Navy chief Admiral Mike Mullen has fired the captain overseeing the Littoral Combat Ship program, Defense News reports:
Capt. Donald Babcock, the Navys LCS program manager, was relieved of his duties Jan. 29 by his boss, Rear Adm. Charles Hamilton who also is being reassigned. Hamilton relieved Babcock due to loss of confidence in his ability to command, according to a Navy source, who added that Babcock would be reassigned to administrative duties.
Both men got their pink slips after an audit revealed that the Lockheed Martin version of the LCS would come in at around $400 million, nearly double the target cost. Two weeks ago the Navy suspended work on the second LockMart LCS for 90 days, long enough to get new managers in place and, hopefully, put the fear of God in Lockheed Martin.
With 55 ships planned, the LCS is a lynchpin of the Navy’s future fleet. The class is designed to work close to shore at high speeds and to carry “modular” weapons and sensors packets to enable it to swing between missions. The idea was to populate coastal waters with large numbers of LCSs anchored by a Zumwalt-class land-attack destroyer. But that concept is in jeopardy if the Navy can’t keep down costs on both ships. Already the first Zumwalt is careening towards a $3-billion pricetag. Toss in cost overruns on the LCS and the Navy’s future surface fleet is dead in the water.
Far from being discouraged, naval analyst Bob Work sees the pink slips and the work stoppage as positive signs. “The Navy needed to say it had a problem. The second thing they had to say was that we have to build affordable ships. Mullen has shown that he is dead serious about doing that.”
–David Axe, cross-posted at Ares and War Is Boring
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
US shipyards doing military-work should be threatened with the work being sent overseas if they can’t either budget correctly, or stay within budget. Cost over-runs MUST be capped…or just nationalize the shipyards as a contract-penalty and sell the asstes and contracts for $1.00 to management that can. Everyone just to fat-and-happy withthe current situation…and the revolving door that allows (incompetent or corrupt) naval officers supervising to “retire” and go to work as yard employees or “consulatants”.
These Defense contractors better clean up their act. If the US is going to compete in a post cold war world we need to stop this nonsense. Sometime soon China is going to more actively threaten the US, and the west. If we have any hope of deterring them, we can not play catch up to them, the way the Soviets played catch up to us during the cold war.
I guess what I am hoping for is a utopia where everyone in America is not selfish, and they put the country first before themselves. And while I am making wishes, maybe people will wake up and realize that America became great because of hardworking individuals, and not a huge bloated, corrupt goverment.
>US shipyards doing military-work should be threatened with the work being sent overseas if
>they can’t either budget correctly
That won’t happen, the lobbyists won’t let that happen, the congress will probably not, and many Americans will be pretty upset for jobs lost to other countries. Do you also want top secret equipment being built and setup by foreigners? Capitalism should do the job for struggle for firms fighting to get the job with lower price, but the involvement of foreign firms is not very wise when you deal with sensitive top secret and national strength on military technology.
Ouch. I wonder how much that set back will cost? Further, I hope they do not take short cuts to make production deadlines or ineffective systems.
Another neo-con (Will) threaten another soverign nation like his political master at the White House does everyday. Leave other countries alone. Just because they don’t agree with us on every issues doesn’t give us or your kind any right in naming them as if they were at war with us. How can you guys be so naive and believe the lies GWB has been spinning out of his dug out? Don’t you guys have a mind of your own and any common sense?
Who gave us the right in effecting a regime change in another soverign nation?
previous posts relevence to LCS?
Yeah, they could have this made in China for a mear 300 thousand. The military weapons procurement system is inexorably linked to the pork-barrel politicians on Capitol Hill. “Never a job w/o cost overruns! – that’s our motto.”
LCS is a real joke — the technologies being proposed by both the Lockheed and General Dynamics teams are “old technology” being repackaged for a new hull.
This program definitely requires government oversight with an eye for “what are we really paying for?”
Why is it costing so much to deliver a working prototype?
What systems are going to be employed, and how much for each one?
I could never figure out why we are paying for two very different ship types in the same class?