V/R,
LCDR Luke Schmidt

It was a good rant and filled with great advice. I think a blog post here at USNI on those historical lessons would be of value. I do not believe in inevitable decay, and if you think about it you will realize that what I have been doing (fairly consistently now) regarding an FFG SLEP is pushing back on what I believe is a foolish idea (SLEP for the FFGs).

I am not happy with the LCS (for a number of reasons), but it is what the Navy has now, and I believe that there should be some mental capital spent on figuring out how to make it work for the USN. That would be orders of magnitude more productive than the pages of ink spilled about the ship’s shortcomings and wild-eyed ideas about how to return to the past (from a platform perspective).

The maintenance article would be good too.

V/R,

You are just a little too accepting of the inevitability of decay and decline. Pushing back has its risks, but what’s the point of making CNO of a 100 minus ship, no fleet auxiliaries, no viable escorts, four (maybe zero) carrier navy that can deploy (sort of) about three barely adequate battle groups. Which is where the current crop of JO’s will be in about two decades, at the current rate of decline. Faint heart and foolish policy did not win the cold war, or prepare (barely) the fleet for WWII.

Jefferson’s Coastal Gunboat policy was folly made manifest. While took the embarassment of a burnt out Capital to get the ball rolling, it got reversed.

Besides this isn’t a national problem, it’s a Navy problem. We had similar problems in the early seventies and fixed them. Most of what I digressed about in my little rant on good maintenence practice falls squarely on the shoulders of the CO/XO/Dept Heads. The rest is on the Commodore and his Material Officer and ultimately, the type commander.

The first step to fixing a problem is documenting it, which is something any division officer can do. If he doesn’t know how to inspect his own gear, she needs to pick the brain of his/her Chief/First Class.

At the other end, command interest at the flag level is essential. Fortunately, we pick new flag officers every year.
Sooner or later some of them will realize they are going to inherit the mess, and get more proactive about pushing back against the tide of poor decision making that is eating the ROV and OMN money, not to mention the Navy’s credibility.

If the Air Force can lose a Secretary and a Chief of Staff to failure to execute the fundamentals on nuclear weapons safety and security, the Navy had best clean its own house on basic maintenence and ship design. I hope the rot isn’t deep enough to get higher than Navy involved, but if the top few rows of the stack of boxes poster think their good names aren’t on the line, they will soon enough.

As far as the RAN SLEP or FRAM or whatever, at least we have an approximate upper bound on cost that has some foundation in reality. Don’t forget it should be cheaper to use an existing solution than pay the upfront costs to develop one.

As an aside, there are tender hulls in the reserve fleet (I think, it’s hard to keep up with the march of folly). There are lots of skills in the Ready Reserve. Man one up, put it to work on breaking itself out. Then put her to work. Repeat.

Enough for now. Out of the loop old men need their rest, so they can rise and rant again.

I get your drift regarding basic maintenance. I understand completely what a SLEP is intended to do. I have recent experience with all of the above.

What you are describing is how you wish (and I wish) things to be. That is a longer term problem that needs to be addressed, and I would dearly love to see someone offer some solutions to the maintenance disaster that is currently unfolding in the surface fleet. Unfortunately, you are not describing the current reality.

There are only two tenders left. As much as we would like to reverse those decisions, that is water under the bridge. There are zero SIMAs left. Again, water under the bridge. Sailors (in the surface force) do not really do deep maintenance, and the zone inspection program is failing if the INSURV results are any indication (and they are). Beyond the ability to do maintenance, it appears that the surface force has largely lost the ability to even identify and diagnose MAJOR problems.

More to the point, a SLEP program for the FFG class would be throwing good money after bad at this point and is not a technically or economically viable alternative. It cannot be done for $20M per hull as suggested, and the OQE for that are the costly RAN efforts to date.

V/R,

One hates to reiterate, but HM&E do not vanish like a soap bubble popping when a installed digital clock reaches an arbitrarily established design service life. Class B (repair to installation specs) or Class C (repair by replacement or repair of inoperative or worn beyond max spec components) overhauls may be accomplished comparatively economically by SIMA or (alas, foolishly deleted) Tender sailors and shops. Functional components can be stripped from inactive ships of the class. While failure to spend pennies on “mothballing” has had a repair opportunity cost of dollars or hundreds in terms of repair opportunity, H,M & E components are robust. Most or much of it is still good, or less worn and cheaper to repair than equipment in service. Particularly if you can make one out of two.

Excuse the following digression into basic good practice that follows, but the postings that are up show that many don’t understand that execution of the fundamentals is a key to long, effective ship life.

Preventative maintenence (clean, preserve, lubricate, test, analyze, align, adjust, calibrate) must be done. If filter housings, access panels, zirc fittings and the like don’t have tool scars on the paint covering the bolts and nuts, it’s not.

Minor corrective maintenence must be done promptly, lest it grow into a major repair. INSURV publishes (still, hopefully) a list of common and repetitive deficiencies for every ship class extant. The measure of state of repair is best measured by how much of a preponderance of minor items outweighs the show stoppers in the report. Part I (serious) Safety and Mission Degrading items are more often than not correctable in short order given the increased command attention brought to bear and high level expertise freed up from NAVSEA’s Engineering Centers.

The experienced and wise XO’s send their wardroom and CPO’s out looking for the common and repetitive deficiencies as part of an active zone inspection program,and then follow up. Every defect is logged with a job sequence number in the equipment deficiency log. The Captain goes through that log with the Department Head once a week. Standard questions: Casrep needed?; drafted and sent?; Gear troubleshot, parts on order?; RQN Number and status?: Work Request submitted?; JSN/PRI?. (Suggested order of sequence: NavOps Monday; Engineering Tuesday; Weapons/Combat Systems Wednesday; Supply Thursday; Friday Field Day/PB for T, Zone inspection,Fish Dinner.)

XO checks a chunk of Heads & Beds each day, Captain goes walkabout every day and looks at something, no notice, HARD. The EDL goes to every drill critique to log emergent items.

Timely and appropriate submission of “minor” CASREP’s MUST be viewed as evidence of due diligence and engineering/technical competence by superiors in the chain of command.

(Back on topic)

That’s before SLEP. SLEP gets the hard to reach, replaces/updates obsolete weapons and fire control, adds new countermeasures for new threats,installs major shipalts, A&I’s, Field changes, junks the headache hangar queen Mk 1 with a solid reliable Mk 4. SLEP uses proven systems being purchased, reducing per unit cost by purchasing additional units. Let the words “redo the wardroom wallpaper and furnishings” never be breathed aloud.

I could go on (and on, and on), but you get my drift.

This, while requiring very hard work and expertise by ship’s force, in the long run, lowers maintenence costs and extends vessel life. A lot. Just don’t cut the manning to minimum levels, it’s a false economy for repair, training, and survivability.

But that’s another post.

Well, at least that old stuff gets underway more often than not…”

You are correct to an extent. I interperet the recent INSURV results from active ships to indicate that many of the same problems probably exist in the mature technology and mature HM&E systems fieled. They are just being ignored in order to support the OPTEMPO. How’s that gonna work out if the level of presumed survivability is not quite what has been advertised?

V/R,

Well, at least that old stuff gets underway more often than not…

This is precisely why I asked the question about what a “bobtail SLEP” looks like to the advocates of this position. I have not asked for a white paper or any other such non-sense. I have only asked that the true believers regarding the efficacy and economy of SLEPing an FFG provide at least some level of detail as to what that would entail so those points can be rationally debated.

Based on Byron’s estimates of $20M per hull to execute his vision, I can tell you from experience that it will not buy a great deal more service life for the hull, electrical, and mechanical systems of the FFGs that are not really mid-life warships as you claim, but are actually coming very quickly to the end of their design service life.

I also don’t think that same $20M will be stretched to improve the legacy (and closed architecture) combat and C4ISR systems to a level that the advocates seem to believe. The price for a docking selected restricted availability (far smaller in scope than any FRAM or SLEP as far as I can tell) is running in the $7M-$10M price range.

Examples of 70′s technology that may still exist after a SLEP are the machinery control consoles, the switchboards, the 400 Hz generators, the desalination systems, the internal communication system, etc. I am left to guess because the advocates for such a course of action have simply refused to provide any level of detail regarding their vision. A bullet list of systems that you envision to be modernized would be just fine.

The fact that the RAN effort ran $360M per hull should at least cause any serious participant in this debate some uncomfortable thoughts regarding the what the cost for a FFG SLEP would be and if the cost is worth the investment. Ironically, this is the example that an advocate provided to educate me.

I have never advocated scrapping mid-life ships. You seem to be the one defining 24 year FFGs as having the characteristics of a mid-life platform without any basis at all from a technical perspective for that claim.

V/R,