ON REPAIRS

 Some people think that the military and Navy's problem with self repair is that we simply gapped the structural manpower with the necessary training, education and skill to carry out troubleshooting, maintenance and repair of complex everyday systems on our ships and combat vehicles. Sadly, that is part of the problem but it is not the problem. The problem is one of spares and access to them.

One of the sad realities of life starting in the 90s was that we made many fewer same type systems and also decided to save money by not buying or budgeting for spare parts. I'm not kidding. The $ used to procure the actual hardware that was given to the Fleet or the FMF was Procurement $ and those could only be used to purchase an initial allowance of spare parts and even then we cheated outrageously to try to buy as many parts as we could because we in the Program Office knew for a fact that there was no, and never would be, a budget line to buy spares for these new systems.

Spares are essential but they don't happen in the right Congressional District and so they cannot find a sponsor who reliably pokes and prods his peers into seeing to it that enough money is put into spares every year in the out years so that there will always be spares. The system was initially designed to run this way but then the bottom fell out of the Procurement Bonanza and the spares became unreasonably expensive.

There was also the problem that as systems reached their end of service in the Fleet we had Logistics types who maintained warehouses bulging with spare parts for thoroughly obsolete weapons and weapon systems. They were spending good money looking after billions of $ of spare parts for F-14's that left the service a decade or two ago. The stories were common and not unfounded. [Iran was paying good money under the table for those spares! It's not like they were going completely to waste.]

As the LCS hit the fleet the trail of tears spares was just a trickle compared to what was to come. Absolutely nobody put their career on the line to line up invulnerable supplies of critical spares and long lead replacement items for infernally complex ships. They just didn't do it. This is why you see Admirals who seriously decided it was more economical to scrap the brand new but broken and fundamentally useless $500,000,000 ship rather than replace the engines and combiner gear. First, they had no replacement engines and Second, they had no replacement combiner reduction gears. Simplest solution? Shitcan it.

That's the endgame of buying war machines without the tail to support them. We have been doing that now since Vietnam. That's a long time to screw up that badly. How many submarines have we scrapped because we cannot fix them inside of 9 years? How many cruisers went to the bottom because we could not repair them? 

The Admirals always claim they are saving money and that savings will be applied to the follow on new ships and aircraft. That never happens. It never happens because we never 'save' any money by scrapping irreplaceable ships. We simply grind up and spit out existing ships and aircraft much faster than they were designed to last.

On the other hand, I'd say from here, that it looks like the DDG guys all did their jobs very well indeed.  BZ!