War Is Boring

“The growing cost of warships in recent years has led the Navy to reduce its orders, and the resulting loss of economies of scale has driven costs of individual warships even higher,” the Associated Press reports. ”That spiral has left everyone unhappy, including the Navy, members of Congress, defense contractors — and shipbuilders who fear for their jobs.”

Part of the solution is for the Navy to give shipyards firm and realistic blueprints rather than vague — and perhaps impossible — notions of what it wants. Fuzzy requirements resulted in huge cost overruns on the Littoral Combat Ship, which prompted the Navy to cancel the second LCS slated for Lockheed Martin and Congress to reduce funding for future vessels:

Critics say the Navy should shoulder some of the blame for escalating costs for asking for too many features on its ships. Also, shipbuilders account for only a portion of a ship’s cost. Much of it is devoted to high-tech weapons systems made elsewhere.

The Littoral Combat Ship, 55 of which are to be built, was rushed under an expedited process using smaller shipyards. The Navy wants a ship that’s capable of operating in shallow, coastal waters to meet emerging threats, including modern-day pirates and terrorists.

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, said it made no sense to order ships and set prices without a final blueprint, which is what happened as shipbuilders moved quickly to build a ship that the Navy wanted fast.

Even if it gets back on track, the LCS program won’t help the big (and struggling) shipbuilders much, since the design is essentially a modified ferry and is being built by smaller commercial shipyards that are already in pretty good financial shape. In lieu of LCS, Bath Iron Works in Maine — one of the nation’s six large shipywards that combined employ more than 20,000 people — is hoping to win orders for some of the dozen or so Joint High Speed Vessels that the Navy and Army are planning to build to haul people and supplies in shallow waters. Building a few of the JHSVs will help Bath bridge the gap between the current Arleigh Burke class of destroyers and the future Zumwalt destroyer class. But the JHSV has all the makings of an LCS-style disaster, as I explained in Defense Technology International in May:

The services are seeing their requirements for HSVs beginning to diverge. “There’s a fight over what exactly JHSV should look like,” [analyst Bob] Work says. “The Army doesn’t need as much helicopter space as the Navy. [Army Logistics Support Vessels] don’t carry people; JHSV would carry people and vehicles.”Even if they can agree on JHSV’s layout, the services face an uphill battle for funding. In light of their happy experience with [leased transport] WestPac Express, “the Marine would like to have a lot of these things,” Work reports. But with shipbuilding budgets stretched by cost overruns on LCS plus with new destroyers priced at $3 billion or more, tentative Navy plans call for buying only three JHSVs between 2009 and 2011 at a cost of around $200 million apiece. Work says that cost figure is unrealistic and that $400 million is more likely.

The Army is planning to buy an initial four JHSVs over the same period, but appears unlikely reach its target fleet size if the cost grows, as expected. “The Army wanted 18 to 25,” Work says. “Once they get up to $400 million, the Army has to start saying that C-130s might be okay.”

The bottom line for JHSV, Work says, is that “requirements, cost and program requirements all uncertain.”

Keep an eye on this one, folks.  

Related posts:

1. Warships International Fleet Review: USA Should Have a Bigger Small-Ship Navy