Design As We Go Fails (Again)

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/07/25/lcs-kerfuffle-navy-gao-may-be-in-violent-agreement-after-all/



The $584 million dollar USS Freedom

LCS Kerfuffle: Navy, GAO May Be In ‘Violent Agreement’ After All
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on July 25, 2013 at 4:50 PM

CAPITOL HILL: Bark, it turns out, does not necessarily correlate with bite. The Government Accountability Office is infamous for its often scathing reviews of Pentagon programs, and its latest report on the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship — one of GAO’s favorite targets — says Congress should “pause” LCS procurement until key systems are more adequately tested. But, as a GAO witness admitted in a hearing this morning, there may actually be nothing the Navy could or should do differently than its current shipbuilding plans.

That said, the ships themselves — the so-called seaframes — are just one of the three pieces of the LCS program and, by GAO’s reckoning, they are the least problematic. GAO worries more about the LCS mission modules, the plug-and-play equipment that goes on the seaframe to kit the ship out for specific missions. And GAO worries most about the evolving concept of operations (CONOPS) for how the Navy is going to maintain the LCS vessels and fix them when they break down, as the first LCS, USS Freedom, did just days ago off Singapore. In many ways, the GAO’s proposal to “pause” procurement looks like an attempt to hold hostage the best-performing part of the program, the seaframes, until the Navy shapes up on the parts that GAO is really worried about, modules and CONOPS.

It’s not easy to change course on a program this far along. 24 ships are already under contract despite LCS still being formally under “low-rate initial production” (LRIP). “We’re married into a lot of this that we can’t change,” the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Randy Forbes, told me after the hearing. “A lot of this has been poured into concrete, as you know, but I think there are some avenues that we have” to make “modifications,” he said, if not wholesale changes.

Congress needs to conduct serious oversight and get real answers to tough questions, Forbes said: “I hope we don’t just whine.”