From: *Travis*
Date: Tue, Nov 18, 2008
Subject: The Navy's Floating Fiasco
If all the info below is true, it's got to be outright shame to SECDEF,
SECNAV, Dept of the Navy, Aquisition, Budget, GAO, and our professional
""inspectors"" for signing off and accepting this canoe in the name of the
U.S. Navy........
*The Navy's Floating Fiasco*
Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2008
[image: The USS San Antonio is seen docked at Naval Station Ingleside,
Texas]
The USS San Antonio is seen docked at Naval Station Ingleside, Texas.
·
- The maiden voyage of the taxpayer's newest nearly $2 billion warship
stalled for two days in August. That's when the stern gate of the USS San
Antonio — needed to roll vehicles on and off the nearly 700-foot vessel —
wouldn't work. The Navy eventually got the gate fixed in time
for the vessel
to leave Norfolk and sail to the Persian Gulf, where its mission
is to hunt
down smugglers. But now the San Antonio has been forced into
port in Bahrain
for at least two weeks of repairs to leaks in the hefty pipes
feeding fuel
to two of its four engines. Hinting at the seriousness of the
problem, the
Navy has just dispatched a team of 40 workers — including engineers,
pipe-fitters and welders — to Bahrain to make the San Antonio shipshape.
"Forty technicians — that's ludicrous," says Norman Polmar, an
independent
naval expert. "It means the problems are major, because the ship has
mechanics, metal smiths and other people on board as part of the
crew, and
they're supposed to take care of minor problems." And you
thought McHale's
Navy was cancelled back in 1966.
The San Antonio is the first in a new class of amphibious ships —
blue-water buses — each of which carries 350 sailors and is responsible for
ferrying 700 Marines and their gear to global hot spots. And the ship's sad
plight represents in miniature all that is wrong with the way the Pentagon
buys its weapons. The pattern of haste and waste accelerated in the Cold
War's wake, and simply exploded following 9/11. It highlights the challenge
facing President-elect Barack Obama as he contemplates retooling an
Industrial Age
military<http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1846201,00.html>—
primed for state-on-state warfare — into the more agile force better
suited for 21st Century conflicts of the type now being waged in Afghanistan
and Iraq.
Navy inspections of the San Antonio have found a raft of problems so baked
into its design that many Navy officials fear it can never be made right,
despite its price tag having risen from $644 million to $1.8 billion. "Some
significant fraction of the welds in that ship were flawed and had to be
redone," John Young, the Pentagon's top weapons buyer, told Congress in
June. "I shouldn't be forced to pay on behalf of=2 0taxpayers any price for
any level of deficient performance." Still, that's just what the Navy did,
forking over an additional $100 million to make it seaworthy *after *the
Navy had taken delivery of the vessel from its builder, Northrop Grumman, in
2006. The service said it needed the new ship to replace an older one it was
retiring, and could finish the work more cheaply in its own shipyard. The
Navy has blamed Northrop Grumman for poor work; the company has blamed the
Navy for a constantly-changing design, and Hurricane Katrina, which hit the
Gulf yards in which the ship was built.
Navy officials have said the San Antonio has so many problems because it is
the first ship in its class, a claim Polmar dismisses. "We've been building
these kinds of ships since 1943," he says. "It has no big missiles, no
advanced radar, and no nuclear propulsion." Government Accountability Office
said last year that the San Antonio's woes began because the Navy relied on
"immature" computer blueprints that infected its entire construction. That
led to delays that cost up to five times as much as it would have cost if
the work had been done in proper sequence. The GAO found that the ship had
been "delivered to the war fighter incomplete and with numerous mechanical
failures" including "safety concerns related to personnel, equipment,
ammunition, navigation, and flight activities." Navy officials say the
leaking oil that forced San Antonio into port in Bahrain poses no safety
threat to its crew — a=2 0claim viewed dubiously by some sailors.
Navy inspectors also recently criticized the USS New Orleans, the second
vessel in the San Antonio's class. It "cannot support embarked troops, cargo
or landing craft" — its primary mission — according to a report obtained by
the independent *Navy Times*. Navy officials say the third and fourth
vessels are performing much better. The rush to produce the fleet might make
military sense if they were needed, but the last time Marines stormed ashore
— the key reason the taxpayer is spending $14 billion on the San Antonio,
and at least eight more ships just like it — was nearly 60 years ago, at
Inchon during the Korean War.
.
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