I was interested to read that Russia has just canceled what's been called its version of the American Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program, the Project 20386 or Derzky class corvette design. Strategy Page reports:
The Derzky turned out to be more expensive to develop and build than anticipated. The original service date for the Derzky was 2025, but as the problems piled up that date was pushed farther in the future while the costs for each of these Corvettes kept climbing. There were attempts to control and reduce the costs. This proved impractical and when the Derzky-class was canceled the lead ship was ordered to be completed as cheaply as possible, which meant removing many of the features that made the Derzky unique, expensive and difficult to build.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia has had problems dealing with ambitious new ship designs that were too expensive and complex to complete. Even with access to Western tech after 1991, Russian shipbuilders didn’t have the facilities or skilled workers to build the Western-style warships the navy wanted. The Derzky is one of several overly ambitious shipbuilding efforts that had to be modified or canceled. The Russians have to learn to build what they can, not what they aspire to.
There's more at the link.
I never saw much point to the LCS program right from the start. It was dreamed up in the fevered minds of a US navy procurement system that had lost its way, and it's had monumental problems right from the start - so much so that the US Navy is about to retire many almost-new LCS hulls, because fixing them would be too expensive and many of their critical features have never been fully developed, making them (in so many words) the nautical equivalent of paperweights. The whole program has been a catastrophic case study in mismanagement and wasting money and resources.
In Russia's case, the high-tech demands of the Derzky class ran headlong into the realities of its war with Ukraine. The Russian Army and Air Force have been far more active in the fighting than the Navy, and have suffered major losses of important weapons systems. Those have to be replaced and improved, and they take precedence over a new class of warship when it comes to getting hold of the latest technologies. Not only are those very expensive, but in a sanctions environment they're hard to acquire. Most of Russia's weapons development efforts must therefore be diverted to the military's most urgent needs. New warship designs have to take a back seat to operational reality.
However, there's an important lesson in this for the USA as well. Russian shipbuilding was almost crippled after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many specialist designers, engineers and technicians were thrown out of work because there was no money available to keep them employed. A lot of them switched careers to other fields, and many left the country. As a result, the Russian Navy has had a terrible time trying to maintain its existing fleet, let alone develop new designs. (For example, its Borei class nuclear missile submarines and their Bulava missiles have suffered prolonged delays: the first in the class began construction in 1996, but finally made it into service with the Fleet only in 2013.) There have been no new major surface combatants at all since the Soviet Union collapsed. The Russian Navy has built limited numbers of its relatively small Steregushchiy and Gremyashchiy class corvettes - predecessors to the now-canceled Derzky class - but no larger warships.
The US Navy finds itself in a very similar, and very difficult, position as far as shipbuilding and maintenance are concerned. It was recently pointed out that compared to China, the USA has fallen far behind.
A U.S. Navy briefing slide is calling new attention to the worrisome disparity between Chinese and U.S. capacity to build new naval vessels and total naval force sizes. The data compiled by the Office of Naval Intelligence says that a growing gap in fleet sizes is being helped by China's shipbuilders being more than 200 times more capable of producing surface warships and submarines. This underscores longstanding concerns about the U.S. Navy's ability to challenge Chinese fleets, as well as sustain its forces afloat, in any future high-end conflict.
. . .
The most eye-catching component of the slide is a depiction of the relative Chinese and U.S. shipbuilding capacity expressed in terms of gross tonnage. The graphic shows that China's shipyards have a capacity of around 23,250,000 million tons versus less than 100,000 tons in the United States. That is at least an astonishing 232 times greater than the United States.
U.S.-based shipbuilding capacity was in decline even before the end of the Cold War, but steadily shrunk even more afterward. It is at a particularly low point, across the board, now.
. . .
"They have 13 shipyards, in some cases their shipyard has more capacity – one shipyard has more capacity than all of our shipyards combined," Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro told members of Congress at a hearing in February. "That presents a real threat."
. . .
Shipbuilding is also a complex and costly affair that requires large amounts of skilled labor and resources, which can take significant time to source. Delays or other hiccups in shipbuilding, as well as repair and overhaul work that requires shipyard capacity, can easily cascade. This reality has manifested itself to an especially extreme degree for the U.S. Navy when it comes to submarine maintenance.
Rear Adm. Jonathan Rucker, the Navy's Program Executive officer for Attack Submarines, told reporters in November 2022 on the sidelines of the Naval Submarine League’s annual conference that 18 of the service's 50 attack submarines of all classes were undergoing or awaiting maintenance at that time. This is significantly higher than the service's target of having no more than 20 percent of all attack submarines down for maintenance at a time.
The Los Angeles class attack submarine USS Boise, which was first commissioned in 1992, has become an unfortunate poster child for these issues. Boise has been sitting pierside since 2017 and when it hopefully returns to active duty next year it will have spent around 20 percent of its entire career idle awaiting maintenance.
Again, more at the link.
18 out of 50 attack submarines awaiting maintenance. That's more than a third of the US Navy's (allegedly) operational attack submarine fleet.
Perhaps we shouldn't point fingers and laugh at the Russian Navy's problems. Our own shipbuilding and repair situation is beginning to resemble theirs to a very, very uncomfortable degree. Let's hope our Navy doesn't get into a shooting war anytime soon . . .
Peter
17 comments:
Sir,
With respect, I am finding it increasingly difficult to abide by AC Clarke's admonition to 'never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity'. If he had this correct, then it is a wonder indeed how so much was conceived, designed, and executed in the past by what I am now supposed to believe were the most complete imbeciles ever to grace this earth.
The LCS program is so utterly without redeeming feature, it is very difficult indeed to believe that an organization as experienced and august as the United States Navy could convince itself that 'this, this right here is the way we should go, gentlemen (points to LCS scale model)'.
These people did not achieve their positions by being stupid. As with other branches and forms of our government, this is deliberate nonsense designed to destroy the work of generations, so that icky institutions and other social arrangements that espouse certain qualities and attributes can be safely denigrated and, eventually, ignored entire.
Also, with the recent revelations concerning where, precisely, all that foreign aid money actually goes, seem to rhyme with the 'gigantic cost overruns' and 'budget inflation' normally found in government projects. It always seemed a little strange, how apparently smart people could f**k up a deal so badly the taxpayer ended up on the hook for many times the value of the original contract... and the money just disappeared somewhere. Mistakes, we are told, were made.
Here in the province of Ontario, we find the curious story of the gas-fired generation plant that was supposed to replace the aging coal-fired one, but ended up being cancelled and a CAN$450 million cancellation penalty being paid to the developers. What kind of politician, no matter how moronic, looks at a contract with such a clause in it and thinks, 'Boy howdy, that's a great deal for the taxpayers that hired me!'? Who got that money? Where did it go?
This same model is being employed in many other spheres, with a similar objective. This whole edifice of civilization is being dismantled, apparently to be replaced with something less amenable to personal freedom and self-reliance.
Hold fast to your taboos. Looking forward to the SMOD.
Mike in Canada
…and remember that, while the Navy was screwing up the LCS program, there was also the Zumwalt abortion and the Ford carrier series of debacles. While China was ramping up, we basically lost a couple decades to poor decisions and worse management.
There's a much, much simpler explanation: personal venality, of the "approve this and you get a nice cushy job after you retire/campaign contributions" variety.
Look on the bright side, the discombobulated US Navy won't have the capability to destroy the rebelling US coastal cities. Fort Sumpter won't be repeated.
Along with venality, you have a lack of experiencing anything like battle. As a result, later generations of paper pushers/planners see some marvelous powerpoint showing off the latest SUPER SHIP, and don't have the experience and training to distinguish between map and territory.
Large naval ships make great targets. Advances in weapons will decimate fleets. Probably not the best investment these days.
@Anonymous at 10:27AM: Actually, when you think about it, Fort Sumter fell because the Union Navy wasn't strong enough to relieve it or rescue the garrison. That means it's actually more likely to be repeated than not!
What a surprise! They try a design we are using and discover it costs more to build and maintain than they can handle.
Why do I recall what happened to the Imperial Japanese Fleet. As I recall, Japanese ship yards were adequate for maintaining scheduled ship repairs, and for constructing replacement ships (and shipping) as ships aged out or were lost to normal situations. But once the active shooting started, they were hard pressed to repair battle damage in a timely way, let alone make of for combat losses.
Sound like the US shipyards (civilian as well) are in worse shape than the Japanese had been.
Outsourcing to the point of utterly destroying our war-making sustainment capacity has been an objective of our puppeteers, er, I mean our leaders, for quite a while now. Industrial policy IS military policy, and gutting our industrial capacity (especially our heavy manufacturing industry) has been brutal. We are a supposed world naval power and yet... this? http://youtube.com/watch?v=V2FBAPtA7to
People can see that we can't sustain a war that takes hardware losses, so people are NOT enlisting in droves, causing the first early calls for reinstating the draft: https://archive.li/TOd8h
There's a reason that CDR Salamander refers to LCS as "Little Crappy Ships". The best thing we could have done was help Russia saddle itself with a few dozen of them, and sell ours to China.
As I remember history, Ft. Sumter had been due serious upgrades that kept falling through the cracks when it came time for budget season. Then when things turned hot there was an attempt to get the supplies approved and sent there...too little, too late.
I used to work at General Dynamic's Bath Iron Works as a shipfitter and welder. There's 2 major problems at that yard: (1) piss poor planning; (2) too much micromanagement.
(1) Piss poor planning: BIW's workforce were hired primarily in the 1980's and '90's. They knew the workforce were aging out and about to retire en masse. The management did no make any plans to gradually hire / train / retain a new generation of workers over a period of time in the 2000's / 2010's. Hence, when the workforce began to retire in 2018-2023, there was a mass hiring spree without regards to qualifications. So, you had new workers with limited work experience, knowledge or motivation trying to build ships while the institutional knowledge in the older workers were not being passed on. And the newly hired workers rarely last more than a year or two due to problem #2.
(2) Too much micromanagement: There are too many supervisors / micro managers (we call them white hats due to the color of their hard hats.). White hats go around from one shift to another, telling workers from different shifts what to do, without communicating with each other. Resulting in conflicting work orders, unfinished work or substandard work. Ie, no chain of command. There's a reason for a chain of command: officers plan, NCO's supervise and the enlisted execute (if an officer stops a private painting some rocks an NCO told him to do and have that private do a police call around the yard without telling the NCO, that NCO is going to go around lookin for that private fuming that he's goofing off and the rocks aren't getting painted. There's a reason why we have a chain of command.). Whites don't communicate with each others, from shift to shift, intervene on different shifts and changes work orders constantly from day to day.
That may be why BIW is always late in delivering ships to the Navy. Retiring workforce and bad management.
Just my $0.02.
Those tiny wee Russian corvettes are being rolled out with ability to launch hypersonic missiles.
Just how many functional hypersonic missile systems does the USA possess today? Or next year? Or in 2030? Perhaps the Senators for Raytheon can answer if asked around midday after sucking down some Sustain and just before sundowner syndrome kicks in.
Russia is a land power. Navy needs to deal some close-in Pacific defence, protection of St Petersburg and Kaliningrad, and the Arctic Passage -- they lead the world in ice-breaker tech. And of course the ballistic missile subs.
For sure their Navy would wish for more new shiny stuff. For sure too, it's to Russia's strategic advantage to focus on land and air assets because that's where most of the threats will come from -- right now the USA via proxies and of course Russia also needs to credibly deter China in the Far East.
Navy ship design has been horrendous of late, Fer sure. One of the 2 classes of LCS can't run in heavy seas without developing CRACKS IN THE HULL. Both are limited to 15 knots, when designed to do 40 to 45. Mission modules meant to be swapped out depending on mission profile flat out aren't changeable, and basic maintenance, to keep operational CANT BE DONE BY CREW, MUST BE DONE BY CONTRACTORS trained by the builder. A total shit show. I won't get started on the Zumwalt's failure of a gun system, or the near disaster of the magnetic catapults on the Ford class carriers, that was only solved after commissioning.... BUSHIPS needs to get their act together...
Saw this live, as a white hat. Two blue hats testing the anchor in dry dock, over 30 white hats had to be present to observe. I was only there because those above me considered if something went wrong and I wasn’t there, I would somehow be partially to blame for having not offered my supervision. At another operation, a single blue hat did the work, 18 white hats were crammed in around him to standing room only. Mistake happened but blue hat fixed it before anything bad resulted. At root cause analysis the official conclusion of the DC reps was that we should have had more supervision present. At another op, MM2 did the work, MM1 supervised, and MMC was reading procedure and supervising both. Shipyard official complained that MMC could not properly supervise if he was reading the procedure out loud, and would not approve us to start unless we found an additional man just to read the procedure.
A big problem that is almost always overlooked is that Environmental Regulations greatly impact US shipyards. The art of building metal ships including welding and painting immediately adjacent to waterways is very difficult to accomplish while preventing any residues from leaving the drydock. There are strict standards for these emissions and have caused many shipyard closures as investigations have revealed large scale contamination from previous work over the past 100+ years.
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