Particularly at the rate we build ships these days, if you only chose companies that have done it before you're not going to have many bids to choose from.
Likewise I'm pretty sure the average Dog Dating App startup has better equipment than we're given, although to be fair what we have does the job, just not nearly as well as it could. Not to mention the mountain of legacy equipment and code that no one ever wants to spend money to replace or upgrade properly (once again, underbidding). For every F-35 or USS Ford there are hundreds of smaller programs wither much tighter (also underbid) budgets that you never hear about (either because they're classified or just too boring for media coverage). But it has to be that way, otherwise we don't get the business at all.
Don't get me wrong I like my work and my coworkers, I'd certainly rather be where I am than Silicon Valley, but the red tape and budgetary constraints are a repeating source of frustration at all levels, and it sucks that there's not really all that much we (at least anyone remotely close to my pay grade) can do about it. At the end of the day it's up to our customers to set the bidding process and pick the winners. A realistic bid is likely a lost contract.
I had a relative in the Air Force, and his group was in charge of salvaging programs that failed because the contractor couldn't deliver. They would get half-finished satellites and boxes of parts arriving at the loading dock and then try to figure out what to do. Is someone criminally culpable? Can we do a contract to finish this, or do we need to start over?
According to him you could just never tell - sometimes the contractors you were sure would fail actually delivered, and sometimes the old reliables went belly up or just kept asking for more money.
Thankfully I'm no longer attached to that program, had to continuously bite my tongue and pick my battles in code reviews to avoid getting a reputation. Even nicely telling people 15-20 years my senior "go spend two days refactoring this crap" was a non-starter. To be fair the code did work, I doubt a user would ever notice. But I felt bad signing off on the review all the same.
I sdhould point out that not all the old-timers are a problem. I'm currently working with some 20-year guys who are VERY up to date and open to new ideas; and the company is trying to modernize from the top-down, but some programs have taken to it better than others and some have outright resisted. Given that these programs are only staffed after a bid is won, I'm not sure what kind of vetting process could catch these kinds of inefficiencies.
But when you're building an aircraft carrier there are just too many unknowns, so you run into trouble in the very beginning when nobody wants to bid on it. Then if it looks like the overrun will be too large the contractor goes bankrupt and you end up with a half-finished ship and a gaping hole in the capability it was supposed to provide.
No, they (or, rather, contractors) solved that problem by assuring that all contracts are divied up between as many states and Congressional districts as possible, so that anyone in Congress attacking any procurement is attacking jobs in their own district, and cost controls are less important because the overruns are also producing work, often also widely distributed.
Of course, this also produces the problem (for the military, not contractors) that any attempt to impose accountability on contractors has political problems that are similarly widespread.
Isn't there some famous economics paper somewhere that shows strategies like median bid produce much better outcomes?
From the article:
> It was also supposed to increase the lifespan of aircraft by putting less stress on their airframes. Unfortunately, recent tests of land-based prototypes showed that the system actually overstressed F-18 airframes during launch.
How do they just now discover that? Nobody thought to build a prototype on land first before agreeing to put it on a carrier?
It sounds like some defense contractors sold a bunch of neat ideas to the Navy and decided they'd work the kinks out as they came up.
The other problem is that there just aren't many companies that build aircraft carriers, and it's a very small market. According to Wikipedia there are only 37 aircraft carriers in the whole world, so nobody's going to do the R&D if they're not getting funded to do it.
Sure, but that put their bid 10% above the bid of the guys who just ran FEA on it and said "she'll be right."
The article does talk about "land testing" so I assume they have a mock-up somewhere in the desert to test this stuff in a place where failure doesn't send the pilot/plane into the ocean.
I think the problem is that they were still testing these technologies at the same time that they were building the ship, so now there's only so far they can go in modifying them from their original assumptions while still staying withing the power/space/layout specifications the ship was designed around.
Either they will do that, or simply cut corners and fail to report it accurately. This will fly under the radar until some tragedy. But the root cause of that will likely be covered up too.
Besides, I'm sure General Atomics had the sense to build factories in rustbucket towns and subcontract out to at least 26 states, preferably about half red and half blue; once your procurement system turns into a big enough jobs program, no one will dare to touch it.
Welcome to the cozy, comfortable world of defense contracting, dedicated to equipping the US to fight another world war, but only if the enemy is at least as cronyist as we are. The good news is that our only likely enemies for a world war actually are as cronyist as we are, or significantly worse -- but if any new Prussia ever rises in the world, we are _so_ dead.
1. Nobody really knows what you'll need until the fighting starts.
2. Once the fighting starts, the necessities of wartime production begin to dominate the necessities of peacetime politics.
But frankly, I hope never to find out whether the USA's carriers are necessary, sufficient or useful in a roughly-equal bunfight.
(edited for wording)
Not a perfect analogy in the details, but I think reasonable in the dynamics.
From our sample set of n=1, this isn't realistic. Production would rise, by hook or by crook. If it ran long enough, you'd see carriers coming off the docks every month or two, with their battle groups completely filled.
Again, I hope we never find out.
> Modern weapons are just too accurate and destructive to make long wars of attrition possible any more.
I think this I agree with and it renders the rest of the argument moot.