Winslow Wheeler: John Saven on the Navy’s New Class of Floating Pigs

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Winslow Wheeler

Among the examples of more expensive hardware providing less capability is the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). Retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. John Sayen addresses the matter with specifics in a new piece at Time's Batteland blog.  John is a friend, colleague and a co-author in the anthology America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress.

John's LCS piece is below:

The Navy's New Class of Warships: Big Bucks, Little Bang

EXTRACTS:

The Navy's new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is not only staggeringly overpriced and chronically unreliable but – even if it were to work perfectly – cannot match the combat power of similar sized foreign warships costing only a fraction as much. Let's take a deep dive and try to figure out why.

. . . . . . . .

However the LCS itself may be more vulnerable to these speedboats than the ships it is protecting from them. This is because the ballooning LCS construction costs caused the Navy to try to save money by ordering that future ships be built to commercial standards.

. . . . . . . .

The surface-warfare chief went on to say that the Navy had yet to settle key LCS issues regarding missions, tactics and the design features to support them. In a sane world, such issues would have been ironed out before any ships were built.

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Taxpayers – and Navy personnel, past and present – may better appreciate the scope of the LCS disaster when reminded that current plans call for these pseudo-warships to comprise more than a third of the Navy's surface combatants by 2020.

Read full article.

See Also:

2013 Robert Steele: Reflections on Inspectors General

2011 Peace from Above: Future of Intelligence & Air Power

2009 Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A Twenty-Year Retrospective

2008 U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century

2001 Threats, Strategy, and Force Structure: An Alternative Paradigm for National Security

1991 MCG Intelligence Support for Expeditionary Planners

1990 Expeditionary Environment Analytic Model

1989 Expeditionary Environment Briefing

Journal: Intelligence & Innovation Support to Strategy, Planning, Programming, Budgeting, & Acquisition

Journal: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP

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