(06-08-2017 06:49 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  It's pretty surprising in my eyes that these things happen. I'm involved with some federal projects for my firm, and the level of scrutiny our relatively small budgets receive (individual contracts for projects too out at maybe $3M per year) is intense. We provide very specific and detailed scopes of work, an intense level of backup for expenses, and competitively bid our subcontracts.
Are these projects just so large that significant vetting is too cumbersome, so the issues you mention just compound the negative effects that allow costs to spiral out of control? How are we letting flawed designs get out of a contractor's shop and into the real world?

To start with, we have more armed services personnel in the Pentagon today than it took to win WWII. Add to that more civilians, and more contractors, and you have this legion of people sitting around with absolutely nothing to do. The contractors stay employed as long as they are generating new ideas, the civilians stay employed as long as they have ideas to study, and the military people are trying either to build their own little career empires in the service, or to line up some cushy job when they get out. And by the way, nobody has really gotten around to figuring out what any service's true mission is, so the first shiny object that shows up gets all the attention, regardless of its utility. So you have a climate that is absolutely ripe for the care and nurturing of all sorts of idiotic ideas.

Some consultant says, "Gee, wouldn't it be great to replace steam catapults with electromagnetic, and reduce the need for so many maintenance people?" Some civilian employee thinks, "Gee, I could feed my family for years, and pay off my McMansion in Falls Church, on what I'd make developing that idea." Some military guy thinks, "Gee whiz, I could look like a hero, and by the way, the company that makes the EMALS will pay me $150K a year once I retire." Now at some point, you can't just have an idea, you need a ship or aircraft or tank that incorporates that idea in order to keep it moving. So here come the Fords, and they will use the idea. Now the problem is that the ship gets built before the idea is ready.

There are two stages in the life of a defense project. One, "We don't know yet," and two, "We've spent too much money to abandon it now."

BTW, the Ford is a veritable success story compared to the LCSs. At least some parts of it work. The idea with the LCSs was a 45-knot ship. Why, who knows, nobody else has anything larger than a small patrol boat that makes that kind of speed, and there is no known military objective which would require that speed. So you end up with something that costs $750 million and is capable of performing no military mission, and at least at the start, we were going to build 52 of them, since cut back, the closest thing to an intelligent decision ever made with regard to that program (the truly intelligent decision would have been to cancel it altogether). It was going to be a mine countermeasures platform, except the MCM module has never worked, and I believe has now been abandoned. It was going to be an antisubmarine platform, except that the engines make so much noise that they drown out the sonar. It was going to be a gun platform, but the gun is only a 57 mm popgun and the fire control system is not stable when the ship is moving at speed. It was going to be a helicopter platform, but in order to get the speed, they saved weight by making the helo deck too thin and fragile to land anything but the smallest helos. The construction is so light, to save weight, that they have essentially no armor; the doctrine is that if you take a hit, you abandon ship. They've been around 10 years and I don't think any of them have yet actually hit the 45 knot speed target. I believe it is still correct that during that 10 years, not one has deployed overseas without being towed home. But they look ferocious parked at the pier (at least the LSC-2 class does) and it's really cool to have a ship that in theory will do 45 knots.