Interesting that the rationale is that the money does not immediately contribute to fighting power; does it not occur that spending money on domestic shipbuilding, whether or not it produces war-fighting machines, can only improve the future capability to replenish hull losses?
US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
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Since the turn of the millennium, any U.S. military project that promises to be "cheaper and faster to build" has either ended up being "still severely over budget" or "unusable" or both.
They just futilely pursuing the impossible triangle of advanced, cheap, and immediate usability.
Yeah, I am not sure if I buy the logic they are using. You have a shipbuilding industry that is struggling and this was one of the major projects yards have invested in. Austal switched to steel based shipbuilding as part of a transition away from LCS to potential Constellation class awards.
I don't see how cancelling Constellation delivers ships faster? What ship is ready to go right now that can take its place?
While the US doesn't generally cancel programs like this, I'm not surprised they axed Constellation. NAVSEA was given an ultimatum to finalize the design by fall of this year. I haven't heard any updates about this so I suspect that NAVSEA failed. Given that the first ship started construction 3 years ago, I think that the reckoning should have come long ago. Honestly, I'm a little bit disappointed because it'd have been fun if they dragged this out a couple more years.
Simply put, procurement is handled by the officers in charge and the defense contractors. These two groups don't share the same goal as the military, so it's unsurprising that the results are questionable. It's most obvious with Navy procurement because these ships have to be built in the US, but the US doesn't have a commercial ship building industry any more.
This mess will take a lot of effort and time to fix, but there aren't any stakeholder interesting in putting in the work to do so so the current system is going to continue getting worse and worse. It's poetry.
It's less about building ships faster and more about losing faith in the Constellation program and cutting their losses. The US Navy would have been way better off if they killed the LCS as soon as possible, so this is the Navy trying to make a repeat of that mess.
Are those just revamped John boats from Ali Express?
I look forward to the day when the entire US navy consists of only the cheapest Chinese boats you can buy online.
Clippy: it looks like you are trying to recreate PLAN type 22 fast missile boat, would you like help?
One of the design iterations of the Connie replaced the kitchen and mess hall with hot food vending machines because they needed more space for cooling, sensor processing, and VLS cells.
They should have just gone with a clean sheet design in the first place
Whoever put that tomahawk VLS idea into Congress heads... well, nice sabotage.