Austal's USS Independence
So the other day we mentioned the Navy’s woes with its latest boat buy, the 55-vessel, $37.4 billion, Littoral Combat Ship fleet. Two teams are each building their own version of the coastal corvette, and each has its own problem: the Lockheed team’s hull has cracked, and the Austal team’s hull is disintegrating in salt water. Austal went so far as to blame the Navy for the problem, and now it seems to be getting some backing from Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., of the House Armed Services Committee. The former Marine (three combat tours) writes Navy Secretary Ray Mabus:
This would come as a surprise if the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had not previously warned Congress in 2007 that the Navy had moved forward on an ambitious schedule despite significant design stabilization problems. Their report warned that “construction work has been performed out of sequence and significant rework has been required, disrupting the optimal construction sequence and application of lessons learned for follow-on vessels in these programs…” In pushing a faulty design, blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the Navy.
During the Cold War, the military insisted that such concurrency — building a weapon while its design was still in flux — was necessary to keep up with the Soviets. It was a fib then, but at least they had the Cold War cloak to mask it. Now, it’s just a lousy business practice, taxpayer-be-damned, bordering on fraud.