U.S. Navy Littoral Combat Ship
“Not too many years ago, we had five times as many contractors and there was more competition and there was more creativity… As these larger guys kept buying the smaller guys coming up with the ideas, and then encapsulate them and restructure, it’s taken a lot of the innovation out.” — Ken Calvert (R-Ca) Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.
By Kevin Policarpo
As the threat of conflict grows in the Pacific, multiple issues have plagued the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) efforts to maintain U.S. readiness. These issues range from supply chain issues, to failed weapons and defense contractor mistakes.
U.S. defense contractors are being blamed for failing to meet cost and quality goals as Republican Congressman Ken Calvert (R-Ca) Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee explains: “Not too many years ago, we had five times as many contractors and there was more competition and there was more creativity… As these larger guys kept buying the smaller guys coming up with the ideas, and then encapsulate them and restructure, it’s taken a lot of the innovation out.”[1]
Mike Watson, associate director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for the Future of Liberal Society worries about problems caused by U.S. defense contractors: “Defense contracting is ‘plagued by the same kind of political engineering and its associated cost overruns’ …”[2]
MISSILE SHORTAGES
A February Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report warns that in a conflict with China, U.S. forces could run out of critical missiles within a week:
“A major regional conflict, such as a war between the United States and China, would likely expend significant quantities of munitions and exceed current DoD planning efforts.
One of the most important munitions to prevent a complete Chinese seizure of Taiwan are long-range precision missiles, including missiles launched by U.S. ships and aircraft.
In nearly two dozen iterations of a CSIS war game that examined a U.S.-China war in the Taiwan Strait, the United States typically expended more than 5,000 long-range missiles in three weeks of conflict:
- 4,000 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles
- 450 Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles
- 400 Harpoon Missiles
- 400 Tomahawk Missiles
Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles would be particularly useful because of their ability to strike Chinese naval forces from outside the range of Chinese air defenses. As the war game showed, Chinese defenses are likely to be formidable—especially early on in a conflict—thus preventing most aircraft from moving close enough to drop short-range munitions.
However, in every iteration of the war game, the United States expended its inventory of Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles within the first week of the conflict, creating a critical problem of “empty bins.”
It takes nearly two years to produce a Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile, creating a time lag to fix the shortfall.”[3]
FUTURE COMBAT SYSTEMS
Another problem with the DOD’s acquisition process was the Future Combat Systems (FCS) program[4].
Developed by Boeing Co. and SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), the program’s goal was to replace current armored units with a family of advanced vehicles:
“In 2009, after spending $20 billion in eight years with little to show for it, the Pentagon canceled Future Combat Systems — run by Boeing Co. and SAIC — to avert what then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates termed a “costly disaster.”[5]
Mark Signorelli, who worked with contractors United Defense and later BAE Systems on the Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon (NLOS-C), the mobile artillery variant of the FCS, conceded:
“We were under such pressure to finish the assembly and integration on time, we were putting parts together that had never been assembled before…”[6]
As a result, Bloomberg reported:
“One upshot: the scrapping of Future Combat Systems means that more than a decade later the US Army has yet to develop a replacement for its Cold War-era armored vehicles — the Abrams tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.”
HYPERSONIC MISSILES
Another failing was hypersonic missiles, “a field in which the U.S. once held a strong technological lead as far back as the 1960s. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began a program to design hypersonic weapons in the early 2000s, only to halt it following a series of early failed tests.
Spin forward to summer 2021, when China conducted two hypersonic weapons tests, including the launch into space of an orbiting weapon capable of carrying a nuclear payload, alarming military planners in Washington. “[7]
F-35 FIGHTERS
Another problem are is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. The F-35 has grown into the world’s most expensive weapons program, with cost projections of up to $1.7 trillion dollars over its 66-year lifespan.
According to a March Defense News article, a DOD report is citing engine failures and a shortage of spare parts resulting in over 40% of the F-35 fighters being unavailable for combat:
“The Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation in January only released to the public an “uncontrolled” version of its annual report. Details about shortfalls in key programs were relegated to a “controlled” — but still unclassified — edition kept from the public.”[8]
At that time, watchdog group Project on Government Oversight obtained and posted online, the controlled report, which fleshes out some of the problems hinted at in the publicly released version.[9]
“The F-35′s availability is still lagging, and a lack of spare parts and fully-functional engines has hurt it.”[10]
Reportedly, the DOD report noted the “F-35 saw a “program high peak” in aircraft availability in January 2021, the controlled version of the report said, when it hit 70%. But during the year, the report said, availability rates “plateaued,” and in June started to slide before hitting a low of 53% in September. Throughout fiscal 2021, the entire F-35 fleet averaged 61% availability, below its target of 65%. The F-35 has consistently stayed above 50% availability since December 2018.”[11]
In addition, an update for the F-35 broke the code that allowed the fighter to use the AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missile: “an earlier version of software broke when the development team tried to add capabilities for another weapon.”[12]
The software development in the Block 4 variant of the F-35 would allow for software updates every six months to fix bugs and improve current capabilities. However, the updates often introduced stability problems or led to problems with other capabilities.[13]
The Bloomberg report says: “These overruns are baked into the system. Like many defense projects, the F-35 is intricately bound up with US domestic politics. Nearly every state has economic ties to the project, with 29 states counting on it for $100 million or more in economic activity. The F-35 directly and indirectly creates about 250,000 jobs in 45 states and Puerto Rico, according to Lockheed Martin.”[14]
POLITICS & THE FAILURE OF LITTORAL COMBAT SHIPS
In one example of defense contractor politics, U.S. taxpayers will pay billions for ships that the U.S. Navy withdrew from service.
The interference in U.S. Navy actions was cited in the case of the Littoral Combat Ships in a February New York Times report:
“Eight of the 10 Freedom-class littoral combat ships now based in Jacksonville and another based in San Diego would be retired, even though they averaged only four years old and had been built to last 25 years.
The decision came after the ships, built in Wisconsin by Fincantieri Marinette Marine in partnership with Lockheed Martin, suffered a series of humiliating breakdowns, including repeated engine failures and technical shortcomings in an anti-submarine system intended to counter China’s growing naval capacity.
“We refused to put an additional dollar against that system that wouldn’t match the Chinese undersea threat,” Adm. Michael M. Gilday, the chief of naval operations, told Senate lawmakers.
The Navy estimated that the move would save $4.3 billion over the next five years, money that Admiral Gilday said he would rather spend on missiles and other firepower needed to prepare for potential wars. Having ships capable of fulfilling the military mission, he argued, was much more important than the Navy’s total ship count.
Then the lobbying started.
A consortium of players with economic ties to the ships — led by a trade association whose members had just secured contracts worth up to $3 billion to do repairs and supply work on them — mobilized to pressure Congress to block the plan, with phone calls, emails and visits to Washington to press lawmakers to intervene.”[15]
Within weeks, lawmakers offered amendments to the 2023 Pentagon spending authorization law that prohibited the Navy from retiring four of the eight ships in Jacksonville and the one in San Diego, the newspaper reported.
RELIANCE ON CHINESE COMPONENTS
Finally, the Bloomberg report cites the issue of U.S. defense contractors using Chinese-made components. Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and former CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), Michèle Flournoy[16] argued:
“Most prime contractors can’t even tell you how much Chinese content is in their systems, ranging from semiconductors to displays to nuts and bolts…”[17]
An example of this vulnerability was that F-35 deliveries were halted in September 2022 when it was discovered that Honeywell International was using Chinese alloys for pump magnets. Deliveries of F-35s continued after Honeywell found an “alternative US source” for the alloy.[18]
SPACE X CHALLENGES
The challenger of new competitors competing into the U.S. defense industry can be understood by the challenges faced by SpaceX.
Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, had to sue the U.S. government to allow his company to compete in national security space launches. At the time, the U.S. government supported the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to launch U.S. satellites into orbit.
However, ULA was deploying Russian-built rocket engines to send satellites into orbit, making the United States reliant on Russian components. [19]
In a 2022 Business Insider article, Musk praised the quality of the Russian rocket engines.
However, after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Russia stopped supplying rocket engines to ULA.[20]
Musk won the lawsuit, ending ULA’s monopoly on defense space launches, and allowing Space X to compete. ULA is now partnered with Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin to develop reusable, U.S.-made rocket engines.[21]
DOD RESPONDS
A new strategy by DOD is contained in a report entitled “Securing Defense-Critical Supply Chains” developed in response to President Biden’s Executive Order 14017 of February 2022.
In the report, the DOD authors noted:
“The Department of Defense (DoD) requires healthy, resilient, diverse, and secure supply chains to ensure the development and sustainment of capabilities critical to national security.[22]
The effort prioritized four areas in which critical vulnerabilities pose the most pressing threat to national security:
- Kinetic capabilities: current missiles systems and advanced and developing missile capabilities, including hypersonic weapons technology, as well as directed energy weapons
- Energy storage and batteries: high-capacity batteries, with a particular focus on lithium batteries
- Castings and forgings: metals or composites developed into key parts and manufacturing tools through high-intensity processes
- Microelectronics: State-of-the-Practice (SOTP) and legacy microelectronics, as well as State-of the-Art (SOTA) microelectronics [23]
The report also focused on the following:
- Build domestic production capacity: For those supply chains that are critical for national defense, the U.S. is committed to ensuring reliable production access within the defense industrial base, both domestic and allied.
- Engage with partners and allies: The U.S. is collaborating with its international partners and allies to develop policies and arrangements that strengthen U.S. defense industrial bases and improve supply chain resilience.
- Mitigate Foreign Ownership, Control, or Influence (FOCI) and safeguard markets: The Department is committed to protecting its supply chains and the defense industrial base from adversarial FOCI by scaling efforts to identify and mitigate FOCI concerns. [24]
CONCLUSION
The U.S. military is in a race against time to match China’s output. Years of neglect, downsizing, and reliance on foreign components have restricted the DOD’s efforts to advance U.S. armed forces’ capabilities. By addressing the shortcomings and implementing the necessary recommendations in the defense industrial base the United States is in a race against time to stave off the possibility of defeat in the Pacific.
FOOTNOTES
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/pentagon-dod-actions-spark-concern-if-us-military-equipped-for-war
[2] Tad DeHaven and Adam Thierer, The Military-Industrial Complex Offers a Cautionary Tale for Industrial Policy Planning, Published March 25th, 2022, discoursemagazine.com, https://www.discoursemagazine.com/economics/2022/03/25/the-military-industrial-complex-offers-a-cautionary-tale-for-industrial-policy-planning/
[3] https://features.csis.org/preparing-the-US-industrial-base-to-deter-conflict-with-China/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20results%20of,capacity%20for%20a%20major%20war
[4] Peter Martin, Courtney McBride and Roxana Tiron, Russia’s War on Ukraine, China’s Rise Expose US Military Failings, Published February 20th, 2023, bloomberg.com, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/pentagon-dod-actions-spark-concern-if-us-military-equipped-for-war
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Stephen Losey, Full weapons tester report highlights F-35 availability, software problems, Published March 16, 2022, defensenews.com https://www.defensenews.com/air/2022/03/16/full-weapons-tester-report-highlights-f-35-availability-software-problems/
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/politics/littoral-combat-ships-lobbying.html
[16] https://www.cnas.org/people/mich%C3%A8le-flournoy
[17] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/pentagon-dod-actions-spark-concern-if-us-military-equipped-for-war
[18] Ibid.
[19] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/pentagon-dod-actions-spark-concern-if-us-military-equipped-for-war
[20] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-russian-rocket-engines-great-boeing-lockheed-martin-2022-3#:~:text=Boeing%20and%20Lockheed%20Martin’s%20joint,%2Dmade%20RD%2D180%20engine.
[21] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/pentagon-dod-actions-spark-concern-if-us-military-equipped-for-war
[22] https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/24/2002944158/-1/-1/1/DOD-EO-14017-REPORT-SECURING-DEFENSE-CRITICAL-SUPPLY-CHAINS.PDF
[23] Ibid.
[24] https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/24/2002944158/-1/-1/1/DOD-EO-14017-REPORT-SECURING-DEFENSE-CRITICAL-SUPPLY-CHAINS.PDF