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Posted by Ralph Wood on March 10, 2025, 21:32:32, in reply to "Re: You give Rumsfeld too much credit as some visionary. He was nothing of the kind."
Here:
https://warontherocks.com/2023/03/breaking-the-cycle-of-incremental-acquisition-reform/
I just glanced it over. One thing I saw which I have already known...at one point they point out that technology changes now come primarily from outside the services, and need to be incorporated into it. In WWII, as they note, it was the other way around. The military drove its own technological changes. When it generated its own changes, it had better control of their development. Now, things are coming from outside the system, and the military is still poorly able to cope with incorporating in. We have not "fully evolved" the system to do this yet.
"And other stuff." Long and involved. Requires digestion. 
Previous Message
And that was my point. Steam power took a century to be adopted incrementally. Are we going to take a century to incorporate every new technology that way? I have given this example here before:
To keep our sole carrier building yard going, we spread construction of each ship out nearly 10 years or so. Ford had over 20 new technologies incorporated into her. If we had done it incrementally, each new technology would have been done one ship at a time. "The newest Nimitz class" would have gotten electromagnetic catapults. The next one, the new arresting system. Then, the next the new radars. Etc. At one ship every 10 years or so, all these 20-odd systems would finally have been fielded for testing in 200 years. We took risk, and jammed them all onto one build. Was a mess, and cost some, but it did not take 200 years to get this stuff either. Ford was a success. Zumwalt did the same thing, but failed because of its mission. We still need carriers. We no longer need a "littoral combat destroyer." But, "an alliance of interested parties"...politicians and in uniform...saw to it that we at least got several working examples to inform future designs, and not lose the development effort that had gone into them.
Incremental is good. It saves money. But, it is slow. As I noted with my WWII example, look at how much stuff came out in such a short time span. Cost us a small fortune, but we "had motivation." We also had the luxury of a proliferation of hulls, so we actually did try many things incrementally. But, we still found out in a hurry what did or did not work because we had so many hulls available and tried so many things simultaneously.
That era is gone. We need to find the way to keep up in our era. I don't know what that is, but I also know incremental is not "the" answer. (It could well be part of the answer.)
As to your final paragraph, I will simply repeat the tired truism that in war, all plans go out the window at the first shot. For either of us to confidently state the manner in which the PLAN can or will be defeated is an exercise in imagination. But, I am fairly confident that if we had the latest technology in hand, the odds are better in our favor. Previous Message
Rumsfeld was nothing but a bean counter not any type of war fighting visionary. One of his biggest bungles was Iraq but let us not go down that road.
The use of steam power in the USN was incremental . USN ships used sail as well as steam well past the civil war. Steam propulsion was not reliable because it had not matured nor proven it could survive battle damage.
Rumsfeld did not remain in office long enough to see the damage he had done in at least two failed classes of warships thereby setting back the Navy possibly a generation.
I agree that one should embrace technology but it should be done incrementally and with proven technology. This allows maintenance and training to remain on level with its rollout to the fleet.
As for the PLAN, numbers are formidable but like the German fleet of WW1 it is a bottled fleet until it eliminates Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines. Australia, Vietnam and the list goes on. It can be defeated by the use of very tried but old weapons today and tomorrow. What we fear is the loss of a very small but expensive fleet. Both sides play on each others fears. Previous Message
The only thoughts I would add for consideration concern your view on incremental change.
Looking at technological change broadly, in general, it has been accelerating since the industrial revolution first started around 1800-ish. It began with wind and oar powered vessels, a method literally used for--not just centuries--but millenia. The same on land. The horse dominated land mobility for millenia. The epitome of "status quo."
Then came steam power, and in just a century, human civilization had transformed. Paralleling this was the mastery of electricity. 1900 was remarkably different from 1800. The next century saw the dawn of flight, which went from frame and fabric to outer space. The internal combustion engine fully replaced steam, and the horse. World War II brought about enormous advances in less than a decade from the resources poured into the efforts. Electronics, jets and rocketry, nuclear power, and more just between 1939 and 1945.
Then came the Cold War. Our opponent was known, and we were engaged in the conflict for over 40 years. Each could learn what the other was developing, and plan accordingly. Incremental change was fine in most cases, unless it was discovered your opponent had made some astounding breakthrough. Witness the space race once the Soviets launched Sputnik. What got poured into NASA was not "incremental." As a predominant land power, the Soviets did not invest much into their navy until Admiral Gorshkov came along. Once his designs started rolling out, and after initially being baffled at how they were to be employed, we could then plan appropriate counters, and measure out the modernization of our fleet. From a military standpoint, this was a remarkably stable period of over four decades facing, matching, and surpassing an opponent whose abilities were generally known and understood.
When that ended, we were adrift. Without the Soviets, who was our enemy? What incremental changes, against whom? While China resolved to make itself a naval power in 1996, its rise was not overly spectacular in the beginning. Meanwhile, September 11th happened, and we had found our new main opponent, and they were not a naval power. Money got channeled to the Army, and Air Force. Even if the Navy could truly and clearly predict the future, it was relegated to supporting the other services in this newest war. The Peace Dividend was over, but the resulting new money flow did not prioritize the Navy. China's rise was "vague and distant." Terrorism was clear and immediate.
The pace of technological change keeps accelerating. Millenia of horse and sail. Centuries of steam and automobiles. Decades of aviation and space. A few years between computer advances. Incremental change is good, but the intervals between the increments is becoming smaller and smaller in many key fields. Our current military acquisition system is still tied to the Cold War it was built under. The pace was comparatively more leisurely then. There are advocates of reform. "Streamlining" (with the resulting risk) is almost mandatory now to keep up. This was one of the foundations behind Rumsfeld's Transformation. He recognized the need to alter how we deal with the increasing speed at which new things appear, and how quickly we incorporate those into "the system." When practiced, the risks--with frequent failures--of that way of incorporation became painfully obvious from the financial angle, and were a huge turn-off. But, if we are not wishing to fight modern Chinese warships and weapons with a surface fleet designed back in the Cold War to be employed against a different enemy, then we are going to have to figure out how to keep up with the modern tempo of tech development, and do it really soon. Previous Message
Who are you, and what have you done with Bill Oreto??
That was really well put! I find myself agreeing with you. "I feel a great disturbance in The Force." Raspy breathing... Previous Message
You kind of expanded there as USCG requirements though similar in some ways to USN differ in many ways as well.
But I believe the point of your question was why we can’t get afloat and remain in proper condition.
And the list is:
1. Government Naval Yards were shut down with loss of many skilled workers.
2. Repairs are put out to commercial bid.
3. Design is outsourced then reviewed to meet requirements. Change after costly change occurs because of experience challenging inexperience.
4. Cold War ends and fleet auxiliaries such as submarine tenders and repairs ships were retired eliminating the skills in The Navy to make its own repairs afloat.
5. Lack of substantial inventory of spare parts due to lack of dollars for required maintenance and understanding of the design especially when low bid is awarded. Maintenance is always the first account that gets savaged to pay for other bills.
6. Over design of what is sent afloat thereby increasing the cost to train upon and repair thereby hastening the ship to scrappers .
7. Decline in merchant ship building thereby making smaller the skilled labor pool to draw upon as well as draw down in suppliers and manufacturers of all items needed upon and within a ship’s hull.
8. Poor pay for highly skilled ship builders leaving no attraction to become an apprentice and improve your skills and move up.
Do you wish me to go on ? I can name Congress and its many faults that have affected USCG/Navy acquisition and maintenance.
You can lay today’s problems at the feet of Lehman who thought the fleet should be all teeth and very little tail. Rumsfeld “We can do more with less” which introduced the gold plating in design and continued cuts in tail . And finally “We have no peers” group which demanded a peace dividend that cut into all areas of The Navy including its experience.
Most in the general public think a fleet is the number of hulls which equate to combat power. Not realizing to maintain a fleet in being that effectively projects national interests takes years of building, years in gaining experience and training, years in building logistical support and above all future vision. Only wealthy nations therefore can have truly effective navies if they have training and experience. The rest are just hulls flying their national flag.
Reading the history of the RN from the Bronze Age until after WW2 one would read how it built upon itself to ultimately reign supreme in 19th century. An example of training and experience is the IJN who from the early 1900s trained vigorously night and day with what they had to give the USN a good run for the money during the war. An example of planning and future vision is War Plan Orange in which the USN designs and builds warships to meet its commitments to the plan while maintaining budgeting for its logistical support and only incorporating innovation in increments . Unlike the Ford which comes back from it first deployment needing 200 + million dollars in repair.
Enough said but it took us 60 years to get into this mess and it will take another 60 years to get out of. The best we can hope for in a future naval war is attrition to peace table as opposed to victory. Previous Message
the USCG has a $7BILLION infrastructure, maintenance /repair backlog, more than doubled in last 4 years, USN has seven years wait for some submarine repairs, 7 years to make half the drawings for the "new " icebreaker and at least another 7 to build it, what is going on??????
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