this dude makes some really good points about the Navy failing to adequately articulate their needs & vision to the shipbuilding world
https://blog.usni.org/posts/2019/02/04/ill-have-a-ship-killer-no-cream-no-sugar
I've worked on every program mentioned in the article. A couple of my thoughts:
- DDG 1000 was a product of the 90s. The Clinton administration was pushing high-tech weapons, and the Navy watched what the Air Force was doing with the F-22 and what the Army was doing with FCS, and needed to stay relevant, so they came up with the Zumwalt. Ships are not the same as aircraft (in many ways), and FCS wound up dying, but now we're stuck with three DDG 1000 class ships that were way too ambitious and now have ill-defined missions. I doubt if one will ever become operational. In the meantime, we are pouring a lot of money into them. Nobody has the courage to stick a fork in the program and cut our losses.
- LCS is another disaster. Our running joke is that LCS stands for "little crappy ship." This was the Navy's attempt at cost savings (ahem) with a modular mission package. The jury is still out on that, but they haven't sorted out the problems with the sea frames themselves (which should be easy). And buying two different hulls is a textbook example of how not to do acquisition.
- The article mentioned NSM. I'm very familiar with that program. It is being rushed into deployment very, very fast. By the time FFG(X) is operational (earliest would be 10 years from now), I doubt that NSM will be the choice for this ship. But the bigger picture is that the Navy doesn't have a good long-range strategy for their attack weapons. There are several interim stop-gap solutions, such as LRASM, Maritime Strike Tomahawk, and NSM, but I haven't seen much thought beyond those. Land attack is part of this also.
- I'm also very familiar with FFG(X). I will give the Navy credit for this program. From my view, they are going back to basics, or at least are being more realistic. They are having an open competition with five candidates, and from what I've seen, they've learned their lessons from LCS. At this point, they are not trying to be too ambitious, but mission creep is perhaps the biggest enemy of DoD acquisition programs, and we'll see where we're at a decade from now.
- I am less familiar with the amphibs, but the article doesn't say anything substantial. I will say that you shouldn't believe anything in the HII figure.
As a personal update: I've spent the last couple of years in acquisition of major Navy systems, but in a couple of weeks I'm moving to a new position in Army S&T. I worked in an Army lab before my current position, so I'm looking forward to getting back to the engineering side of things, and I think I will be working on some interesting things. And I didn't plan my career this way, but by working on Navy programs, I've now worked on just about every area in DoD except cyber. (You would think that with this experience, I'd be better at wargames, but that knowledge doesn't seem to have transferred.) With my new job, I'll also be moving from the Pentagon to Crystal City, which will put me in the middle of Amazon's HQ2. I'm not sure if that will be good or bad.