This ship might be a violation of the 80/20 - Old/New rule.
Aside from someone getting fired, what is the difference between that program and virtually every pork barrel corporate welfare defense contractor full employment scam we’ve seen since 1945?
Most of the others were designed by people who didn’t think PowerPoint slides were reality.
The Ford has had some incredible missteps and design problems. Along with a few other “New Vessel Types”
. Fallows has some good articles about the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the M-16, Col John Boyd and past reform efforts.
The story of Boyd and the F-16 is interesting.
Their assertions were that:
- Air Force generals established the wrong criteria for combat effectiveness, ignoring combat history.[1]
- High technology and the focus on “higher, faster, and farther” increases costs and decreases effectiveness. The mafia argued for cheaper and better planes.
- Air Force bureaucracies were corrupt as they did not conduct honest testing on weapons before buying them and deploying them in the field.
- The focus should be on close air support and the use of combined arms to support maneuver warfare rather than interdiction bombing.[2][3][4]
- Multi-role and multi-mission capability compromises the plane.
- Beyond visual range combat was a fantasy.[1][5]
During the four years of the Reagan buildup, he said, the United States had spent 150 percent more for tanks and armored vehicles than it had under Jimmy Carter, but had increased its purchases of tanks by only 30 percent. He said, “The number of missiles purchased increased only six percent despite a real increase of ninety percent in budget authority for this category. Aircraft purchases went up less than nine percent versus seventy-five percent growth in aircraft appropriations. Indeed, purchases of fixedwing combat aircraft were lower [from 1982 through 1985] than they were [from] 1977 through 1980.”
Read that a while back, good story.