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!
11 comments:
Seems we've chatted about repairs and our inability to sustain warships in the field. Lack of parts due to politics. Lack of repair ships and their trained crews requiring use of forward bases vulnerable to missile strikes like Bahrain.
That and the almost custom made level of our missiles and such. Not very scalable even with massive "money" thrown at them even before the Chinese grasp on rare earth mining, refining (a dirty job) and fabricating.
That F35's radar systems required Chinese made parts showed up as more and more F35's are going on duty without a radar.
Nothing like attacking the oil supply of the nation that MAKES critical parts for most of your Wunder weapons.
Taiwan will not be attacked but adsorbed peacefully by China as America's "Security Envelope" continues to show weakness. Already Taiwan is doing trade deals with China for oil, batty gas, rare earths and helium as out Not Open Strait continues to harm our Asian allies.
So much winning.
We are actually sustaining DDG very well, somehow. Co7ld say the same for CVN. The Navy deliberately destroyed the Fleet’s IMA capabilities at every level. No one ever explained that one in any way that makes sense. That was one of the reasons I enjoyed working with the Philippine Navy. They kept all that infrastructure and used the same names for it that I did.
One amusing thing is how we completely ran out of weapons 4: 5: 6: 8 years ago. Barely hanging on by our teeth….
Oddly I'd love to see a link or 2 about us "running out of weapons " from a couple of years ago.
There were whole flocks of them at Sal’s and of course Andrei always claims we have no more left. The NYT and Post used to wail about how little 155mm ammo we has left that we had to beg the ROK to give us some se we could give it to Ukraine who then turned around and sold it on the market.
LOL I can find links WE DID BUY 155mm from South Korea for Ukraine.
Too easy.
Now do Patriot missiles.
https://foreigndesknews.com/asia/u-s-gets-500000-artillery-shells-on-loan-from-south-korea-to-fill-plummeting-stocks/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20reached%20an%20agreement%20last%20month%20to,Reuters%20reported%20Wednesday%2C%20citing%20a%20South%20Korean%20newspaper.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/manufacturing-woes-hamper-us-155-mm-ammo-production/ar-AA27TT1C?ocid=BingNewsSerp
Ah YEP, wish I could shorten the links but even basic 155mm shells seems hard for America to make in industrial war levels.
What do I mean industrial war?
4.2 million annually
Russian artillery production of 122mm and 152mm shells expanded swiftly from 0.4 million rounds in 2022 to an estimated 4.2 million annually by 2025.
Seems we even have troubles finding enough explosives to fill our shells.
https://www.defensenews.com/land/2024/02/06/us-army-hunts-for-explosives-to-meet-increased-munitions-output-goals/
HMS it's NOT the 1980's when you and I were military.
I think there was no real shortage, merely uninformed people waging war on the Administration. Patriots and SM are a real issue because drones alone can destroy targets worth billions and those two systems are massive overkill.
Must give you credit for stubbornness friend.
So many point out that Iran hasn't seriously attacked our navy, so we're not low on anti-missile ammo. That we've stripped all other commands of the bulk of their SM2's and Patriots never seems to make an impact on that thinking.
I think the lack of major losses of our Naval ships is Iran trying to avoid a "Remember the Maine" event.
Iran needs to outlast us, just like Afghanistan, and Vietnam. Both cases they won because American's don't DO massive casualties since WW2.
As long as Iran and Russia (in the proxy war against America-NATO) avoid getting nuked they can win.
It boils down to the unserious nature of our elected leaders. America is toast because we went 40 years with idiots in charge. Over a hundred years with thieves in charge of the money. Over 50 years with communist morons in charge of education... Sir John Glubb is correct about the age of an empire. Unfortunately, the American empire is at the expiration date. The question now is what will replace it? I predict a slow fade followed by balkanization of the CONUS. Asking the way, the US dollar will utterly collapse in value due to the unpayable national debt. At a certain point, the creditors will realize that the treasury notes are worthless and then it's game over.
*Along the way
I don't despair of the Empire. That will come. It is the outgrowth of the fall of The Republic. Americans don't know any history and they don't realize how the situation can literally change overnight. We have never had a "Ruthless Man" run things. I mean, hopefully we never will but it is not beyond possibility.
I mention Oliver Cromwell a bit in the blog because that was just about the last ruthless Englishman. They massacred most of the remaining men of his caliber over the next 300 years but they could still produce one. Ditto the French. Their last ruthless men probably perished with the Terror and the end of the Jacobins.
Germans did industrial terror on a scale not seen up to that point and somehow turned into the biggest pussies on the planet.
For an Empire to work there has to be gold out there in them hinterlands. If there is no profit there is no Empire. Looking at the mess of Europe and Asia right now I don't see any way to extract any profit from either and none at all from Africa. That's one reason for feeling sanguine about the rise of Empire here. On the gripping hand, those stories Heinlein wrote about the Prophet Scudder and the rest are right on the money if the Ruthless Man steps up. I'm thinking it will look something like Aum Shinrikyo in Japan to start and then get much much worse.
As I look at the fools and sewage from the Left I see people who would, if they had the power, kill every single person they could find who they find objectionable and kill their families and business associates. They are scary but very inept. They're, for the most part, self-eliminating.
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