There is a widespread, nearly universal disdain for trolls in every social media I know of and yet I was given to wonder the other day as I drove back home from near Columbus if there might be something the troll hammers don't ever seem to think about. I actually enjoy visiting a few websites where they put down the trolls in a careful humanitarian way and then banish them to Mars. The social media at twitter and facebook and perhaps the rest of the blogosphere I don't go visit, seem to view their job in hammering trolls every day, as duty. On reflection, most of the trolls, perhaps 95% are real asses who need to be shown the curb but there's the other 5%. Ever wonder about them?
When the CNO and his dream team decided to commit every resource the USN had in its surface combatant construction budget to build an utterly worthless class of ships and then screwed that up so badly they could not down-select and pick ONE as the most viable and worthwhile hull and decided they were just going to build two completely different ships and then declared them both to be the same Littoral Combat Ship, they got some criticism. To be honest, the real surface warfare officer, ship-driving, war-fighting types took one look at these two abortions and declared war on them.
They were pretty critical and they didn't hold back much in their disdain for such useless "warships" and the idiotic notion that one weak and pathetic ship could be made into 4 different ships by swapping out a module in some nearby port in under a day and return to combat as a Surface Warfare Ship, a Mine Sweeper/Hunter, an Anti-Submarine hunter killer and last and least, as a sort of super enormous MK V SEAL delivery vessel supporting irregular warfare missions. 12 years later and not one of those 'modules' exist. The missiles the ships were designed to carry were canceled and that concept scrapped many years ago. Sort of like the wonderguns of the Zumwalt Class destroyers where the Navy finally accepted the fact that the cost of each artillery shell exceeded the cost of a Tomahawk land attack missile.
The critics were all correct and respectful but what they failed to realize, all of them, was that the CNO, NAVSEA, OPNAV N85 and just about everybody else in the top echelons considered them trolls and after reaching that conclusion they simply ignored everything the critics said. After all, they were trolls.
9 comments:
The Pro-LCS trolls drove me away from Sal's place. They just cannot accept that the LCS cannot work. I salute Sal for his patience with people like Lazarus, but really.
any idea how many rounds for a zumwalt super gun one could buy for the price of an F-35 or two? or is that opening a half healed wound and applying some nice lemon juice to it?
Interesting question and the answer is a little terrifying. For the cost of one F35 @ $90,000,000 you could buy 65 tomahawk missiles which means you couldnt fill the ready service magazine for even one supergun on a Zumwalt. You gotta wonder if the program manager for that mistake is still being tortured in the basement at NAVSEA. Also, some Admiral made the decision to go LRIP on them knowing the out of realms of possibility for buying ammunition and still made the decision to go ahead and put those guns on the ship. Hopefully that admiral is beside the PM getting tortured in the basement.
Some of the guys in my division did work supporting LCS, including the least of the modules and the one nobody ever talks about because the USN wants to pretend they don't need it and don't want to talk about (extra crew facilites module to expand the crew to a number that might almost be able to make the ships float if not fight). Also, single gun, srsly? You know how often they don't work?
A FLETCHER, on half the displacement, had five radar controlled 5" /38s, five tubes, six K guns, two roller racks, three twin, and two quad Bofors, and seven twin Oerlikons.
She could sail and fight in any water deeper than 15 feet. Less than five feet under the hull, and they handled oddly.
The 5" /38s had 500 rounds apiece, ten ready use in the gunhouse, sorry in the upper handling room, and the rest in the magazine.
I wonder how well a LCS would fare against a FLETCHER?
as much as you surface warfare types do not care for LCS and the Zumwalt class in toto, pilots could give you a run for the money there with the F-35(which sucks eggs). Marines must look at the stubby winged STOVL abortion and wonder where to hang the ordnance(if it could even get off the deck) they need to support the ground force at the FEBA.
Nothing fails better than a highly stressed aircraft stuffed to the gills with highly integrated avionics and a pilot who is saturated with tasks and incoming information and so many engineering compromises that...
sorry, off on another rant about Lockheed abortions-way too much experience with their products to just let sleeping dogs lay.
On two of the projects I was involved in as a Program staff guy the boss was adamant that we not tell Lockheed about anything. We went to alt contracting to avoid dealing with Lockheed and somehow they found out about the RFP and demanded to be included. Naturally they came in at twice the cost of the 3 contractors we had sent the RFP to. Since we had to treat cost as an independent variable and that was up to them that does that, we at the techeval simply had to find their proposals were ludicrous. That wasn't too hard.
so, back to the conversation you were having about the "modular" combat ships. when the module got swapped out from say, seal team transport to asw, was the plan to also swap out the crews trained in transporting seals and all their lovely goodies-for an tight knit asw crew capable of turning subs into coral reefs? or was the plan to just saturate the sailors with so much training and perishable skills that training would be a 100% training evolution all the time, as in good at a lot but not great at any one thing??? I don't understand their thinking.
The simpletons in charge thought they could train a highly competent ship's company that could do any of the tasks required and augment them with a handful of experts (mechanics and technical types) and the crew could do it all. The problem of course is that the crew is one layer deep. There is no backup. There would be one sonar tech, one interior comms tech, one quartermaster, one signalman, etc and yet the bozos never thought the billets would be gapped by NAVPERS not conducting contact reliefs, allowing for leave or illness or for schools. I played that game for a couple of years on a somewhat smaller ship and we made do. Hell, we got a ship underway with 18 crewman total including officers and staid underway for 4 days. We had one EOOW, one Topwatch, one Switchboard watch. As I told the CO, we can do it if we're allowed to sleep on watch.... It's a ridiculous conceit.
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