate its risks.

Yes, and next time will you PLEASE at least have a link to CDRSalamander in the footnotes? One note of caution;

From 2010 to March 2012, INSURV data indicated a slight improvement in the material readiness of the surface combatant and amphibious warfare fleet, but over that period casualty reports from the ships increased, which would indicate a decline in material readiness.

This can also be read that improvements are the RESULT of more CASREPS, but it can also be the fact that we are running ships hard and have fewer people in ship's company that can fix things themselves; maybe both?

Read it all.

CBO on 2013 Shipbuilding Plan: Snort, Giggle, Harumph

Our friends at the Congressional Budget Office have done it again.

Their analysis of the Navy's shipbuilding plan came out this week. You can get your copy here, or read at the bottom of the post.

You need to read it all, there is a lot here - but here is what I found the most interesting at second reading.

They lay it all out in the summary; we have garbage in and garbage out. Once you read the cold, hard, facts given by the CBO and then look at DoN's numbers, it almost seems like the two organizations are living in parallel universes.

We'll get to the numbers in a bit - but one thing that kept coming to mind as CBO sliced off each of its thousand cuts was that the Navy continues to be undermined by the intellectual cancer of happy-talk and best-case COAs/CONOPS, leavened by the intellectual terrarium that is the Beltway.

As a result, we prevent ourselves from even starting an informed discussion by intentionally injecting inaccurate, ahistorical, and deeply flawed assumptions in to our entering arguments. We do this over and over, yet wonder why we have so little credibility. Over promise and under deliver is no way to run a business.

Anyway .... let's go!

The latest plan—submitted to the Congress in late March 2012 and covering fiscal years 2013 to 2042—contains some significant changes in the Navy’s long-term goals for shipbuilding. In particular, the Navy’s latest plan would:
- Reduce the goal for the inventory of ships,
- Reduce the number of ships to be purchased, and
- Alter the composition of ships to be purchased, buying fewer less-expensive support ships and more high-end combat ships.

The total costs of carrying out the 2013 plan—an average of about $22 billion per
year in 2012 dollars over the next 30 years—would be much higher than the funding
amounts that the Navy has received in recent years and higher than the costs for the
2012 plan, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates.

Out of the block, CBO puts USN on report; "Your numbers are bogus."

Remember since the end of last decade the discussions we've had about the funky numbers? Well it hasn't gotten any better and in may ways if drifting further from reality.

The Navy assumes that most of its destroyers will serve for 40 years. In the past, the Navy’s large surface combatants have typically served for 30 years or less. If the destroyers serve for only 35 or 30 years, the shortfall in large surface combatants could be more than twice as large as projected under the Navy’s plan, unless more ships were purchased.
...
The assumptions about the service life of large surface combatants remain the same
under the 2013 plan. The 2012 plan assumed that all Arleigh Burke class destroyers
commissioned after 2000 would have a service life of 40 years; earlier versions of the
ship would remain in the fleet for 35 years.
...
The Navy assumed it would keep its LHD class amphibious assault ships for 43 to 45 years (up from 40 years under the 2012 plan).

Have we shown any success in either INSURV or OPTEMPO that leads us to believe that we will be able to make these ships last that long in an economic manner? No. So ...

Speaking of ignoring present facts and creating your own,

CBO accounted for the fact that costs of labor and materials have traditionally grown faster in the shipbuilding industry than in the economy as a whole, whereas the Navy does not appear to have done so; that factor produces a widening gap between the estimates over time.
...
If the Navy receives the same amount of funding for new-ship construction in each of
the next 30 years as it has on average over the past three decades—$14.3 billion
annually—it will not be able to afford all of the purchases in the 2013 plan.

Given the budgetary crisis that is only starting, does anyone here think that the USN will be able to keep shipbuilding at steady-state? Ask the Royal Navy.

Looking for Fords out in the parking lot?

The number of support ships was lowered from 45 to approximately 33. Specifically,

the planned number of joint high-speed vessels (JHSVs)—small, fast ferries for transporting small numbers of personnel or equipment within a theater of operations was reduced from 21 to 10 ships.
...
Altogether, the Navy would buy almost the same number of ships over 30 years
under the 2013 plan as it would have bought under the previous plan.11 However, the
composition of ship purchases—particularly the mix of combat ships and logistics and support vessels—is quite different under the 2012 and 2013 plans.

No. Ferraris it will be then.

Wait ... there is a little goodness here we should smile about. I wish it were earlier, but take what you can get.

Unlike the Navy’s 2012 plan, the 2013 plan also included the purchase of replacements for its 2 command ships in the early 2030s. Those ships are scheduled to retire in 2039.

Whoever made that happen, send me an email - I owe you a beer.

Back to the green eye-shade:

The full annual cost of the 2013 shipbuilding plan, in CBO’s estimation, would average $21.9 billion over the 2013–2042 period—about 17 percent more than the Navy’s estimate of $18.8 billion and about 37 percent more than the average funding the Navy has received in the past three decades.

With this budgetary head wind, really?

Like your humble blogg'r, CBO likes to repeat the very important items. NB:

In addition to the ship purchases, a critical element of the Navy’s plan to achieve its projected inventory levels is the assumption that all DDG-51 Flight IIA and subsequent destroyers would serve in the fleet for 40 years. The class was originally designed to serve for 30 years, but the Navy has subsequently increased the planned service life first to 35 years and then, for Flight IIA ships and beyond, to 40 years in the 2009 shipbuilding plan. Historically, 12 of the last 13 classes of destroyers and cruisers were retired after having served 30 years or less, and many ships (including, in recent years, Spruance class destroyers and some Ticonderoga class cruisers) have been retired after 25 years of service or less (the only exception was the CGN-9 Long Beach, a class of one). The Navy retired those ships because they reached the end of their service life, because they became too expensive to maintain in the waning years of their service life, or because improving their combat capabilities to meet existing threats was not cost- effective.20 If the DDG-51 class met the same fate, the shortfall in meeting the Navy’s inventory goal for destroyers and cruisers would grow substantially (see Figure 7, which illustrates the effect on the force level for large surface combatants if the service life of those ships is only 35 or 30 years and the Navy does not increase the number of such ships it plans to purchase).

I'm sorry - but all this does is set up future leaders for failure in order to make your own PCS cycle easier. Ungh. Is that what you worked so hard to be promoted for? Really?

Of course - no post like this would be complete with out the required Salamander swipe at the Little Crappy Ship.

CBO estimates the average per-ship cost of the 43 LCSs in the plan at about $500 million.

Of course, that does not count all the Mission Module and logistic/enabling etc in order to make it actually anything more than a helo pad with a 57mm and smaller caliber weapons.

The Navy would also buy 27 next-generation littoral combat ships—called LCS(X)s—
beginning in 2030.

Hey - I have an idea; let's call them "frigates."

Oh, we don't need frigates, right? Really ... then why is LCS defined on page 29 as,

More routinely, they will also patrol sea lanes, provide an overseas presence, and conduct exercises with allies.

Ummm .... that's a frigate.

Words are nice, but I really like the graphs and numbers starting on page 31. As I like to toot my own horn more than anything else and to beat home my cute little catch phrases - you know our "Terrible 20s" that I keep bringing up? Well- here it is in a picture. No further discussion needed on my part.

Somethings got to give - and will have to give. Pick your poison.

At the beginning of the post I made a comment about over-promising and under-performing. This is how CBO puts it.

An important factor affecting the Navy’s and the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) estimates is assumptions about future increases in the cost of building naval ships. The Department of Defense (DoD) has an overall estimate of future inflation (known as an inflator) that it uses to project increases in the costs of its procurement programs. However, according to the Navy, DoD’s inflator is lower than the actual inflation that occurred in the naval shipbuilding industry in the past decade.

Again - you need a picture.

I, ahem, know the Navy sends officers off to get their PhD in Economics - aren't we getting their input on our planning? On the team? I hope? Maybe they were told to shut up and color or their slides went in to backup? Harumph.

Well - on the official Navy blog at least we are firing back at the CBO. About as accurate as Admiral Nebogatov's 3rd Division at the Battle of Tsushima - but firing we are;

Based on a report issued by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), there has been media reporting and discussion about the cost estimating methodology used by the Navy to forecast over the 30-year shipbuilding plan.
The Navy’s 30-year plan assesses DoN investments in battle force ships in three 10-year periods, called near, mid, and far-term. The near-term 10-year period (FY13-FY22) comprises the FY13-FY17 Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) and the next FYDP. The mid-term planning period covers the two FYDPs between FY23-FY32, and the far-term planning period covers the two FYDPs between FY33-FY42. Confidence in cost estimates over these time periods inevitably declines over time. Unsurprisingly, then, the difference in Navy and CBO forecasts for new ship construction increases over time. Depending on the costs being considered, CBO’s numbers are 9-11 percent higher in the near-term planning period, 11-13 percent higher in the mid-term planning period, and 30-33 percent in the far-term.
The Navy’s confidence in our cost estimates in the FYDP (i.e, the current budget window) is extremely high.

Yes, as high as our "all children are above average" self-esteem, I am sure. I just wish the response was as fact based as the CBOs. Too much feeling, hoping, believing, and not enough knowing.

Sigh. That is what I got out of it. Over to you!

---

UPDATE: Undersecretary of the Navy Bob Work offers up a long response in comments that is worth the read.

Power vs. Stewardship

Packed away in one of my boxes is a speech I outlined back in 2004. It was concerning a concept, a word, that with the last few generations we seem to have forgotten about.

This forgetfulness manifests itself in different ways and in different degrees throughout history’s path. This isn't the first time - but in our living memory it is acute.

It was on a word that is both a concept and a worldview; stewardship. I can’t find my outlined speech, but I was reminded of it Friday when I read this line from David Brooks article, Why Our Elites Stink:

… today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the … old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership. The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. … they … believe(d) in restraint, reticence and service.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous).

Stewardship in question is defined as;

stew·ard·ship
noun
\ˈstü-ərd-ˌship, ˈstyü-; ˈst(y)u̇rd-\
...
2: the conducting, supervising, or managing of something; especially : the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care

Stewardship in practice is something more, something deeper. Stewardship is more often than not a hidden thing, an undercurrent.

A person or an organization who practices good stewardship often does so without being noticed by those looking for the "flash" for the squirrel that is all so interesting. Stewardship isn’t flashy, it isn’t zippy, it isn’t apparent – it just is. Good stewardship is, “what it should be.” One does not see it, as it is expected.

Many failings we see, from painting over rust, to selecting the best case scenario to plan from, to having a command climate that only allows concurrence – all derive from a desire to have the appearance of stewardship, but to not suffer the effort of actually practicing it. It is easier to paint than to do preservation. It is easier to ignore risk than to mitigate it. It is easier to say “yes” and let someone else’s PCS cycle clean up, than say “no” and work towards a better solution for others to enjoy.

That is the difference between being inwardly focused towards self, vice outwardly focused towards the institution. It is the difference between a love of the narcissism of now, vice the respect of the legacy of stewardship.

Where is our focus, and what is the focus of our Commands? Do we have the personnel, funds, and time to properly take care of our equipment – or do we simply slap some paint on it? Are all the spaces well taken care of – or only those that will be seen immediately? Do we have our ships in the best condition for the stage of the cycle they are in, or do we have “Tiger Teams” that rush to get things INSURV ready? Are we in an organization that never wants to CASREP an important item, or one that CASREPS now to make sure those in the future are ready? “Now” doesn’t, as that might imply up the chain of command something negative. “Stewardship” does as they know that it is the future that matters, not the now.

Here and at Midrats, we’ve discussed the General Board and the successful programs of the past. Is a General Board part of a culture of stewardship? Would a new General Board be the answer to the system that brought us the parade of program horrors of the last decade? Perhaps, it all depends though on who is on the board, what their charter is, and what the focus is of the individuals and the board.

Regardless if we have a new General Board or the system we have now, it isn’t the name that is so important, but the mindset of the individuals who make it up. If we have people who are directly or indirectly ear-deep in the food-trough, we will have no improvement. If we have people who continue to promote the plague of buzzwords, repackaged concepts, and a historically ignorant transformationalist mentality, we will have no improvement.

The intellectual adhesions we have accrued over the last few decades must be broken. Just taking the next group off the established conveyor belt that gave us everything else will not get different results.

Let’s get back to Brook’s article. Where is the sense of an ethos of stewardship in some of our decisions? In the 1990s – was a culture of stewardship responsible for the half-baked JFK yard period? Was it stewardship that in both name and concept ignored decades of history in the development of LCS? Was it stewardship that allowed LPD-17 & DDG-1000 cost to saddle future budgets?

What was it then that brought these and others? What is the underlying intellectual basis of our decision making processes? Are our leaders focused on building a legacy for themselves, or for those who follow?

William F. Buckley had a phrase,

“I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

He knew his "elites." What about our elites?

What results, priorities, and D&G would you get by pulling the first 40 officers coming through the gate a Norfolk? Would their decisions have been any better or worse than those of the last decade and a half?

Why?