CUTTING STEEL

 There is some talk that the Secretary of the Navy was fired because he did not produce a battleship in something less than one year on the job. While I find this unbelievable there is some truth to the failure of our shipbuilding business model in the United States Navy. The shipbuilding people simply cannot get out of their own way and set about building a ship because they have institutionalized the entire process and codified it and wrapped it in concrete and made it just about impossible. God could not build a warship in this country in less than 20 years.

I worked with the sweep riders of destruction in the organization called Naval Sea Systems Command and they were petrifying and ossifying to a degree you literally cannot imagine. The Supervisor of Shipbuilding, Construction and Repair took the last 60 years off to get a manicure and the only time they are ever seen is, suspiciously, after dark when they finish sucking the last blood and marrow from the bones of a good idea.

Their little brothers in the Combatant Craft Department live to make and preserve the perfect boat. Anything less than perfect or marred in any way or modified at all without permission that takes years and tens of thousands of $ to get approved, is simply not allowed. I was amazed to see that what they did was done so thoroughly that it was far easier to actually procure patrol boats offshore rather than try to build one in the United States that was not able to bypass NAVSEA CCD and lay claim to the protection of Special Operations which had its own very different and separate acquisition chain. In my own case I started out with even better protective cover but that faded away as the boats neared completion and CCD got involved.

The people working at Combatant Craft, SupShip and even NAVSEA as a whole, are not evil nor do they think of themselves as other than imperfect Gods laying a firm but guiding hand on the cowboys that just want to get the ship built, the boat to float and get on with it. They act in strict accordance with the guidelines created and maintained forever by NAVSEA. My favorite apocryphal story had to do with an article I read in the Surface Force Quarterly Engineering Bulletin about a team of experts from NAVSEA called in to determine why one of our missile hydrofoil patrol craft could not get up on its foils and hit top speed. The crew and experts had tweaked everything and it all showed in the green and yet the foil craft persisted in wallowing along at 12 knots instead of stepping up onto its foils and speeding down river at 50 knots. It turns out they had 12 tons of extraneous paperwork (NAVSEA complete Technical Manuals) onboard and the boat was simply too heavy.

 

If we really do want to build ships in this country and in particular, warships, we need to take a flame thrower to NAVSEA in all its iterations and branches and clean out about 90% of the people and processes that ossified and solidified about the time we switched from steam to gas turbines. It probably never helped that the place turned into a flower garden for nuclear power officers and chiefs who all set about forbidding all change and all deviance from specifications as both Heresy and unGodly. In short we need to do what Elon Musk did to rocket building and launching and to Twitter. A lot of people with rock solid political connections to every sitting senator and congresscritter need to be turfed out and put out to pasture.

This can happen and it has happened before. I myself was blown away a couple of months ago talking to an engineer about some crypto work and finding out that some of the die-before-changing aspects of red/black physical separation had changed 180 degrees since the last time I was involved. Things I never thought could happen back when KVM switches first appeared are now accepted best practice by DIRNSA. Who knew? 

What will it take to change NAVSEA? Well I cannot tell the whole of it but it will only work if the new SECNAV simply, for the good of the service, fires every single Flag Officer and SES civilian working at NAVSEA. Every single one and they have to be replaced with outsiders who have demonstrated the knack for telling underlings to stop fucking around with their precious processes and make things happen. Yes, this did not work out well for SeaFighter and some other concept ships but that is because those Flag Officers and SES who were bypassed were still in place 2 years later to crap all over the changes and revert to the deep channel. All of them have to go.

And if you simply look at our shipbuilding industry and capabilities with this one Query in mind...What could anyone possibly do to fuck it up even more than it is right now, your answer will be obvious, nothing. Go ahead and slash and burn to your heart's content because no injury you could possibly do to it matches the pure uselessness of the industry as it is now. And one final thing, for the love of God don't crawl into bed with anyone from the American Shipbuilding industry or the Trade in the United States. They are all demons in human form. Go and find your top level and many of your midlevel managers for the shipbuilding process WHERE THEY STILL BUILD SHIPS. Give them visas, a flame thrower and the authority to hire and fire and you will build ships again.