Recommended article on the Littoral Combat Ship. Here’s a good bit: “Cracks, corrosion, and equipment breakdowns are common in new warship designs, especially designs that are radically different (like the broad trimaran shape of the USS Independence). Usually, these problems can be fixed, but there’s always the risk that the new design will be seriously flawed, requiring extensive rework and a halt in building more ships of that class. That is what happened with LCS. There is some nervousness about all this. The U.S. Navy has not introduced a radical new design for nearly a century.”
NET ASSESSMENT: THE PENTAGON CAN COUNT SHIPS (BUT NOT MUCH ELSE). War on the Rocks podcast episode.
In case you missed it: “Section 820 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 (NDAA) establishes a new Defense Cost Accounting Standards Board (D-CASB) to oversee the application of the cost accounting standards (CAS) to defense contracts.” Congress loves to streamline with one hand and inject bureaucracy with another. But it is amazing, after almost 50 years of trying with the CAS, we still don’t have consistency in proposing, accumulating, and reporting costs.
Inside Lockheed Martin’s Epic Smell of Space Prank. (April Fool’s!)
An outsider’s take on acquisition.
Navy Unveils $3.2B Unfunded List: 2 F-35s, New Laser & More Precision Strike. The biggest item: $814 million to cover ship depot maintenance, which Richardson, in his letter to Congress, said suffers from “financial shortfalls associated with work scope and pricing growth.”
Two Marine pilots died in a helicopter crash during a training mission in southwestern Arizona.
The Navy’s Railgun Might Be So Powerful It Could “Blow the Top Off a Mountain”. Speculative.
‘How Is Yoda?’: An Appreciation Of Andy Marshall.
Indo-Pacom Commander Says Only Half Of Sub Requests Are Met. A slice: “We’re going to lose our quantitative edge in about the 2025 timeframe. I think that’s going to be a challenge for our equities in the region,” Davidson said… By 2020, China is expected to have 70 submarines – a combination of nuclear- and diesel-powered subs, according to a January U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report. In comparison, the U.S. Navy generally keeps about 30 submarines – roughly 60 percent of its total fleet of 51 submarines – operating in the Pacific. However, as Los Angeles-class fast attack submarines retire, the Navy is expected to only have a total fleet of 42 submarines by 2026.
Socializing America’s Defense Industry.
Project Maven update: According to a Pentagon memo signed last year, however, no one at Google needed worry: All 5,000 pages of documents about Google’s work on the drone effort, known as Project Maven, are barred from public disclosure, because they constitute “critical infrastructure security information.”
Agile vs. Top-Down Management: Leadership Must Evolve as an Organization Matures. “When you combine elements of Agile management with top-down alignment, you create the best of both worlds: engaged teams that can work with autonomy, and cross-organizational clarity on the direction of the company.” Annoyances at the link.
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