I still have an HII access card for when I worked on the USS Chosin and USS O'Kane right underneath the Coronado bridge. I was still in the custody of the San Diego sheriff's department at the time. Many of the few hundred of us that worked there were either currently in a halfway house or ex-cons. None of us received any safety training on asbestos, yet we handled a-cloth every single day. We only had rudimentary safety equipment. Some guys would cut asbestos cloth with a hand grinder, sending fluff everywhere. Equipment marked "TOP SECRET" was covered with a simple piece of butcher paper...assuming it hadn't torn or fallen off. It was pretty much a shit show.

The United States government and "unconventional" approaches to labor for building military equipment is not new.

One of the most interesting stories to me is how the Mafia helped break some bones of laborers during WW2 to ensure the USA was victorious. They knew they couldn't operate without a free society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmMcD96bHak

Lots of other ways that the Mafia helped in Italy.

https://smile.amazon.com/Mafia-Allies-Americas-Secret-Allian...

That's not butcher paper it's fire retardant paper. Granted the cabinet was probably metal....

yah, you're right, but it looks and feels enough like butcher paper that it says "NOT FOR FOOD SERVICE" all over it =)

Holy shit

:o

I'd share more about what was possible with the access I was given, but I've endured enough federal investigations for this lifetime.

> the US Navy accepted delivery of the Ford and commissioned it when it was non-functional. This should be ending swathes of careers at the top of both the US Navy and Huntington Ingalls Industries.

It'll be bonuses at Huntington. "Congratulations, you got the Navy to sign off even though it's not complete!"

This is true for most of the defense contractors I've worked for. It's one of the chief reasons I left that sector and eventually the US.

This sounds a lot like the classical result of politics shoving contracts to private companies who then look how to fulfill them with minimum spending. Gains are privatized and losses socialized — as usual.

Based on the scuttlebutt I've been hearing from Navy insiders, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and the entire organization is a mess right now.

The Navy has been hemorrhaging actual engineers for decades now. Most of the real engineering work is done by contractors (hired to build something) and contractors (on site technical staff who don't actually answer to the Navy).

The Navy is left with uniformed personnel and manager bureaucrat types, neither of which have the engineering expertise the organization needs.

The results should not surprise us.

There's a problem involved when you don't have a subject matter expert.

consider: here on HN commenters will often deride decisions made "anyone in the field with half a brain should know...".

But if you don't have that requisite someone in the field with half a brain, and when someone who literally makes money from convincing you they are experts tries to sell you...anything, how can you possibly evaluate the truth of their claims?

I saw this in state govt when they would try to hire someone - without programmers on staff, how can you evaluate if someone is a decent programmer? This goes beyond the normal problems of interviewee evaluations - you can get people that can't do fizzbuzz and you'd not be able to tell. Being able to tell the difference between "experienced expert" and "halfway competent but way over their head" isn't even an option.

It's a hard thing for an organization to overcome - as far as I can tell, absent some trusted 3rd party evaluation system (which runs into incentive problems), it requires iterations of staffing and trial by fire to build even this ability to evaluate in house.

> without programmers on staff, how can you evaluate if someone is a decent programmer?

I work in .gov and have heard many variations of that problem. A really common non-solution is to hire a second contractor to oversee the first. In theory that’s not a completely horrible idea but there are relatively few contractors who are certified to do business with the federal government and they usually aren’t trying to make waves, not to mention how job hopping makes for a lot of personal incentives which aren’t aligned with the clients’. Since getting and breaking contracts is so hard — and the big guys will definitely play hardball if you do – it has to be a pretty epic disaster to have real consequences, and that’ll arrive after years of billing very well.

The answer should be having more staff positions at competitive rates so agencies have qualified staff for oversight or simply doing the work but that has been politically untenable for decades.

And this is one of the reasons why you see the revolving door between regulators and private companies. They are both competing for experts.

One can argue about the appearance of impropriety, but when people talk about stopping the revolving door, you’re talking about hurting both the gov’t and private companies because there are a limited number of experts.

For highly-technical regulators, this is definitely true — I’ve wondered what the threshold would be where it’d be cheaper to pay substantially more but with a non-compete banning work with anyone in a related field. There’s a plausible argument that the country would be better off with, say, a really motivated SEC even if you paid their retirees 50% to sit on the beach after they left government service.

Yeap. If you cede the doing to consultants, they will extract more money. Especially when you cede the management of the doing entirely.

Same with the FAA. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/podcasts/the-daily/boeing...

Same with any other part of the US government. It doesn't pay people what they're worth, so they can't attract enough good talent.

Local governments, too.

In my neck of the woods, there are departments that have to make do with whole teams of low-skill employees because, while a more skilled person could do the work of at least four lower-skill workers, they would also require two lower-skill workers' worth of salary, and you just can't be paying any one person that much money because that would be Government Waste.

In America, it's probably more accurate to blame government labor unions for the preference of more lower skilled workers to fewer higher skilled workers

Unions tend to prefer fewer workers to more workers for obvious bargaining-position reasons. What they don't like is losing existing jobs.

They also have more bargaining power when they represent skilled workers compared to unskilled ones.

How often do labor unions campaign to impose salary caps on their own members? The very idea seems out of character.

Unions like to set salaries, because there are more mediocre performers who stand to gain compared to free-market wages than top performers who stand to lose. They don't exactly want a cap, but they greatly desire a floor, and accept it also serving as a cap as an acceptable tradeoff.

Whenever that first part isn't true for a union, then the market pressure is for the top performers to leave the union for free-market wages, until it is.

It was my impression, not supported by much, that unions do like to set a salary for a role rather than letting that be up to the company or negotiated between the company and the individual employee. (Unions featuring superstars, like the Screen Actors Guild, are an obvious exception.)

I think it's an interesting question how a government workers' union would be likely to feel about a hypothetical restructuring that lost 75% of existing jobs while doubling or tripling wages. I tend to suspect that if the union already existed and represented those low-skilled jobs, it would be adamantly against the restructuring.

Doubling wages while not cutting jobs would obviously be fine with the union, but what would the point of that be?

Rarely, but if the union official gets to chose between more people paying dues and fewer people paying dues, which are they going to pick?

We know that Unions don't oppose salary caps, but they oppose differentials in compensation based on job performance. Seems like that amounts to the same thing? Unless you're suggesting we just pay government workers more and see if we get any marginal productivity out of them.

I can follow your hypothetical right up to the point where the union official commits career suicide by trying to piss off every member single member of the union in a single stroke, and no further.

> so they can't attract enough good talent.

...and they have no real way to evaluate the talent they DO attract, so they're doubly-screwed.

And, with the military, it doesn't even have a cause people believe in.

Your conjecture is not factual, but rather represents beliefs that are not held by an overwhelming majority in the United States.

According to 538, the Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan are the most unpopular wars in US history, except for Vietnam which is #1.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-americans-agree-th...

Firstly, that chat doesn't measure popularity, it measures "how justified were they".

Also, I think that a honest reading of that chart would be that there is the Vietnam War (with very low justification), WW2 (with high justification) and then two subgroups: WW1 & Civil War with moderate justification, and Korea, Gulf War 1 and Afghanistan with lower levels, but still significant levels of justification.

Popularity of conflicts du jour and opinion of the military as a valuable enterprise in general are different.

For instance, I joined and served in the military during the second Iraq war despite disapproving of the invasion.

This holds especially for career civil servants, as political winds shift and one may not always agree with the policies of the current government.

One does not serve because the nation is perfect, one serves to strengthen the nation and to have the opportunity to make it better for future generations.

> For instance, I joined and served in the military during the second Iraq war despite disapproving of the invasion.

And after your experiences would you recommend the same path to your children if they were thinking of doing the same?

I would, to the best extent possible, educate my children as to what military service actually entailed, and then I would let them make the decision based on their values and life goals.

According to 538 Hillary was going to win in a landslide too

False, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav...

They were wrong by less, but still wrong.

Are you talking about the idea of a military as a whole, or the wars that were involved in right now?

I'm just suggesting that when the military is actively engaged in operations that many people dislike, that has an impact on the quantity and caliber of people that are interested in being part of it.

Well, the "real" (read: design) engineering work has always been done by contractors. I literally walked out of an interview for the Navy (NSWC Carderock) when I realized that. I went over to General Dynamics and got a job as a mechanical engineer designing nuclear submarines. NASA is the same way, the design work is done by subcontractors. The government agency conducts oversight. So we, the contractors, sent our plans to the Navy for review & approval. Their job was to ensure we didn't screw up and that our plans would meet the contract requirements.

In my experience NAVSEA (the actual Navy side) were all former senior engineers at the subcontractor. They were good engineers and could smell bullshit easily. But that kind of work is very different than the creative side. Some people like being the reviewer better, and the government benefits are generally better, but otherwise I never saw the appeal.

As a former Naval Surface Warfare Center engineer I can't really agree with your assessment. When I was there (2004 - 2010 ) there was a dedicated push to get more engineering talent in the doors. Most of the time it appeared the qualifications to get hired at a contractor was "had pulse" and they desperately needed someone to fix everything that was getting delivered completely non-functional. The deliveries for the 76, and 77 were in a similar state of disarray, and without a team of NSWC engineers onboard for years neither of those boats would have passed sea trials.

I read "uninformed" instead of "uniformed" personnel and manager bureaucrat types. The meaning didn't change.

Sadly, another item to add to the list of how the US is slowly crumbling.

Add to that, the Fortune 500 list - for the first time ever, it is not dominated anymore by US Companies. At least that is what I've heard from RT news.

You're probably thinking of the Fortune Global 500. The Fortune 500 are by definition U.S. companies. For 2019 there were more Chinese than U.S. Global 500 companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_Global_500#Breakdown_b...

I believe some of this is the slow-burning unintended consequence that political leaders are responsible for.

We've been at "war" for decades burning military dollars on a "cause" that very few Americans believe in, care about, or even understand. You can only wave the flags and shout about patriotism for so long before people stop giving a shit. It obviously becomes very hard for an organization to attract talent when said talent doesn't care about or believe in what the organization is doing.

The military got the best and brightest during WWII because the US was fighting Nazis (oh, sorry, "alt-right European Nationalists") and a foreign enemy who had attacked us on our own soil. For Vietnam, they had to draft because few believed in the cause and what they got where those too powerless to escape the draft (cough, cough, bone spurs). And for... whatever the fuck it is we've been doing in the Middle East since 9/11, the military doesn't even have a draft to potentially snare some better people.

When you have an all-volunteer military in an endless war for no clear purpose, the end result is many people who have nothing better going for them. Should we really be surprised the military is a clusterfuck? If you were competent, why would you want to squander your talents helping the US kill random brown people for no good reason?

>The military got the best and brightest during WWII because the US was fighting Nazis ... and a foreign enemy who had attacked us on our own soil. For Vietnam, they had to draft because few believed in the cause and what they got where those too powerless to escape the draft ...

WWII also had a draft, as did WWI and the Civil War. More people (as a percentage) volunteered for Vietnam than did WWII. That surprised me when I heard it. Americans were pretty gung-ho about enlisting in Vietnam and didn't really sour on it until later in the war. It was during the communism scare, so people fully bought into the Domino Theory at the time. Russia went nuclear, North Korea invaded South, the Iron Curtain went up, Cuban Missle Crisis, McCarthy, Sputnik, and a lot of chest thumping made it a pretty scary time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2x491p/volun...

I think your general point is valid. It's better to enlist when the country isn't at war, and that hasn't been for what, going on 18 years now? Enlistees nor draftees typically don't decide what features a warship has though.

My grandfather voluntarily enlisted in the air force in WWII because he didn't want to get drafted as a front line soldier with a rifle. So voluntary enlistment doesn't always reflect agreement with the war, it can be a pragmatic decision.

Yup. How many times does this engineering mistake have to be made?

"Let's save time and money by not building a prototype and do our testing of the system on the actual ship itself!"

Whenever someone thinks: let's cut corners on "x" to save money and time, it has always come around to bite me. And now they are far behind schedule, and they ended up having to build a carrier replica at the drydock to do testing anyway.

> not building a prototype

Old saying, "Fastest way to build a six inch reflector telescope is to build a four inch telescope first."

That is, learn in the simplest possible context.

Like companies that won't build an MVP or even a non-sellable proof of concept. Finding out a key software library doesn't work three weeks before launch day, for example.

They did build a land version of the EMALs launch system. Here it is launching a F-35. There must have been a design change between when this was built & tested, and when they installed it on the Ford. Which would be the wrong thing to do - always install upgrades/changes in test before production.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDAQtlmtCe8

All these technologies "worked" before they were installed. They are just not yet reliable enough.

Reminds me that the first U.S. ship to ship night naval battles with the Japanese in WWII were tragic (for the U.S.) 'cause the American super-fancy new-tech Mark 14 torpedoes hadn't been properly tested; that would have been "too expensive." So they were just made and deployed - and since defective, didn't trigger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo

So "this engineering mistake" indeed has to be made ad nauseum, it would seem. As Einstein said, only space and human stupidity are infinite.

back then the US had still a solid industrial base outside of a oligopolic, capitalistic industrial-military-complex which is only interested in making money by milking the government (as opposed to making money in the long-term by supporting a solid, diverse array of industrial ventures)

"“I think when the Navy started off, they had a really good plan,” Paul Francis, of the Government Accountability Office, told the Senate in 2016. “They were going to build two ships, experimental ships.” But in 2005, having assured itself that “optimal manning works,” the Navy decided to skip the experimentation and move straight to construction. From this point on, whenever the Navy tried to study the feasibility of minimal manning, its analysis was colored by the fact that—on these ships, at least—it had to work. Dozens of littoral combat ships were on their way. The Giffords was the 10th to deploy."

Taken from:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/future-...

Some of the systems might be unique, if not new technology or specifically designed and made for this use case, with the R&D sponsored as part of the project budget.

There might not be a prototype, because the delivered item is the prototype.

Sure, it should be tested before being shipped, but it doesn't help when it ultimately doesn't perform as expected and there is no alternative at hands.

It keeps happening b/c so many people have the same attitude as GP: find scapegoats and fire them! That will fix the systemic problems...right?!

No, it won't.

It will if the scapegoats are admirals.

From my conversation with navy folks, unless a scandal sinks an admiral, the organization does not take it seriously, and will not make any institutional changes.

Voltaire: "in this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, in order to encourage the others".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Byng#Honorific_eponyms

+1

But if the only scapegoats are lower down in the chain then the result will be devastating to morale.

The SecNavy has to fire one or more admirals here, and soon.

As a yard worker, In some ways I feel sorry for NewportNews Shipyard. These elevators are designs the Navy brought to them. Not something they designed. They built it to spec and it did not work. Now the blame game. As someone above noted, The Navy did not even build a land based prototype. Now whose fault is this mess? I had thought it would be the catapult system that failed. Instead it is too powerful and they are still tuning it. They are worried about the stress on the nose gear. Some birds are still restricted in weight last I heard.

the most probable cause is there aren't any contractors available anymore in the US who are able/willing to build such things. This is really sad.

If the systemic mechanisms and incentives haven’t changed, is the problem really solved?

Care to elaborate?

Robert Reich's latest video shows what's wrong... too much spending on whiz-bang military toys while cutting Social Security and Medicare. https://youtu.be/BGIJxNPFpAQ

Like the F-35, it’s virtual disarmament by DoD proxy