For the interested reader: https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/
(The Good Commander has dedicated himself to exposing problems of this sort that plague our Navy)
I had the pleasure of spending part of my service trying to escape the shipyards. I lacked the perspective of these widespread issues as a lowly Junior Officer (I was trying to survive the equivalent of the daily standup without getting flayed for any number of issues that would become our responsibility with little agency to help). But I mostly fought against system upgrades that had no semblance of deconfliction ( my tracker had something like 8-10 medium mods with another 2 large ones eating our bandwidth). A shop of a handful of sailors that had to provide maintenance support, and operational support, conduct training/development and also quite literally babysitting some of the shipyard workers and many lacked experience (I certainly did). The QA work was poor as was acceptance testing, and always created issues later as kicking cans down the road created issues during workups. Also culture goes down the drain as the leadership has no incentive to address the inevitable scope increases ("growth work") will require more time in the shipyard which is unacceptable. I've read a lot of administrative action proposed (which is part of the issue) but as others have stated the quality must improve, shoddy work does absurd damage down the line (fires a la Bonhomme Richard and Oscar Austin) and defeats the purpose of mooring up to get the vessel right.
I was an enlisted sailor aboard the USS Mount Whitney when it experienced a major fire in the shipyards in Croatia and extended our visit by months[0]. Career growth was halted during that period for nearly everyone as they spent months babysitting contractors and standing extra watches with only the slightest bit of valuable training conducted over the period.
I love Salamander, but respectfully disagree when it comes to Cultural Marxism being responsible for the destruction of the officer corps. Has it[1] helped? Probably not? But you're tweensing needles off the fir tree in the middle of a very big forest, and the forest is made of bankers.
Everything else, he's great.
[1] Insofar as Kulturbolschewismus is an actual thing, that is
Bankers?! Surely the one class of people least relevant to US Navy funding! The article is pretty clear that commercial shipyards crush the Navy in efficiency and management competence.
The DCS game provide interesting simulations of how different combat styles and doctrines play out.
An early take away is that CIWIS and other close range air defense are broadly ineffective in a major engagement. They provide a necessary short range component which can be effective in limited circumstances-but little more.
Likewise, armor is ineffective as it is always possible to use/build a bigger bomb. However speed is effective at making long range strikes harder.
IMO the useful observation in the article is the cost difference between US, Japanese, and South Korean ships. I’d be curious to understand whether this is purely due to efficiency, or a difference in war doctrines and missions.
It seems likely that most of the cost difference comes down to the US ships being built at shipyards that specialize at working with the US Navy and the others being built at shipyards that mostly competitively build commercial vessels.
That sounds right to me, a lack of competition and low supply of skills and infrastructure brings costs up.
Bit of a chicken and egg problem though, if you don't manufacture locally because of cost you'll never build up a competitive industry that brings the cost down.
A lot of the costs involved are in infrastructure and the running a maintenance of that infrastructure, which is the same regardless of whether you are building two ships every 10 years, or 200.
Not sold on the short-range air defense destroyer idea. I think we want destroyers also capable of intercepting ballsitic missiles after seeing what has happened in Ukraine.
The changes to procurement do not sound harmful but why go for a less capable ship? South Korea, Japan, and China are building larger and more capable multi-role ships. Are they all wrong?
And regarding software, didn't Sqlite originate on Aegis destroyers?
The short-range destroyer doesn't make any sense because the radars for air defense aren't cheap. The US is building Constellation frigates as lower cost air defense. They will have medium-range SAMs because they have shorter VLS cells, and not the bigger long-range SAM and ABM that the destroyers have. I think they put on Aegis cause that is the only system available.
There is short-range ESSM missiles that packs 4 per VLS cell, and they could fit in shorter cells. You could make a frigate with ESSM, a lot of countries have similar. But the US doesn't seem to have combat system that could do that and might have to buy it. ESSM is intended for self-defense, I don't know if it can defend fleet.
Also, the size of missiles is directly related to the range because they are mostly rocket. The warhead doesn't make much difference to the cost.
https://www.navalgazing.net/ESSM says the range is estimated to be 50km, Block II no longer needs illumination from the firing ship, but may not be fully integrated into AEGIS such that it can take targeting data from other ships.
“But despite its capabilities, ESSM still had the drawback of all previous versions of Sea Sparrow. It relied on semi-active guidance, requiring illumination from the firing ship. It did have an autopilot and uplink from the firing ship, allowing illumination only in the last moments of its flight, but this was still a potential problem when facing saturation attack. The obvious way to solve this was to fit the missile with an active seeker head, and discussions of doing so were happening as far back as 2002, but it wasn’t until relatively recently that serious work began on what is known as ESSM Block II. Block II kept the motor and fins, and replaced the forward 8″ section with a new 10″ guidance section, with a new dual-mode active/passive radar seeker. This removed the need for firing-ship illumination entirely, allowing Block II to be used against swarm attacks or targets that the firing ship couldn’t see, although reports don’t seem to indicate that it’s fully integrated into the Collective Engagement Capability (CEC) system.”
Those struck me as odd. I can’t find much in the author’s experience in the defense space. Advocating for guns over missiles seemed to go against every expectation I have for future naval combat, too.
The Navy tried to make gunfire support work and it was a failure with Zumwalt class. The problem is that artillery is too short range, and modern missiles make getting close to shore too dangerous. The rocket-boosted guided munitions were super expensive especially since Navy developed their own and didn't use Army ones.
He is half right about ballistic missiles and glide bombs. It should be possible to launch MLRS rockets from VLS cells. The GLSDB, which is rocket boosted glide bomb would be effective. The PrSM would also be effective for quick strike. The Navy doesn't seem to be interested, but the Marines have tried using HIMARS from deck of amphibious ship.
He is wrong about ballistic missiles being cheaper. Cost and size seem to scale with range. The current hypersonic missiles are basically ballistic missiles with longer range glider on them.
> Advocating for guns over missiles seemed to go against every expectation I have for future naval combat, too.
Current naval combat involves using missiles worth millions of dollars in order to take down cheap Houthis' drones worth tens of thousands of dollars at most [1]. Replace those missiles with much cheaper artillery and pound the Houthis bases located on shore from 30-40 miles out and you're back to being cost-effective again. Because the US Navy, or any navy for that matter, won't be able to play that game of very expensive missiles vs. cheap drones (or cheap Houthi "missiles") for too long.
Those drones can be launched from substantially more than 30-40 miles from the shore.
You might use gunnery to take out individual drones coming to attack you or the ships you’re escorting, but you are not likely to manage to hit the launchers/bases.
> Those drones can be launched from substantially more than 30-40 miles from the shore.
Yeah, you're correct on that, I was probably going by the good old tactic of "bomb everything that adversarially moves on the shorelines from a relative safe distance out in the sea", which tactic was active (among many competing others) sometime at the end of the 19th century - early 20th century (Douhet partially took cues from that naval tactic when writing about his mass aerial bombardments strategy).
But as some other poster mentions in a related comment, there are no definitive Houthi bases, so that leaves one with the question: What exactly to bomb? What exactly needs neutralising? The same questions would be as valid and as difficult to answer were carrier-based airplanes to be available in the vicinity.
Range is obviously a clear advantage that missiles will basically always have over guns for anti-air, but the cost difference is also huge. This is currently a very real issue in the Red Sea - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/19/missile-drone-penta...
Although I would agree with what I think is your implicit thought, which is that the US really needs to work on interceptors that are significantly cheaper (i.e. the Tamir used by Iron Dome)
The US Navy is putting a lot of research into directed energy weapons (DEW) for this purpose. The primary intent behind these is to offer a low-cost and "deep magazine" for taking out missiles and drones. There's a few demonstrators out there on various ships with systems like these in the trial stage.
One big advantage to DEW over interceptors which the Navy likes is that it isn't another magazine hit risk like conventional missiles and gun ammunition is. Another is that even if the ammo is cheap, it takes up space which is limited on a ship. This presents challenges when operating in areas like the South China Sea or Persian Gulf where countering attacks from land would be likely. Even if the interceptors are cheap, deeper magazines by an attacker on land can simply exhaust the supply on the naval ship. DEW has the potential to rectify this.
Yes, they seem promising for ships assuming the output can be increased so it doesn't require tracking the target for multiple seconds.
I'm a bit less knowledgeable wether the energy requirements can easily be met for other vehicles such as Humvees with vastly different engines & fuel capacities. That said, I'm all in for laser research and the trickle down effects of things like fiber lasers!
You're not going to win that game with new and expensive tech, to the contrary, you need numbers, and that new and expensive tech doesn't bode well when it comes to numbers.
How are you going to sink/take out Houthi-like troops with lasers once you approach enemy shores? Taking those people out with missiles is already too expensive and a losing game going forward.
You don't shoot them with lasers of course. You can use different tools for different jobs. But for intercepting missiles like this thread is about, new high-tech equipment is going to be more effective than the old stuff
I can't say that I've seen any proper physics analysis of this, but my small understanding would be that incoming lasers will not be effective against ships*.
The lasers currently fielded for Navy tests require tracking a target for multiple continuous seconds - my understanding is that if the target rapidly changed heading and you lost tracking for a couple seconds, the air flow will cool the target and you'll basically have to start from scratch when the target is reacquired. This would obviously change for something hypersonic that has a plasma barrier around it :)
For a ship, the hull itself is all metal to conduct the heat (relatively) evenly, and it's sitting in the ocean which is a huge heat sink. Obviously it's possible that laser research comes a long way, but my understanding is that you would have to hit the ship with a huge amount of energy, which requires even more energy generated for the laser due to laser divergence over distance etc.
This is comparing apples to oranges, but seeing how the Navy recently stopped their Rail Gun research, I don't think it's a given that were just going to pour money into research and end up with mW lasers.
* Dazzling sensors etc is another matter. I'm mostly referring to punching a hole in the side of a ship, which is what I interpreted your question as.
> Missiles in turn were much more effective than shells in WWII.
They were? I thought missiles were only really developed by the Germans towards the end of WW2 and were basically ineffective due to bad targeting caused by the British turning their spies. Also the missiles were horrifically expensive and contributed to the bankrupting of the war effort. Hitler couldn't let go of his new Wunderwaffe, but the cost/benefit analysis didn't make sense.
Which is what the article is about. The most advanced weapons don't necessarily help, if you bankrupt yourself making them.
The author says "dedicated platforms could provide ballistic missile radar coverage." It doesn't sound like he's suggesting we skip ballistic missile defense.
I understand a bit with the one role perspective. But why build short range air defence destroyers at all? Because the ballistic missile destroyers will have a more capable radar and be able to fit all the same anti-air missiles and the bigger ones too. So it seems like their "one role" subsumes the others entirely albeit with the caveat it'll be more painful to replace if they're lost in war.
The author may be thinking that in a peer conflict, some number of ships would be taken as “acceptable” losses. This could be a useful role for a cheap forward deployed “drone” ship, but I’d expect alternate platforms would be more effective.
There are two kinds of ballistic missile defense. First is defending land targets with ships instead of base. Second is defending fleet from Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles. Without BMD on escorts, ballistic missiles can wipe out fleet.
Area air defense capabilities including ABM is growing more important by the day. Has this guy been paying attention to what's happening in China and the Middle East?
And building slower surface warships just to save money doesn't make any sense. Aircraft carriers have to be fast in order to generate enough wind over the deck for flight operations. And the escorting destroyers need to be just as fast to keep up.
Amphibious vessels are already designed with wider hulls and lower top speeds.
The observations of foreign shipyards and competitiveness I thought was interesting and bore resemblance to points I'd seen made elsewhere. It read as credible.
When the author began going into military strategy, that's where he lost me. With all due respect to the writer, it seemed like a lot of off-the-cuff ideas from a layperson who has the outsiders view on what they think naval warfare is like, combined with some knowledge elsewhere that doesn't necessarily apply.
The author had a simple solution for dozens of things, my reply to which I can only surmise as "it's not that simple". Ship design and procurement is very complex, and takes into account many factors that are not always apparent (in many cases because they're not very appealing to study). That's not to say that the US Navy always gets it right. But even in the cases where they've gotten it wrong, you can at least follow the path of logic that got them there.
These wishlists of "They should just do it this way, it's logically so much better!" I feel often fails to take into account the constraints and limitations of the environment, and how the things to be done fit into the greater warfighting picture. The latter alone I feel results in more misunderstandings of why some weapons are procured over others and why they do what they do than any other factor.
There's some good defense journals which cover topics such as these from analysts with backgrounds in the subject matter. I was reading an article from War On The Rocks just yesterday on naval procurement, and their site is good reading for those interested in more from a more knowledgeable base.
It's not just to save money - it also increases the number you can crank out in a big hurry.
In WWII, escort carriers were small, slow, lightly armored and yet came in absolutely clutch because some slow air cover that needs extensive destroyer/cruiser babysitting >>> no air cover at all once all the fleet carriers of both sides were done mutually annihilating each other (iirc at one point the US was down to one operational fleet carrier in the Pacific; the Saratoga in late 42/early 43) due to how most leaders hadn't fully grasped just how lethal massed air power was, some figures like Halsey aside. In that breach, and even later on e.g. Battle off Samar, escort carriers were indispensable. Of the 151 aircraft carriers built in the U.S. during World War II, 122 were escort carriers.
I don't think it's totally implausible that massed cruise/hypersonic missile attacks won't play out similarly in a future conflict, leading to a scenario where both sides need to rebuild asap. Being able to crank out limited-purpose ships is important if you want to maintain any capability at all, even if that capability is less flexible than the gucci option.
If want cheap warships, then putting containerized missiles on cargo ship might be the cheapest option. The standard VLS cells should fit in standard container.
It should be possible to create data link to other ships, and use the cargo ship as magazine. It would be much harder to make a containerized warship with radar, combat system, and all that. The cargo ships would be super vulnerable without any defenses, and be destroyed by any hit.
The other problem is that the stocks of missiles are small. The US should probably focus on making more, cheaper missiles than building ships.
There have been a number of proposals along those lines to install containerized missiles on cargo ships. It's technically possible, but cargo ships are so slow and vulnerable that they would only be useful to supplement the magazines of surface warships conducting convoy escort missions. That's a pretty niche mission now and it would be difficult to justify the expense.
I mean we kind of have "escort carriers" already in the form of amphibious ships that can operate helicopters and V/STOL fighters. Those work well enough for limited missions like close air support. But without high speed and catapults they can't operate the heavy aircraft necessary to defend a fleet or engage an adversary at long ranges. What worked in WW2 is no longer relevant.
The point isn't that it specifically needs to be escort carriers, but something analogous in role, where you get a valuable capability at a low cost and production time. Slow/cheap missile platforms might be that modern analogue.
Here's a view, from the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, mostly by retired Naval officers. [1] War starts in 2026, China invades Taiwan, takes over the southern third of the island, then stalls. A long war ensues, involving Taiwan, the US, China, and Japan. 2026 is close enough that nothing not already under construction will be available.
That's pure nonsense. Here's how it's really going to play out: China keeps building warships and waits patiently. Once it's navy outclasses the US Navy the US simply abandons Taiwan because it won't dare to get in a shooting war with China when it's guaranteed to lose it.
Xi Jinping is 70, and he wants to see this happen while he's still running things. That affects the timing.
It's a failure of dictators. If Hitler had taken a decade to consolidate Europe into Greater Germany, remaining at peace with the UK and the USSR, things might have worked better for the Nazis.
If Xi wanted to invade Taiwan he could have done it already. The US is not able to militarily defend it anymore. Obviously it would cause massive, massive problems for China, for instance it could completely stall the economic growth and as a result likely even create political instability but if 'uniting' Taiwan was the goal worth pursuing above anything else and it would need to be done NOW because Xi wants to live to see it happen then Chinese military is already capable of it and would have done it already. But they don't because they are rising superpower and Xi apparently doesn't want to see united Taiwan that badly or his grip on power is not so strong and others are not that keen on a shooting war with the US. So they just wait, because with every passing year China gets stronger and the US weaker. So they don't need to do anything to 'win by default'.
> The US is not able to militarily defend it (Taiwan) anymore.
Taiwan is not really defensible, in the sense that Ukraine is. There's no depth. It's a narrow island with a mountain range down the center, and the vulnerable developed area is a strip about 15-20km deep along the west coast. Look at a map. If there is a war there, not much will be left.
I know, that was my point. But there was a time from 50s to 2010? or so that US Navy was so strong compared to the Chinese Navy that invasion was not possible at all, the Chinese wouldn't even be able to reach the shores of Taiwan.
From article -> "British yards using traditional techniques could turn out liberty ships cheaper than US yards like Kaiser's Richmond, CA"
During WW2, if British shipyards had been tasked with constructing Liberty ships for the US, it would have hurt the war effort. Many British yards were heavily damaged by aerial bombings, making them less capable than U.S. yards such as Kaiser's in Richmond, CA, especially for large-scale projects like Liberty ship production.
I don't see mention of naval drones, even though they seem like effective harassment against US and Russia in present conflicts. I wonder what would happen if you got 10,000 cheap drones for the price of just one traditional navy ship.
On a related note, for those who don't mind reading 17k words on industrial decline, is Ian Jack's great take on (civilian) shipbuilding in Glasgow.
The relevance to TFA is the difficulty of recovering the arts of ship construction lost to offshoring, financial engineering, politics, whatever. And it's a great read.
Apropos of nothing, my son and I toured the coast of Maine last summer and visited the maritime museum in Bath, including the boat tour that passes by Bath Iron Works. Very impressive facility and a highlight of our trip.
A common criticism of the defense industry, or relating to government contractors in all industries, is misaligned incentives. Military contractors are incentivized to maximize profit, not win wars. Health care contractors are incentivized to maximize profit, not care for people. Technology contractors are incentivized to maximize profit, not innovate. And so on...
Which may explain why Russia's military is more effective than US led NATO. Or why US Health Care is relatively expensive compared to other countries offering equivalent care. Or why massive tech initiatives need to be rescued or are a costly failure.
If you want to point to misaligned incentives, I don't think a conscript army like Russia's is a good counterexample. In fact, they're probably the prime example of how misaligned incentives makes an organization less effective.
I'll leave it to the Russians to determine if they are achieving their publicly stated goals or not.
In the meantime, I think we should focus on helping our government better & more efficiently serve the people in America...rather than flooding the world with weapons, publically lecturing about "values" while privately destabilizing governments abroad & arming genocidal maniacs & Banderite Nazis...while disproportionately enriching select contractors & politically entrenched institutions.
The new Ford carrier is undermanned by hundreds of sailors, and the Navy missed every single one of its recruitment goals in FY2023, by thousands.
It's a chronic issue at this point for practically every branch. Only way to actually fix this would be a draft but it goes without saying that this has it's own issues.
This is the real bottleneck and what navy force design 2045 wants to add 150 unmanned hulls. But that's still going to require more shipbuilding capacity. Assuming it's not fantasy. Sometimes I think Navy/planners see writing on the wall and realize future is not naval.
The long-term Stimulant-medicated do not hold up well in hotter climes.
Actually, daily early morning Physical exertion/exhaustion works better than stimulant drugs to combat ADHD anyways.
Let's start with sensors, since that's probably the most important part of a modern warship: a radar 10m above the surface of the water can theoretically see a target at 10km altitude ~350km away. Bombers are the primary choice to launch missiles, as they're basically a reusable first stage. Surfaced launched missiles don't travel at low altitude because the lower atmosphere has lots of drag. And of course Chinese antiship ballistic missiles are not known for their sea-skimming capabilities. So there is a theoretical need for long-range radars.
Also, stealth: stealth isn't binary, it just makes things _harder_ to detect, not impossible. A 350km radar may only be able to detect a stealth fighter/missile at, say, 100km; a 150km radar could detect it at 50km or less. This obviously creates massive gaps, so if you want to fill those gaps, you need more ships, and whoops, now your fleet is more expensive.
Ships are multirole for two main reasons: first, larger ships are perfectly capable of carrying adequate loadouts for every role at once. A theoretical 9700 ton antisubmarine destroyer would not be significantly more effective at ASW than a 9700 ton Flight III Burke, because there's just not a lot to do with them. Slap on another helicopter or two, add a slightly larger sonar... what else? Possibly surprisingly, helicopters are the best ASW weapons out there once they've been detected (maritime patrol aircraft and other submarines are the best), and it only takes a couple to prosecute a contact. For antiair warfare, you can either have radar and missiles on the same ship or not. In the former case, as we'll talk about in a second, the marginal cost to add ASW capability is much lower than a whole 'nother ship. If you split radar and missiles, you have to worry about your kill chain being twice as vulnerable. If either is taken out then both are useless.
Second, fewer ships is cheaper basically always. There's certain amounts of fixed work on any ship, like engines and stuff, and you can't really get rid of them[0]. If you add more stuff onto a new ship, you add the crew of that new stuff, plus a few more sailors for the larger ship. If you have two ships, you have to add a whole new ship's base cost in sailors, and sailors are by far the biggest obstacle to the US Navy right now.
[0] You may be thinking that greater automation would enable lower crews, and you'd be right. Modern container ships have like 20 crew or less. It was so effective that the Navy tried it on the Zumwalt class destroyers. It turns out that Navy ships can't always expect to be in peaceful waters, and when you suddenly need 20 extra bodies to fight a fire or shore up a leaking compartment (or even just do more maintenance on higher-spec Navy engines) then automation isn't helpful.
Next, power. He proposes hybrid electric propulsion. He's correct in that regard and everyone's moving to that, called Integrated Electric Propulsion. However, he proposes eliminating gas turbines, and that's the wrong way to go. As mentioned above, sensors are the most important part of a ship, and bigger engines is always better for more power. Also though, next-generation ships are going to be using even more power, because everything's going to get lasers. Big gas turbine engines is important for speed yes, but it's getting to be even more important for power.
On to armor. An armor piercing Mark 8 16" shell fired from an Iowa class battleship has a bursting charge of... 18.55kg. (all data from navweaps) It has a muzzle velocity of 762 meters per second (~mach 2.2), with a striking velocity of 514m/s (~mach 1.5) at maximum range of 38.7km. The shell weighs 1225kg. Armor to defend against that is legendarily thick.
Compare that to, say, a Russian/Indian BrahMos antiship cruise missile. (figures taken from wikipedia so a little suspect) The BrahMos has a maximum speed of 2.8 mach, a range of 500km from a ship, weighs 3000kg (presumably when launched), and has a warhead of 300kg. Other than mass, the missile is better in every way than the battleship shell. Not to mention higher accuracy and the like. If you wanted to armor ships to withstand more power than battleship shells, then good luck.
How about armament? Oh wait I just showed why missiles are so much better than artillery. If you need sustained firepower, then yeah artillery is great. That basically never comes up on the water.
(Not related to warships, but I really don't think the author knows anything about gravity bombs. Do you know how many gravity bombs it took to destroy the Thanh Hóa bridge? Answer: the gravity bombs couldn't hit the target with enough accuracy to destroy it. Do you know how many laser guided bombs it took? About 30. Oh, well, maybe we can make it up with better planes and keep the cheaper gravity bombs you say? A JDAM kit turns an unguided bomb into a guided one for $27k in 2011 dollars. A bomb at the time cost $3000. You can either get a hit on the first shot with a single $30k JDAM or take 10 bombs, possibly mounted on multiple aircraft, and then still likely not get a hit.)
"Short Range Air Defense Missiles over large interceptors." What if the short range interceptor misses? You lose your ship. Interceptors aren't measured in cost, they're measured in cost of the thing they're protecting. Your long range interceptor misses? You have another chance. Assume a probability of kill (pK) or 0.5 for example: one short range interceptor has a pK of 0.5; a long range interceptor backed up by a short range one has a pK of 0.75. And if the long range one misses, you get to reuse the short range one.
"Ballistic missiles over hypersonic missiles." Yeah probably. That's part of the reason why the US isn't investing so much in hypersonics, although they use planes rather than ballistic missiles because you launch a ballistic missile and there's suddenly a question of whether or not it's a nuke.
All that about his ship design being said, his shipbuilding stuff isn't bad. I'm in favor of cancelling the Jones Act and letting the yards fail just because I don't think there's any other way Congress is going to care enough to change the status quo, but that's another issue.
Sorry if this is a little disjointed, it's 3:00AM here.
> I'm a guy that loves to learn about new things and occasionaly write about them.
I read a lot of foreign policy, which often overlaps with military. The author's facts and assumptions are often in conflict with everyone else, and the author seems unware of that - not addressing very many essential issues.
> Block-Style Construction / Parts of the ship (or "blocks") are made in workshops and then transported to a dry dock. Cranes move the blocks into place, and workers connect them.
The US Navy's shipbuilding contractors (the Navy doesn't build its own ships, or at least not ones of any significance) have been doing that for many years, at least on some kinds of ships.
> Lack of Integrated Testing / The Navy is infamous for its paperwork. It prefers standards and supplier certifications instead of actual testing (and often drags its feet on testing even when Congress mandates it).
I might misunderstand the author's intent, but the US Navy does extensive testing and qualification of new ships, sometimes a year or more, just like the rest of the US military. For example, the latest aircraft carrier, the Gerald Ford, went through eight years of tests (it was a new model of carrier). For an idea of what that means,
Here's one test I won't be doing on my new sailfish: On 18 June 2021, Gerald R. Ford completed her first Full Ship Shock Trial ... to ensure that she is able to withstand battle conditions. 40,000 lbs. (18 tonnes) of TNT was detonated underwater, measured as a 3.9 magnitude earthquake by USGS. Additional tests were conducted in July and August, with the test detonations set off closer to the hull.
> Single-role ships [instead of multi-role]
I've never heard anyone else ever suggest that. Thoughts based on what I have read:
The US military is moving aggressively in the opposite direction. They want people and machines to be highly flexible. The main reasons is the advent long-range precision missiles - once the enemy sees you, they now can pretty reliably hit you now.
That means you can't concentrate large forces, including lots of specialized personnel and equipment. You can't move and resupply, or even communicate. What does work is smaller units operating within the range of fire, with the personnel you have, and moving and attacking faster than the enemy can react (within their 'OODA loop').
You need highly flexible generalists who take initiative and make decisions on the spot, not rigid specialists coordinating with higher-ups. It also is believed to play to US strengths as a free-thinking, entrepeneurial population; the US trusts its sergeants to make the decisions.
Applied to the Navy, they are switching to more, smaller ships. Due to the new precision, long-range (hundreds or thousands of miles) anti-ship missiles, big ships risk too much. For similar reasons, the Navy wants 'distributed lethality', deploying weapons, if even a few, to every ship imaginable. They want to make it hard for an enemy to disable the Navy with missiles.
All services report encountering minimums in size, including the Navy: When ships shrink too much, for example, they lack the powerplant for peak power necessary to capabilities like high-end radars, future directed energy weapons, etc.
Alsdo, the oceans are an enormous area (2x the land area!). The US Navy has a ~250 ships, and moving a ship to the place it's needed can take weeks. If the available nearby ship is single-role, and it's the wrong kind, what then? Maybe the enemy won't attack it, being the wrong kind of ship for the fight, and will wait for the other ships to arrive.
> Speed is the defining feature of some ship classes, like the American Littoral Combat Ship (LCS)
> New form factors and propulsion designs are available if missiles devalue top speed. Boxier ships can carry more mass and provide more internal space for crew, armor, and armaments.
Again, this author is the only place I've ever heard that. In my limited experience, almost all Navy ships advertise similar top speeds (around 30 knots), to the point that I wonder if there's a reason for it - possibly they are just not revealing the true speed.
Again, oceans are enormous; moving a ship on-station can take weeks. The idea is to delay that even more?
The LCS's defining feature was to reduce the cost of low-end missions by using low-end ships, instead of wasting multi-billion dollar warships on (e.g.) chasing smugglers in powerboats. The other defining features were a non-very-successful attempt at modular, swappable equipment for different capabilities, and armor insufficient for a real naval battle (not really their purpose).
> An alternative option is to use electric motors powered by diesel generators.
> Inexpensive marine diesel engines can power the generators. These engines are reliable and can efficiently burn a wide range of fuels.
Newer navy ships already use direct-drive shafts for propulsion, IIRC. Regardless, the warships may have requirements beyond the niceties above. For example, each Ford-class carrier uses (looking quickly) four 30-ton propellers. Maybe they can use some inexpensive marine diesel engines?
> Use Radar Judiciously
> Moving to smaller radars (150 km range?) on most ships would have significant benefits with few drawbacks.
The US military's fundamental approach is to use sensors to see the enemy before they see us, network those sensors in a mesh network (satellites, planes, ships, ground-based), and use computers to integrate, filter, and present all this info into real-time situational awareness to all units.
Saying 'maybe we should cut back radars' is like telling OpenAI 'maybe we should cut back on GPUs'. Next!
> Missile Armor
> Missiles aren't too destructive because the Houthis have fired anti-ship missiles at dozens of cargo ships in the Red Sea, most sailing away with minor damage.
And I shot my sibling with a sling-shot, and they survived, so who needs body armor - or cover for that matter? I suspect the Russian and Chinese anti-ship missiles might be a little different than the Houthi ones.
I've never seen anyone suggest that armor was an effective counter-measure against missiles (or mines). Maybe this author knows something that everyone else overlooked.
> Artillery shells and gravity bombs can replace cruise missiles
Not very useful when the enemy has precision missiles with hundreds to thousands of miles in range. Artillery? Like WWI?
> Limit Software
Again, the author is going in the wrong direction; it's unthinkable, IMHO.
Could you imagine doing this for any modern business? 'Hey boss, my proposal for our disruptive strategy is - minimize computers!' The Navy is just going to give up all the capabilities of computers?
In fact, they see it (rightly) as the present and the future, with many military assets being essentially flying/floating on-site computer platforms. Software also has the advantage of being far easier to deploy, upgrade, and repair remotely - as in thousands of miles away, under fire in a war zone - than hardware.
> > Lack of Integrated Testing / The Navy is infamous for its paperwork. It prefers standards and supplier certifications instead of actual testing (and often drags its feet on testing even when Congress mandates it).
>
> I might misunderstand the author's intent, but the US Navy does extensive testing and qualification of new ships, sometimes a year or more, just like the rest of the US military. For example, the latest aircraft carrier, the Gerald Ford, went through eight years of tests (it was a new model of carrier). For an idea of what that means,
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gerald_R._Ford_(CVN-78)#Op...
>
> Here's one test I won't be doing on my new sailfish: On 18 June 2021, Gerald R. Ford completed her first Full Ship Shock Trial ... to ensure that she is able to withstand battle conditions. 40,000 lbs. (18 tonnes) of TNT was detonated underwater, measured as a 3.9 magnitude earthquake by USGS. Additional tests were conducted in July and August, with the test detonations set off closer to the hull.
It's funny you chose Ford shock testing as an example, because the Navy wanted to shock test a later ship because _that's the way it's usually done_. The first ship in a class is always going to have teething issues. You can either a) spend the time resolving the teething issues while working around a shock test (which adds an incredible amount of time; you can for example try to change out the boilers which takes 6 months if there's a shock test scheduled 3 months for now), or b) fix the teething issues and shock test the second ship in the class
I actually knew they tried to put off that particular test, but I don't think their scheduling debate disproves my point. The Navy did extensive testing, for years on the Ford, and does similar testing (though maybe not quite as long - not every ship is a new model of aircraft carrier) with other ships that are delivered.
> The US military's fundamental approach is to use sensors to see the enemy before they see us,
That probably works out in the open seas, but once you approach (enemy) land those radars that can detect anything that moves from 300 kms out are of no strategic advantage anymore, cause you do you know that there are enemies there by definition. Case in point is the current conflict against the Houthis, there's no use of the US Navy's very expensive radars when trying to counter-act some guys launching cheap drones from 30-40 nautical miles out (i.e. from the Yemeni shore).
Also, in regards to the general "no-one is thinking about that" sentiment, we've had such moments in the past, when the lack of any real naval combat for decades meant that it was very hard for non-institutional actors (like this guy is) to impose their views against the mainstream consensus. The best example that I can think of is the end of the 1800s - the early 1900s, just before WW1, when almost no mainstream naval theorist was really mentioning subs (other than in passing) or the air component, everyone was focused on speed and fire-power, hence the dreadnoughts (which, looking back, did not have that big of a role to speak of, other than being money-sinkers for the Brits). To say nothing of the fact that (if I'm not entirely mistaken) naval rams made it into the 1890s for new ships, and that was only because of that one battle at Lissa in 1866. If it hadn't been for Tsushima in 1905 we would have most probably had naval rams going into WW1, because that had been the general approved consensus.
And regarding fighting Chinese/Russian advanced missiles, even if the US Navy manages to implement all that tech in order to be effective against said advanced missiles nothing stops the Chinese/Russians from adopting Houthi tactics, i.e. resorting to using cheap drones/cheap "missiles" when the US Navy will approach their (China's and Russia's) shores. Just look at how fast Russia was at copying Ukraine's tactics of using cheap "suicide" drones against tanks and other armoured vehicles, nothing will stop the same Russians from using cheap drones against a big and expensive US warship approaching Vladivostok, for example.
> Case in point is the current conflict against the Houthis, there's no use of the US Navy's very expensive radars when trying to counter-act some guys launching cheap drones from 30-40 nautical miles out (i.e. from the Yemeni shore).
There's no evidence of that. The US is not attacking the Houthi bases, period. It's not a matter of technical capabilities, it's political reasons. If the US wanted to end Houthi attacks on shipping tomorrow, then there's a couple of carrier groups in range that would stop that pretty quickly. Now, why those political limits are in place is a very good question that I would like to know the answer to as well
How are some sea-based airplanes meant to take out the entire operational base of Houthis on the ground? Because I guess that’s what you mean by mentioning those carrier groups, i.e. US air-attacks. I agree though, it is partly a political decision because, for once, the US leaders are aware that they won’t be able to neutralize the Houthis based on sea power alone and that they (the Americans) will need men on the ground, and this is indeed a very big political no-no in this current climate.
Which brings me to one of the main subjects ignored by the article and by almost all the people commenting in here, i.e. the coordination between sea power and land power, meaning becoming aware that in order to neutralize your enemy it’s very counter-productive to rely on very independent military groups (the Navy, the Army etc), each of them with their (grand) strategy and with different procurement focuses, you need to take several steps back and to “strategize” it all together. Granted, this has always been a big problem for big industrial armies and especially for the US (since the WW2, in the Americans’ case), not sure there’s an easy fix to it. But fact is you won’t be able to defeat Houthi-like troops in choke-points like Aden or Malacca without a combination between land and sea power, i.e. actually controlling those choke-points on the ground like the Brits used to do in their emperial heyday.
> ...you need to take several steps back and to “strategize” it all together.
That was the purpose of the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986. The US invasion of Grenada showed clearly that the Army, Navy, and Air Force were not working well together. Its most significant reform was that operational command bypasses the service chiefs and instead the chain of command goes from the president, through the secretary of defense, to the regional combat commanders. The services are responsible for recruitment and procurement. In Central Command (CENTCOM) which covers the middle east, all Army soldiers, Navy sailors, Marines, and Air Force airmen report to the combatant commander. At the higher levels, the service chiefs have the joint chiefs of staff to coordinate their higher-level strategies. This system has been extremely effective since the 80s. The problem in Yemen is not that the Army doesn't want to go in so it's leaving it to the Navy to fix the problem, it's that there's political issues at higher levels that prevent the Army from going in. I'm sure CENTCOM has a plan right now for sending in troops that would integrate the Army and Navy together, and is ready to execute that if ordered.
You're right, and it's a fundamental aspect of the US military. It's fine that the GP doesn't understand, but it's not fine to speak as if they do. Jointness is decades old now.
Politically, it's seems very unlikley that the US desires to send ground troops (which seem more likely to be Marines or special forces than regular Army) into Yemen. Yemen is tied up with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and a Mideast that's on a hair trigger. The US wants to de-escalate, not inflame the situation. Biden is very cautious about confrontation and military involvement anyway, but I can't imagine any president doing that. At worst, some local ally would do it with our help.
More likely would be airstrikes. The US has air bases all over the region, and can fly from anywhere due to refueuling capability; they don't need a carrier to do it. If the US did conduct airstrikes, I expect they would not publicize it to avoid escalation with Iran, in Yemen, in the Mideast generally, and pulling in Saudi Arabia too. That's exactly what Hamas and possibly Iran would like to see.
But the Houthi missiles aren't that big a problem, so far.
You are talking nonsense. There are no 'Houthi bases' to attack because it's a guerilla force. If the US could destroy Houthi rebels it would have done it already. You think the US somehow 'allowed' the Houthis to totally block commercial route trough the Red Sea instead of the actual reality that the US Navy and the allies were simply unable to prevent Houthis from doing it? Seems you are unaware that the Yemeni civil war has been going on for years now and the US Navy has been actively involved in it from the very beginning doing naval blockade of the Yemeni coast.
Houthi drones, missiles, and speedboats don't appear out of the ether. The Navy is taking a passive approach right now, only responding to threats rather than going in and attacking. At the least, if an antiship ballistic missile is fired, since it flies on a ballistic trajectory it's relatively easy to figure out where it came from and send a cruise missile back. Or if you want to be preemptive you could use tactics honed in Afghanistan to surveil and watch for the launch sites. Of course you can't eliminate guerilla forces using just airstrikes; but you can remove launching facilities. There weren't any major drone strikes or ballistic missile attacks in Afghanistan. Technically it's relatively not very difficult to have a surveillance plane orbit overhead watching for where ballistic missiles are coming from, then have orbiting fighters or bombers strike that before the launcher and its crew have had time to displace. The reason it hasn't been done is purely up to political decisions.
Yeah, right, the US left Afghanistan for 'purely political reasons', too. Not because they couldn't win the war even though they had 20 years to do it. Soviets left Afghanistan also because of purely political reasons, not because it was unwinnable war for them. Get a grip of reality, dude.
Yes, the US left Afghanistan because of political reasons, not technical reasons. The US lost the war in Afghanistan. All wars are waged, won, and lost for political reasons. The war in Afghanistan was unwinnable because there was no path to a viable democratic government in Afghanistan. That doesn't have any bearing on the effectiveness of tactical and technical measures.
So tell me what are these political reasons preventing the US from attacking Yemen? Saudi Arabia has been waging war with Yemen rebels for years now, and the US has been helping the Saudis. What exactly is preventing the US from getting even more involved? I'll tell you what: nothing, apart from the fact that the US knows that it will be a losing battle, another Afghanistan, never ending war that would cost the US trillions and would have nothing to show for all that wasted money. And why would it be never-ending? Because just like in Afghanistan the US can't fight guerillas for shit, especially now when the Houthis have powerful allies in the region. So it's all not because of some bullshit 'purely political' reasons but for very practical ones: the US military is simply not capable of decisively winning such a conflict. And that's why they are carefully treading now
>> The US military's fundamental approach is to use sensors to see the enemy before they see us,
> That probably works out in the open seas, but once you approach (enemy) land those radars that can detect anything that moves from 300 kms out are of no strategic advantage anymore, cause you do you know that there are enemies there by definition.
But that's in fact the US tactic in all domains, sea, land, air, and even space, and they've invested heavily in it for ~35 years: it first was used in the Gulf War (to great effect) in the early 1990s. Knowing the enemies are there is necessary, of course, but not sufficient. The sensor network's purpose is to pinpoint and track the enemies (who may move) so that they can be struck with precision missiles. (That's the reason the military built GPS, not for second lieutenants who can't manage a compass.)
Also, ships fighting a near-peer adversary (not Houthis with a few missiles, but China or Russia) need to focus on the air - that's where naval battles have been fought since Midway in WWII. The ships won't be near land anyway until the enemy is suppressed; carrier planes have a ~500 mile combat radius, without refueling, and that's not even enough any more due to precision missiles.
> Also, in regards to the general "no-one is thinking about that" sentiment, we've had such moments in the past, when the lack of any real naval combat for decades meant that it was very hard for non-institutional actors (like this guy is) to impose their views against the mainstream consensus.
That is a problem, though less of one in an open society where such things are extensively and publicly debated. But it's not an argument for the OP's point-of-view; they actually need to substantiate it, that would be an argument. As it is, they don't know basic information.
> nothing will stop the same Russians from using cheap drones against a big and expensive US warship approaching Vladivostok, for example.
I'm not sure what I said that disagrees? I wouldn't say 'nothing'; there's a lot of anti-drone technology, and a lot of anti-air technology on ships, but yes that's a real threat. The navy doesn't plan to approach coastlines under fire, as far as I know; the Marines have greatly deemphasized amphibious landings, for example, in part because - for reasons you say, and due to precision munitions more generally - there's no way to station ships offshore and then to move amphibious craft to the beach.
Letting yards fail may be the most politically sensitive change. It will be a disaster if the Navy decides to toughen up on yards but waits until the ship is delivered in poor condition to lay the hammer down. The earlier Naval officers are in the yards and shops identifying problems, the less painful changes for the shipyard will be. Companies can fire bad managers or exit the business while some value remains.
The bottom line is getting officers out of their offices. The rest will follow.
This is all just red herring. The decline of shipbuilding in the US is just the result of the general, nation-wide deindustrialization. And analogously, you can't revive the shipbuilding without reviving bigger industrial base.
The article claims that the US has over 100,000 shipyard workers, while Japan has about 70,000 and yet produces 20x more tonnage. This suggests that there's a lot more to it than just US deindustrialization.
But it also goes into some detail about why that's true as well. Essentially, to me the biggest issue is that Defense spending is a Congressional pork trough. Instead of centralizing for efficiency, everything is spread out so everyone gets their share.
It's a decent report for someone that has the merest of an idea what the Navy does/uses/needs. It shows how thoughts about various aspects of a ship's needs have changed over the years including walking back from implemented changes as they've responded to opponents' reactions to those changes. It's also in an interesting format seeing the difference from a report vs a presentation style slide deck that must be so tempting to use. Glad to see that actual reports are alive and well outside of the tech bubble.
It should take large number of bombers or ICBMs to render the US unable to build or repair her Navy.
In World War II we hijacked most of the industrial base for the war machine. After the war, there was incentive to be certain that the US was capable of outfitting the Armed Forces regardless of whether manufacturing slowly shifted overseas.
South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are too geographically close to a number of likely antagonists in the next global conflict. In the latter case, the distance might be negative.
They may be occupied or their industry bombed to dust as the opening moves in a protracted conflict.
There is something to be said for the DoD to effectively be paying rent (or a retainer, if you prefer that analogy) to Western Hemisphere manufacturing, with a large fraction in the continental US.
Centralized what exactly for efficiency in defense spending?
edit: downvote if you want but it's rather rude to do so with out providing an answer to my question. It comes off more like you're offended that your assumption in thought is being questioned.
Why the implication that we measure industrialisation in number of people? People are almost categorically not a factor in industrialisation. It is all about processes, technologies, expertise, organisation and economics.
The English speaking world has been on a decades-long campaign to reign in industry. Energy availability has been reduced. Environmental protection has been given supremacy. Manufacturing outsourced to Asia. An impenetrable net of regulations put in place to force businesses to conform to the average. There is the pattern of bailing out incompetent managers so that the financial system doesn't have to reform. In that environment, number of people is a weak metric.
The US has people, educated people and otherwise great people. I don't think at any point anyone has accused this of being a people problem. The issue is that capable people are being prevented from improving the situation.
> The issue is that capable people are being prevented from improving the situation.
What situation, specifically, needs to be improved? The US Navy does not, at present, have any need whatsoever to drastically increase the size of its fleet. Every ship that gets built is a ship that needs to be manned and maintained, which siphons money from elsewhere. We can bemoan the inefficiency of the existing shipbuilders, but that's just how the US sells welfare programs to conservative voters.
If you think that a hot war with China is in the cards, forget investing in shipbuilding infrastructure and instead put that money towards onshoring the rest of the national critical supply chain, much of which is in far more dire straits (ahem) than the shipyards.
If your argument is that US shipbuilding is supposed to be a welfare project then all is well. I suppose my mistake was thinking that the industry was there to build ships.
> The US Navy does not, at present, have any need whatsoever to drastically increase the size of its fleet.
How much of US military spending should be classed as welfare? Between Ukraine and Israel the US appears to be in a 1.5 front war and the European front hasn't covered itself in glory. This might be a good time to think about re-purposing the military from welfare projects to defence, if there is a hot war with China it'll be US vs. the world's preeminent industrial superpower. It'd be wise to prepare before it becomes necessary, they learn how to build things faster than the US does.
I don't think it is likely, but we've seen this last year how close the US is to a 3-front war. There are uncomfortable odds they'd lose; their ability to sustain overseas operations is in question. We're already looking at a debt crisis with what they pulled off in the last 20 years and that was mainly a fight with guerrillas and goat herders.
We are nowhere near a war, let alone a war on multiple fronts.
We have massive stockpiles of equipment and ammunition that we specifically earmark to give away and that's what we've been giving Ukraine. We do not and will not dip into what's allocated for national defense.
All of the "$X billions of aid" headlines are misleading, because most of it is material, not cash.
Israel has plenty of its own weaponry and can do what it pleases.
Characterizing the US's current commitments in Ukraine and Israel as 1.5 fronts is baffling. Neither of those constitutes even a tiny fraction of the American capability to wage war.
Yes, there are some commitments in the Eastern Med, but as Ford heads home, the Bataan ARG of literally three ships and zero full-sized aircraft carriers is judged sufficient to hold that down, because remember that their role in Israel is to, uh, do exactly nothing.
Now, putting aside Israel-as-such, there is Ike's group in the Red Sea. The Red Sea presence isn't directly about Israel, but about Houthi threats to global shipping. If the US was in a hot war, global shipping could go around Africa (which Maersk and another line had already decided to do, I've seen some pundit modelling on the costs and consequences, it's pretty miserable from the standards of peacetime, with consequences on the consumer supply chain, but in terms of "oh no the US might lose a hot war with China", going around Africa will just have to work itself out).
And yes, they're moving amazing amounts of arms to Ukraine, but not as much as it looks like. There's a lot of already-destined-for-scrap vehicles, and a lot of ammunition that was approaching the end of its shelf life, and so on. What fraction of Abrams went to Ukraine? (under 1%) How many F16s are going to Ukraine? (I believe that all nations collectively have committed around 60 F16s, which if supplied entirely by the US would be about 2% of US fighter aircraft.) Don't get it twisted, the US is not going full-bore in Ukraine. The stockpiles and production capacity of 155mm is a concern for sure, and air defense missiles too. But it's not even close to being a "front", even in terms of the logistics demands (and obviously in terms of combat personnel it is 0% of a front). And because of that conflict, Russia is nearly incapable of doing anything more aggressive than it already is, which frees up military resources relative to the situation 2 years ago. Except 155mm, of course.
None of this means that the US does or does not need to increase the size of its fleet to meet goals involving its pacing threat, which is the context of this thread, and I'm agnostic about that higher-level claim. And I'm not saying that everything is peachy, neither with respect to the health of the US fleet in general, or in particular with respect to industrial competitiveness vis a vis China. But the US is not currently in a 1.5-front war, that's just absurd.
> Neither of those constitutes even a tiny fraction of the American capability to wage war.
How would we know that? We haven't seen the US go to war against a top-ten global power in something like 70 years. They might be quite close to the cap of what they can do for all we know. Obviously they have nukes so they aren't going to be invaded, but their ability to control conflicts the like of which we see in Europe, sorta-present in the Middle East and potentially in Asia is very much open to doubt.
The linked article is suggesting that the US shipbuilding industry is operating at 1/20th of what a competitive shipbuilding industry in Japan is, that has interesting implications on the fact that the US is spending 10x as much in their military budget as Russia and 4x China.
I'm not up to speed on the state of stockpiles and democracies tend to be violent military behemoths. So I'd still bet on the US being comfortably ahead of everyone else. But it's performance in the Ukraine has not been as impressive as the gap in budgets suggests it should be. We might observe that it is exhausting the US's ability to provide military support. The US also happens to be broke if anyone cares to check in on their finances. It isn't at all absurd to question the US's military strength here; these wars are not easy for them. Particularly if the response to "this seems inefficient" is going to be "well it is really a welfare program; we don't expect effective production to be happening here".
Shipbuilding inefficient and the lack of onshore critical supply chain are two symptoms of the same problem: whether it's chips, shells, or ships: production capacity is critical in any prolonged conflict - which is something we've been agnostically gutting and impeding. It's desirable that we be able to build ships well[0] because being able to build ships well (or not) is a reasonable proxy for being able to build drones, fighter planes, or ballistic missles (whatever the next war calls for).
[0]Read: unacceptable for it to be otherwise for a superpower that would like to stay one. Actually cranking out ships is another thing but the capacity needs to be there (and tested/validated accordingly).
Obviously cause the largest chunk of profits from manufacturing doesn't go back into the factory or r&d, but into dividends/exec bonuses/stock buybacks/moved overseas to avoid taxes and other financial engineering.
So in GDP you can see clearly Finance sector growing while Manufacturing shrinks. Parasitic relationship. No one seems to be able to comes up with tools to invert that dynamic. I thought Big Tech would be the natural source of such tools but they have been over run by financial engineers too.
The other potential counter balancing force is govt getting into manufacturing big time, but Wall St has too much influence there too. They are great experts in getting govt to hand out subsidies and tariffs which they then siphon off.
That's exactly how deindustrialization looks like. Efficiency goes down because nobody knows how to build ships anymore (metaphorically speaking), so more people are required than before. A lousy analogy: think about history of agriculture mechanization but in reverse: the less mechanization the more work needs to be done manually again and the machines that are still in operation are harder and harder to operate because spare parts and technical expertise are getting harder to come by.
What kind of tonnage, though? A huge containership is easier to build than a modern nuclear submarine, for example, and gives you a hell of a lot more tonnage.
Not really. It’s more about the politicization of military contracting.
Every congressional district gets a piece of the pie, so the process is incredibly inefficient by design.
For all the hooh-rah, the US military is probably the greatest make work program since the pyramids. Many industries, especially tech, exist due to the largesse of the military.
When you hear pandering politicians quack about efficiency, they are a fool or a liar.
You say this as if there's no innovation in modern shipbuilding, as if the Koreans and Japanese who dominate the industry have just gotten really good at lashing together logs to make really big rafts.
That would be like saying that VC's don't invest in communication companies because communication is as old as civilization, and who wants to invest in semaphores and stone tablets anyways?
Long story short, yes, VCs have entered the defense industry (writ large) and although I have my doubts about whether said VC money will achieve FB-like returns, they are trying.
And to answer the GP poster.... The industry is not "ripe for disruption" because it's dominated more by the "invisible hand of the lobbyist" much more than the "invisible hand of the market".
Repealing the Jones Act would be good, but would not result in more US shipbuilding. It would just mean that ships meant for routes between US ports would be built in more competitive Japanese, Korean, and Chinese shipyards.
There is nothing within the Jones Act itself that currently prevents an innovative and enterprising American entrepreneur from building ships at a lower cost.
> There is nothing within the Jones Act itself that currently prevents an innovative and enterprising American entrepreneur from building ships at a lower cost.
There is. Without the Jones Act an innovative and enterprising American entrepreneur could build ships partially or wholly outside the US.
She could sell them to a re-invigorated domestic shipping industry. The re-invigoration coming from (1) lowered costs by being allowed to hire foreigners, (2) lower cost of capital, because foreign ownership is allowed, and (3) from the foreign competition spurring on productivity improvements.
A repeal of the Jones act would lower the costs of our American ship building entrepreneur directly, and increase demand for her products, by lowering the costs of her customers.
Yes but we're not talking about that. Everyone already knows foreign shipyards are very competitive. We are talking about why domestic shipyards aren't, and the Jones Act isn't to blame for it.
The Jones act still is for the reasons I outlined. It shelters them from competition, and it also outlaws partial outsourcing, too.
At a hypothetical example, consider if Thailand passed the equivalent of the Jones act but for computers. At the moment, Thailand produces a lot of hard disks. There are used all over the world, but also in Thai computers. With protectionism in place, Thailand would produce some complete computers for domestic use. But they would be just as abysmal and expensive as American ships. The overall size of the industry would likely be smaller than just the hard disk branch alone was.
(This example worked better before SSD were widespread.)
In the real world right now, a Thai entrepreneur can start building computers easily, because she's allowed to source parts from anywhere around the world. And Thai computer users are allowed to let foreigners service their computers, too.
Huge capital requirements, exclusive contracts with the government (naval), overseas competition (merchant, recreation), and not a ton of room for growth.
The moats are the guys you paid to put into power. And because your lifeblood comes from the government no one can outspend you. You just take from it to pay for who makes it up.
Of course, as SC Justice Thomas showed, there’s no real moat. And the people in power are just your friends. They’re not placed there by you. And the gifts you give them are just gifts. If you think you can make a better ship, convince my friend in power.
You should talk to some shipbuilding insiders. It is a culture of phoning it in. Really most all US defense contractors have that issue to some extent. Fat and happy.
Isn't a core issue that budgets (cost and time) are effectively fictional and that a lot of work is time and materials so there's no incentive to deliver high quality under budget and on time?
In my opinion the issue is cultural. Everything's in place to churn out a lot of ships, jets, missiles, night vision goggles, etc. Budgets are very high and schedules are realistic. Failure isn't scary enough. It's a problem that can only fixed from the top with sustained effort.
Lead by example. Demonstrate what putting in effort looks like, be passionate about the projects, and inspire others to be passionate about them.
I've made a very conscious decision to not work on weapons, but if I dedicated my life to making weapons then I would hopefully have a core drive to cultivate. Give meaning to the work. The security of your family and way of life are at stake.
If that isn't gaining traction after about six months then try to shake things up with the stick. Put middle managers on alert that failures without improvement won't be tolerated.
"A" position of power is insufficient here. "The" position of power is necessary. It's a big ocean and one person needs to have control of their section to be able to affect change.
It's the result of American business culture prioritising and incentivizing "shareholder value creation" (aka making wealthy fund managers more wealthy) above all else and regulatory capture of the government by the wealthy.
For the rest of us on the outside, the US often serves as an interesting experimental platform to test the most extreme ideas and see how things work out
The very notion of a service based industry is idiotic and feels gutturally wrong. If the US can’t bring back it manufacturing industries, we’re done for.
As an engineer I also feel the "realness" or whatever of manufacturing a real product, but countries that don't shift into a service economy tend to struggle more: there's fewer profitable investments and not enough places to sell goods. Our liberalization policies from the 90s until recently would not let us maintain the industries, and places like Germany or China with industrial policies more favorable to manufacturing are criticized by a lot of our policy makers, economists, media, etc.
It's not like there isn't manufacturing in the US. It's not great that the US shipbuilders are apparently fat and lazy, but for example, the US has 70+ modern destroyers in service, compared to the ~dozen that the apparently much more efficient Japanese and Korean shipbuilders have constructed for their countries.
The complaint is thus that we should have more for what we paid...
Maybe the fact that you need the physical, manufactured goods to live a comfortable life unlike 'financial services', that won't cloth you, won't transport you and definitively won't feed you.
Thanks to trade, you can transform one into the other.
The complaint seems to be that foreigners are willing to give you those ingredients for the comfortable life cheaper than you could produce then yourself. I don't really see what's wrong with that generosity.
Somehow we did just fine without fractional reserve system. And historically loaning money with interest was considered a great sin. So manufacturing can exist without any modern finance but modern finance can't exist when it's not backed by the 'real' economy.
The industrial revolution was (partially) enabled by finance. Especially Scotland managed to catch up so much with England during that time, because it had a better and more robust financial system.
I bring up the industrial revolution, because manufacturing before the industrial revolution existed, but with such low productivity that I am sure you wouldn't want to go back to that state.
I'm not sure the notion that interest was considered a sin by some people at some point in time carries much weight. First, have a look at all the other things considered great sins. Second, banks in the European middle ages did functionally earn interest income, they just used techniques that should be familiar to any modern tax optimiser or even sanction buster to officially call is something else.
One technique was to charge late fees. Technically as a debtor, you could pay your loan back on time at 0%, but if you ever wanted another loan, you better be fashionable late and pay your interest disguised as a late fee.
Another technique was to give you the loan in one currency and have you pay back in another. Then you can disguise the interest payments in the exchange rate.
There's also plenty of examples involving shenanigans with derivatives.
Have a look at modern Muslim finance for more examples.
So that golden age of no interest never really existed to begin with.
I don't buy your arguments that industrial revolution wouldn't happened without banking system. Industrialization of the Soviet Union is a prime example, Soviets pulled it off on a massive scale without any shenanigans with the debts and whatnot. You yourself actually proving this stating that the semi-modern banking with loans with interest already existed in the Middle Ages yet the industrial revolution only really kicked off in the XIX century. Industrial revolution was driven by the progress of science (steam machines, electric motors etc) and would have happened without any modern banking anyway. Pooling money of individual investors for great infrastructure projects like railways or factories etc. doesn't require any debt or bank mediation, in fact the entire idea of a corporation as we know know where investors are shielded from the liability doesn't need banking system at all to function just fine. And such investments were the most common of financing industrial projects during the peak of the industrialization, along side with the direct government subsidies, not banking loans
Be careful: are we talking about The Industrial Revolution, or later copy-cats?
Unlike the inventions of agriculture which happened multiple times independently, The Industrial Revolution happened only once and then spread.
It's still debated amongst historians and economists what factors caused The Industrial Revolution to happen in Britain when it did, and not earlier or later or elsewhere.
We know a bit more about what factors help or hinder copy-cat industrialisers. Just because we have more examples to study. You bring up a few yourself.
Btw, I never made the argument that you absolutely need a reasonable financial system to have any kind of industrialisation. I would argue that such a system helps with prosperity, but is not absolutely required.
(One good example that you didn't mention is actually the US. They got quite prosperous despite absolutely hobbling their financial system throughout all of their short history. See eg their bans on branch banking, and obsession with unit banks.)
But all else being equal, I'd rather live in a more prosperous society than the Soviet Union, which barely managed to industrialize at great cost and largely thanks to oil money.
> Maybe the fact that you need the physical, manufactured goods to live a comfortable life unlike 'financial services', that won't cloth you, won't transport you and definitively won't feed you.
Thanks to the division of labour, the tailor doesn't have to drive a car, nor does the bus driver have to make her own clothes. Similarly, people can work in a bank and trade to acquire clothing and transportation.
If they are particularly good at providing banking services, they will be able to acquire a bigger bundle of those manufactured resources than if they worked the factories themselves.
Just like the tailor can get more bus rides with less hassle by selling clothing, then by getting behind the wheel herself.
Btw, what do you have against fractional reserve banking? It seems to universally spring up in anything remotely resembling a free market. Systems with 100% reserves only ever exist when governments interfere, and even then only briefly, because they are brittle. See eg https://www.cato.org/blog/friday-flashback-state-100-percent...
You make some good points. Yes, Soviet Union didn't 'invent' industrialization, just copied what was already well known and didn't need to go through the pains of incremental improvements and some dead ends in science etc. and instead could just look up to the already industrialized Western countries to see what works and what doesn't. You are however wrong stating that they did it thanks to oil money. They didn't trade any oil with the West till the late 60s and by then they already started their decline.
Regarding the financial services, I acknowledge that they are useful, my problem with them is that they disconnected from the real economy and instead of being a tool subservient to the needs of that economy they started to live on their own and even enslave big swaths of the actual economy. That is simply not sustainable, sooner or later the countries that actually produce real products decide that they don't need a third party skimming off top of their work and develop their own finance sector and then you are left with nothing, there's no _sustainable_ wealth creation by slushing money around between different banks and accounts, the money needs to be put to some _productive_ use. Some tiny countries can survive as tax heavens but it's a very precarious situation and can change over night. Sure you can have one Switzerland, but it's just an exception related to specific history, you really can't have two Switzerland-like countries living off finance, there's simply no room for that.
My beef with the fractional reserve is that it is too easy to abuse it. The idea is sound and good, it works nice and makes everyone more wealthy as long as the money creation is kept in line with the growth of the economy. But that's not the case in practice. That's the problem. Countries start pumping in 'empty' money into the system to paper over structural problems, but then these issues come back with double force to bite in the ass.
Singapore does fine as a 'second Switzerland'. So I'm not sure where you get the notion that there can be only one Switzerland-like country? (Hong Kong was in a similar boat for quite a while, but it has decreased in importance lately. Not because the global economy didn't want finance any more, but mostly because of PRC mismanagement.)
If NYC or London were independent countries, they would be in similar situations. They even have similar population numbers as the financial centres mentioned above.
When has a financial centre ever imploded overnight? Especially where that was not due to internal mismanagement, but due to shifts in the outside economy? (Though even with plenty of mismanagement, Hong Kong is still around as an important financial centre. Just not as important as before, and the decline has been slow.)
Amsterdam was once a more important financial centre, but its relatively decline has also been slow.
> The idea is sound and good, it works nice and makes everyone more wealthy as long as the money creation is kept in line with the growth of the economy.
I agree that government should be kept out of the money creation business. Private note issuing banks tend to do better. See George Selgin's work for more.
> Countries start pumping in 'empty' money into the system to paper over structural problems, but then these issues come back with double force to bite in the ass.
I am not sure what you are talking about here. You mention countries, so I assume you are talking about a system with a central bank?
Well as long as the central bank makes sure inflation (or nominal GDP) stay on target, the problem you describe just doesn't exist.
> Regarding the financial services, I acknowledge that they are useful, my problem with them is that they disconnected from the real economy and instead of being a tool subservient to the needs of that economy they started to live on their own and even enslave big swaths of the actual economy.
I'm not sure how this enslaving is supposed to happen.
OK, again, you make good points about Singapore being like a second Switzerland. But what I was trying to convey initially is that such countries are like oversized tax heavens. Combined population of both is what, 10 million? Compared to 8 billion humans living in this world. That was my point. How many more countries can you convert to live off finance? It's a niche, a very cozy one for sure, but it's not something that would be globally applicable. And anyway, since most of the capital flowing through these small countries is foreign, it's subject to the restrictions of the countries of the origin. So it's not really Switzerland or Singapore's capital.
The enslaving happens by 'financialization' of industries. This term has already well known meaning which you can look-up to get a good description because I'm afraid I can't articulate it good enough. But in a nutshell it means destroying industrial base for short-term gains and siphoning off of _existing_ wealth from the industry into finance.
Finance is one example of a service based industry. Tourism is another, and there are plenty of countries with extensive tourism industries. There's also healthcare, hospitality in general, media, education, etc.
> And anyway, since most of the capital flowing through these small countries is foreign, it's subject to the restrictions of the countries of the origin. So it's not really Switzerland or Singapore's capital. The enslaving happens by 'financialization' of industries.
There are basically two ways to use other people's money: via debt or via equity. Those other people would either be your creditors or your shareholders.
When people use 'slavery' metaphors in the context of finance, they usually mean to say that debtors are the slaves of the creditors. You seem to imply that the notion is the other way round? That's somewhat peculiar.
For 'financialisation', I am going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization and it doesn't seem particularly scary. Though different people seem to mean very different things by that word. Eg the introduction talks about increasing debt-to-equity ratios.
If you are worried about those ratios, ie about leverage, one targeted change you could make is to remove the tax advantage that debt enjoys over equity: companies typically get to pay interest with pre-tax dollars and have to pay dividends with post-tax dollars.
If you want companies to use relatively more equity and less debt, you should remove that subsidy of debt.
> But in a nutshell it means destroying industrial base for short-term gains and siphoning off of _existing_ wealth from the industry into finance.
How do you 'destroy' an 'industrial base for short-term gains'? Usually a short term focus in the economy means that interest rates are high. But I'm not quite sure how that fits here.
>The bottom line is getting officers out of their offices. The rest will follow.
This is not necessarily true.
An analogy would be saying a company has a software quality problem where things are always late and broken... and thinking the solution is hiring more managers and getting them more involved in the day-to-day work of programmers.
Management is a part of the problem but throwing more managers at the problem isn't the solution.
Defense acquisitions is hideously complex and involves many stakeholders from entirely different heirarchies often changing their minds half way through and making politically- or career-motivated decisions that have little to do with "doing a good job".
Fixing this involves somebody or some group motivated more by "doing a good job" than everybody else's motivations to go in and sort out the inefficiencies and broken processes and organization. It's hard. It's not a matter of "we need more of our guys in on this".
The article is not saying to hire more officers. It is saying that the officers we already have are not spending their time where they need to be.
Also, the officers are not managing the shipyards. They are doing customer oversight. So having the officers spend more time out of their offices is not a case of managers getting more involved in day-to-day work. It's a case of the customer's representative getting more involved in understanding how the product is made and seeing the impact of that on customer requirements.
> getting them more involved in the day-to-day work of programmers.
Just a point. Getting people involved in the day to day of programmers, or really any one building things is exactly what works. The more management know, the better they are at unblocking problems, or steering people onto the correct task. It's magical thinking to heap crap on managers and expect that devs or welders will just build the correct thing.
I take it you’ve never been micromanaged. Management well done doesn’t equal just more of it. Organizations in trouble often just reach for exactly that and in doing so make things worse. Better can mean doing more in some places, but things don’t automatically improve by adding more management.
My understanding is that the officers are supposed to be doing this oversight and not traditional management. The shift-left aspect of it is more about correcting problems sooner rather than letting a huge capital investment go to waste.
The best idea I heard of to solve this problem is the ancient Greek "liturgy" [0], whereby the richest citizens would be compelled to spend their money on public works such as ship construction. Scott Alexander recently made a good (though somewhat tongue in cheek) case for reviving this [1].
