LUSV is Looking Like a Mating of Jeffboats and Auxillary Cruisers

Our friend David Larter may have to report this straight, but I am under no such requirement. 

Get the waffle-paddle out - time to take the Large Unmanned Surface Vessel (LUSV) to task.

Unchallenged dreams, accountants, and yes men - these are what get us, to be blunt, shitty programs. Throw in a bit of careerism and greed with a few other human weaknesses ... and you get a fleet - just not one worth a damn in war.

As the U.S. Navy pushes forward with developing its large unmanned surface vessel, envisioned as a kind of external missile magazine that will tag along with larger manned surface combatants, a growing consensus is forming that the service needs to get its requirements and systems right before making a big investment.

In other words, sober minds have reached the point they can't dismiss the neo-transformationalist money pit otherwise smart people are pushing. Good.

“The approach has to be deliberate,” Gilday said. “We have to make sure that the systems that are on those unmanned systems with respect to the [hull, mechanical and electrical system], that they are designed to requirement, and perform to requirement. And most importantly, are those requirements sound?

That is the polite way for the CNO to say, "You know that fiasco that was LCS and DDG-1000? We need to at least pretend that we learned something from that living nightmare."

“What I’ve found is that we didn’t necessarily have the rigor that’s required across a number of programs that would bring those together in a way that’s driven toward objectives with milestones,” Gilday told Defense News.

AKA, people were believing the PPT and industry/consultant spin and fever dreams.

“The Navy wants LUSVs to be low-cost, high-endurance, reconfigurable ships based on commercial ship designs, with ample capacity for carrying various modular payloads — particularly anti-surface warfare (ASuW) and strike payloads, meaning principally anti-ship and land-attack missiles,” the report read.

The Navy also wants a pony for its birthday.

“One of the biggest challenges people are realizing now is the machinery systems and keeping the systems operational for six months [over a deployment],” Collette said. “If you think about a ship today, there are daily machinery rounds and constant preventative maintenance. The Navy has its casualty reporting system, and the commercial world has something very similar. And over six months, that’s a lot of work that’s not getting done on the autonomous ship.

This challenge, the merchant one, is actually the easiest to overcome. For the military, you have legal, piracy, connectivity, damage control and AI maturity that are the harder nuts to crack.

“But the other approach is to try and monitor it and put in a lot of redundancy and figure out how we get this system reimagined so it can do a six-month deployment. And I can’t really assess where we are with that at this point, I just don’t have enough insight to know if that’s six months away. Is it six years? Is it never reachable?”

Another polite way of saying, "Calm down people. This is about as ready for prime time as a 1950s Popular Mechanics article on the future military."

...jumping toward something like large unmanned surface vessel, is a big, big step with a lot of risk.”

This last quote gives me hope. I think we have in some quarters at least, hoisted aboard the hard lessons of the Age of Transformationalism. We need to maintain a humble view of what we can accomplish, re-embrace the "build a little, test a little, learn a lot" approach to weapons development and to keep a weather eye out for squishy salesmen pushing snake oil dripping PPT programs.

Communism Kills; Estonia Remembers

Few things disgust me more than American liberals' popular front with the hard left. There can be no justification, no excuse, no desire for power great enough to allow those who outright supported or made common cause with communists. The only former communists who should be allowed in proper company are those who have publicly renounced their former associations and are actively - in word and deed - opposing them.

Communists are in the same fetid bucket as Nazis and should be treated with equal contempt. History is the collective memory. This is especially true for those who know what socialism with communist members leads to. My small but plucky friends the Estonians are some of the best at this.   

BZ to the Estonians;

The Estonian Institute of Historical Memory has launched a portal that provides information on the history of communist regimes and their crimes; the portal is published in Estonian, English and Russian. The aim of the portal, called Communist Crimes, is to deepen the understanding of the history of communist regimes on an international level and to hinder the activities of “red terror” deniers, the institute said in a statement. “The portal is unique as it consolidates the communist experience of 45 modern countries into a single database. The portal is continually updated with fresh material,” the institute said. Giving a voice to millions of victims and their loved ones “According to various estimates, approximately 90 million people around the world have perished due to communist experiments in the 20th century,” Sergei Metlev, the institute’s spokesperson, said. 

“Throughout history, the disciples of this ideology have adorned themselves with pleasant-sounding slogans about a happy future, while destroying entire nations and social groups as well as depriving their citizens of basic human rights in order to reach the leaders’ communist utopia.”

Is that clear enough? If you ever find yourself in wonderful Estonia, Please give yourself at least two days in Tallinn. Just a beautiful city with great people. Make sure while you visit Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom. I took the long tour with the wife and kids a decade ago. Our guide was deported twice; once as a young kid after WWII and again in the late 1980s.

Summer of Our Discontent Midrats Melee

In our COVID-19 summer doldrums, what could be better than kicking back with a nice cold drink with the kings of natsec social distancing, Sal & EagleOne for a live Midrats free-for-all? 

Come join us this Sunday from 5-6pm as we cover the waterfront from Sand Diego to DC; the Taiwan Strait to Cypriot gas fields. 

No guests this week, and no specific topics - so this is your time to drive the discussion if you are so inclined.

As with all melees, we'll take questions in the chat room or on the phone.

You can listen to the show at this link or below, but remember, if you don't already, subscribe to the podcast at Spreaker or any of the other podcast aggregators.

If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here.

Fullbore Friday

 

So, what did you do after high school? How long have you had to wait for your full story to be understood? I offer to you Teddy Sheean;

On December 1, 1942, Sheean was a gunner's mate on the corvette HMAS Armidale, when it came under attack during an operation near Japanese-occupied Timor, now the country of Timor-Leste across the Timor Sea from the Australian city of Darwin. ... ...Japanese warplanes swooped in on the Armidale. The Australian corvette was hit by two torpedoes launched by the Japanese planes and quickly began to sink, according to the AWM. An order was given to abandon ship. "Sheean was wounded and, rather than abandon ship, he strapped himself to his Oerlikon (anti-aircraft gun) and began to engage the attacking aircraft even as the ship sunk beneath him. He shot down two planes, and crewmates recall seeing tracer rising from beneath the surface as Sheean was dragged under the water, firing until the end," the AWM says. There were 149 sailors aboard the Australian ship. Forty-nine survived and were plucked from the Timor Sea a week after the sinking. Each likely owed his life to the 18-year-old gunner's mate, according to an expert panel established in June of this year to adjudge Sheean's case.

Eventually, all gets settled.

...on Wednesday, almost 78 years after the then 18-year-old sailor provided cover for his comrades to escape the Japanese planes overhead, Sheean was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, the British Commonwealth's highest honor for military valor.

The distance they fought from Darwin is about the same distance as from Norfolk, VA to Boston, MA. 

Of note, Teddy's ship, HMAS Armidale, was commissioned a little under 6-months when she went down. 

Total war at sea demands and consumes at rates our modern minds have trouble grasping.

France Returns Contra Ottoman Aggression ... I mean Turkish

As I've been saying a lot recently, history is sticky.

France has been an on an off - mostly on - power in the Levant for a thousand years when the Crusades first started the push-back against Islamic imperialism. The Ottomans and Persians even referred to the Crusaders not as Crusaders, but as "Franks," and the Christian West as "Land of the Franks" ... or Frangistan. 

That may help those new to the topic why the French President Macron was received so warmly in Beirut after the bombing. Many in the Levant - especially the Christian minority - look to the former modern colonial power France vs. The Ottomans as modern Estonians think of Sweden vs. Russia. Part of an empire, yes, but a stable and relatively humane empire.

As a cornerstone of this blog is that the USA should not be the primary power everywhere especially where issues are clearly in an ally's sphere of influence, we greatly welcome France pushing forward, and we should support her efforts.

I especially believe we should with the latest French presence operations in the Eastern Mediterranean - standing next to the Greeks/Cypriots vs. the Ottomans ... I mean Turks; 

France has deployed two Rafale fighter jets to Greek-Cyprus and a frigate to nearby waters. President Emmanuel Macron's intent is to deter Turkey from starting a conflict with Greece. It hasn't garnered much attention in the United States, but the risk of a Greece-Turkey conflict is growing rapidly.

The heart of the problem is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's deployment of an energy survey vessel and naval escorts into Greece's exclusive economic zone. In response, Greece has deployed its own navy to the area. Tensions are high and rising quickly. Unconfirmed reports suggest that Turkey has started flying armed drones over the Greek island of Rhodes and that a Turkish naval vessel may have damaged a Greek vessel during a collision on Thursday. Apparently referencing that collision, Erdogan proclaimed, "We said that if you attack our [survey vessel], you will pay a high price, and [the Greeks] got their first answer today."

Endorsed. 

I hope other European nations should support the French play, and in a very background role, us as well.

I would like to end today's post with a repeat of my regular call; USA nukes out of Turkey; Turkey out of NATO. 

The Millington Diktat is Immortal

I don't like the rigid and stifling officer career paths the Big Navy forces on everyone ... but it is a big organization with big responsibilities and like it or not ... people are numbers.

An interesting RAND report came out that review what many of you already know - but it is interesting to see someone has done the math.

Head on over to USNIBlog to see some more of my comments and links to the report.

Just close your eyes and think of England, as the phrase goes. 

Michèle Flournoy's Neo-Rumsfeldism

For most of the last decade, I have heard nothing but good things about Michèle Flournoy. Indeed, she's been making appearances on this blog since 2008. 

The fact she's been soaking in national security issues for decades and is highly respected is a given - but this article by Aarn Mehta gives me great pause. 

As I read this, I was reminded that it was twenty years ago that the greatest advocate for Transformationalism came in to power and drove it through the Navy and other services; Donald Rumsfeld. He meant well (and for the record I am a fan of a man as imperfect as I am), but the ideas he proposed - well known to readers here - threw away decades of evolutionary progress in weapons development, assumed risk away, and acted that just by saying it - things would happen. Transformationalism is attractive; an almost religious belief in the power of technology; an amost mystical attraction to the syren song of the well briefed "cusp of being operational" PPT brief; an impatience with the plodding, slow, and tedious work of building billion dollar systems in an effective manner.  

Let's review why I'm concerned; we've seen this movie before:

The next U.S. defense secretary must be prepared to invest heavily in game-changing technology, even if it comes at the cost of existing capabilities

Why are we not a learning institution?

“I think there’s, sort of, two parallel efforts that have to happen. One is investments that may take a decade to be fully realized and integrated into the force. Another is the question of, what can we do in the next five years with what we have, but use it differently,” she explained.

This is true, but has always been true. If Flournoy just stayed here ... she'd be a world winner ... but no:

“Defense budgets are probably going to flatten in the coming years, no matter who wins the election,” Flournoy said. “That means you have to make trade-offs and you have to make hard decisions, which means you probably need to buy fewer legacy forces in order to invest in the technologies that will actually make the force that you keep more relevant, more survivable, more combat effective, and better able to underwrite deterrence.”

What a cancerous idea to keep injecting in to our veins. This is exactly what had us sinking SPRUANCE Class destroyers and PERRY Class frigates with years to a decade of usable service ahead of them for the promise of LCS that still has not been fulfilled. It is what had us clunkingly restart DDG-51 production when we no longer could lie our way out of DDG-1000's failure anymore. What has our TICONDEROGA CG limping in to their dotage without effective replacement.

...there is a “whole laundry list” of future technologies on which to make big bets, Flournoy highlighted two she considers particularly important. The first is a “network of networks” for secure communications as well as command and control that can survive an attack from any domain — space, air, naval, land and cyberspace — that China could seek to use.

If we hedge everything to "Network Centric Warfare" we will first be made blind and mute. Then we will find ourselves lost and impotent. Then we will be killed.

In a peer war, we will not have unobstructed access to the electromagnetic spectrum and satellite vox/data. If everything rides on the assumption we do, we will lose. 

“We need a command-and-control system that is powered by artificial intelligence to enable that kind of resilience in a much more contested environment,” Flournoy explained.

Oh, hell no!

Who briefed her on this?  Does she have a handle on the very real problem with AI as it stands right now? How about the intersection of the ethical and legal issues with "AI" making C2 decisions? 

Next ... well ... I can't be the only one who sees this?

“China has created a set of threat rings that are very, very lethal places for U.S. forces to go,”

Yes, yes China has ... and how has she done this? With a steady building in number and quality an evolutionary force based on proven "legacy" systems that - while we were dreaming of Tomorrowland - made the American Lake that was WESTPAC in to a prickly and poisonous place. 

With the fruits of the previous Age of Transformationalism fading in to the mist to nothing - we are stuck with under-resourced and maintained Cold War systems and units that check a number box but are combat ineffective in almost peer conflict scenario.

Yes, we need make trade offs, but for at least the next half decade they need to be made in favor of repairing and reconditioning that which we neglected for the last two decades, starting with maintenance, manpower, and training. 

 “Sometimes when the department is trying to make those trade-offs to move money from one program to another, if they don’t do a good job explaining that to Congress they sort of get the hand from Congress,” Flournoy said.

If I were in Congress and someone brought that patronizing shinola to my committee room, it would be a nasty, brutish, and short hearing. 

No, when you over-promise, under-deliver and tell clear falsehoods year after year, an institution loses its institutional credibility and had no institutional capital left to demand anything from Congress but its guidance. 

Here is the baseline;

We are still suffering from the (to some) expected backwash from the Age of Transformationalism; the lost opportunity cost for things we can use now spent on futuristic promises that never came in to being; a denuded depot level maintenance infrastructure; a force equipped with sub-optimal equipment no one can use, upgrade, or can ergonomically work in the operational environment; a manning CONOP that looks at people as a problem, not an asset - something that can be burned out in perfect synchronicity with an exquisitely crafted schedule from the banks of the Potomac. You know the drill. 

We do not need a Rumsfeld II: Electric Boogaloo. We need a humble, hard working, clear eyed leader with an eye on the future, but ensuring they have the forces they need to fight 1QFY21, not just FY35. We need someone who is brutally honest with The Pentagon and the larger Military Industrial Complex about how they have fooled, hoodwinked, and bamboozled other appointees - but not this one. 

We need a SECDEF Lombardi, a Secretary No, someone who will not have us waste another generation's billions of dollars on things that fluff up balance sheets, but fail to make a shadow on the ramp, displace water, or give the infantry an extra hour of fight. 

Whoever wins in November, whoever is the next SECDEF ... may none of them take us back to the 00s. No more failed wars; no more failed transformations.