Design As We Go Fails (Again)

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/07/25/lcs-kerfuffle-navy-gao-may-be-in-violent-agreement-after-all/



The $584 million dollar USS Freedom

LCS Kerfuffle: Navy, GAO May Be In ‘Violent Agreement’ After All
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on July 25, 2013 at 4:50 PM

CAPITOL HILL: Bark, it turns out, does not necessarily correlate with bite. The Government Accountability Office is infamous for its often scathing reviews of Pentagon programs, and its latest report on the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship — one of GAO’s favorite targets — says Congress should “pause” LCS procurement until key systems are more adequately tested. But, as a GAO witness admitted in a hearing this morning, there may actually be nothing the Navy could or should do differently than its current shipbuilding plans.

That said, the ships themselves — the so-called seaframes — are just one of the three pieces of the LCS program and, by GAO’s reckoning, they are the least problematic. GAO worries more about the LCS mission modules, the plug-and-play equipment that goes on the seaframe to kit the ship out for specific missions. And GAO worries most about the evolving concept of operations (CONOPS) for how the Navy is going to maintain the LCS vessels and fix them when they break down, as the first LCS, USS Freedom, did just days ago off Singapore. In many ways, the GAO’s proposal to “pause” procurement looks like an attempt to hold hostage the best-performing part of the program, the seaframes, until the Navy shapes up on the parts that GAO is really worried about, modules and CONOPS.

It’s not easy to change course on a program this far along. 24 ships are already under contract despite LCS still being formally under “low-rate initial production” (LRIP). “We’re married into a lot of this that we can’t change,” the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Randy Forbes, told me after the hearing. “A lot of this has been poured into concrete, as you know, but I think there are some avenues that we have” to make “modifications,” he said, if not wholesale changes.

Congress needs to conduct serious oversight and get real answers to tough questions, Forbes said: “I hope we don’t just whine.”

[JayhawkSD]

1. One question I've never seen answered.

This thing supposedly has "modules" for different modes of operation: anti-submarine, anti-ship, troop carrying, whatever.

Suppose the ship is carrying the surface battle package and is out looking for surfacd ships to fight. It doesn't find any, but discovers a submarine. They can't fight the submarine because the anti-submarine package is back in port. So they scream dirty names at the submarine and haul ass back to port to get the anti-submarine package.

They get back to where the submarine was but the submarine is gone. That should not actually surprise anyone, but for some reason this crew was expecting the submarine to have been waiting for them to come back properly equipped to sink it, which would have made it a pretty stupid submarine.

What is there is a small fleet of enemy surface ships, which our ship is now not equipped to fight, since it left the surface package in port. Our gallant but not very bright crew lobs a few depth charges at the surface ships before being sunk by the ships it was prepared to fight before it left to go get ready to fight the submarine.

[unhappycamper]

2. Mission modules for the LCS do not currently exist.

None. Nada. Zip.

The biggest gun that thing is one (BAE) 57mm pop gun on the bow.

[JayhawkSD]

3. Well, yes, there's that too.

So at this point they can't do anything other than intercept drug runners, which is what we have the Coast Guard for.

Not to mention that the stupid thing breaks down on a regualr basis, that is to say, it loses its main propulsion system. I served on a diesel boat that was twenty years old at the time with its original diesels, and we never missed a movement order. Well, we did get underweigh on battery power once because none of the engines would start, but we got two engines running before the batteries went flat.

But, once the modules do get built and engines that run more reliably. how the fuck do they decide which one they should be carrying and what do they do if they encounter a situation for which they are equipped with the wrong module? Where are the spare modules kept, and how far away from this module storage spot can the ship operate if it has to keep coming back to port to reconfigure itself every time the mission changes?

This whole concept is FUBAR to the nth degree.

[unhappycamper]

4. Our congresscritters liked the LCS so much they ordered another $37 billion dollars 'worth'.

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/jul/25/Littoral-navy-gao-slow-production-house-committee/?st