The U.S. Navy's Titanium “Tin Canâ€
By Mark Thompson | Filed under analysis | January 10, 2019
If the U.S. war in Afghanistan were a ship, it would be a Navy Zumwalt-class destroyer: They’ve cost too much, done too little, and the Pentagon’s rhetoric on them falls far short of reality. The ships represent an object lesson in the risk of trying to cram nearly a dozen new technologies into a warship, most of which failed to get out of port. The bottom line: American taxpayers have bought a fleet of three warships—at a cost of $8 billion each!—that are still looking for a mission. Not only that: the ships are missing their key weapon, and Congress—which rarely rebukes the Navy—recently ordered the service to strike the two that have been delivered to the fleet from its roster of combat-ready ships.
Inside a Pentagon spending nearly $2 billion a day, it’s easy to lose sight of truly wasteful programs. But as the Zumwalt class winds down—the last of the three ships is slated to be delivered in 2020—taxpayers can view, to their horror, the arc of the program from beginning to (nearly) end. The vessels represent a case study of a program run without adult leadership. Its contractors and admirals were blinded by ambition that had little to do with providing the fleet with enough hulls to patrol the world’s oceans, but everything to do with maritime hubris that didn’t pan out. “They just started putting all sorts of requirements on the ship without really understanding the cost implications,†argues Robert Work, who served as a Marine officer for 27 years before serving as the number-two civilian in both the Navy and the entire Pentagon during the Obama Administration.
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/01/the-u-s-navys-titanium-tin-can/
