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The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem

popularmechanics.com

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Re: The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem

#71

Post by throwanem »

grandinj wrote: post #65
hwillis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineering has a much stronger and more specific focus on avoiding "unexpected" problems like this. At its most general you use things like dimensional analysis to identify and avoid issues that you can't specifically foresee. This is, bare minimum, an embarrassing failure of design. No system, especially on a military ship , should have no redundancy. A single point of failure should not bring down every toilet on…

Any very large project is expected to have a number of embarrassing failures. You just don't hear about most of them. Not surprisingly, on a __military__ ship, sewage is not considered mission critical and required to have multiple redundancy. You can, after all, take a poop in a bucket and throw it over the side. Redundancy engineering is reserved for truly mission-critical things, like being able to find and shoot…

It's a shame they also haven't wasted redundancy resources on the electromagnetic catapult system used to launch aircraft, and which as of 2018 had a failure rate consistent with a 70% chance of completing a full day of flight operations without downtime. (1)

It's easy to imagine that the toilet failures here under discussion represent an isolated concern and a teething problem for the kind of new, nonessential system that you expect to see in a new class of capital warship which, after all, still gets the fundamentals right. The trouble is that, once you start really looking, that's just not borne out by the evidence.

A lot of the ideas in play with these ships, as with the LCS or the F-35, are fundamentally good. But the US military procurement process has become so deeply corrupt that we as a country are no longer capable of implementing these good ideas well. The multiple-decade, trillion-dollar boondoggle has become table stakes, and that doesn't deserve to be excused by anyone.

(Also, a Ford-class carrier has a crew of something like four thousand. They're gonna need a lot of buckets...)

(1) https://breakingdefense.com/2018/06/navys-troubled-ford-carr...

Re: The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem

#72

Post by burlesona »

ceejayoz wrote: post #67
dreamcompiler wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineering in the traditional sense plays very little role in modern defense systems. The overriding concern is profit: How can we extract the most money from the DoD? Good engineering that avoids recurring costs is discouraged in favor of gee-whiz technology that's easy to sell but expensive to build and maintain. The icing on the cake is that bids no longer matter; the largest contractors always underbid to get th…

> instant scrapping of programs that exceed cost estimates So you're gonna build 75% of an aircraft carrier, and... then what?

It’s possible to put performance guarantees / insurance etc. into contracts such that if the contractor cannot build the entire thing within some percentage of budget then the entire cost is refunded, and the contractor is left with scrap metal.

Re: The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem

#73

Post by ceejayoz »

burlesona wrote: post #72
ceejayoz wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instant scrapping of programs that exceed cost estimates So you're gonna build 75% of an aircraft carrier, and... then what?

It’s possible to put performance guarantees / insurance etc. into contracts such that if the contractor cannot build the entire thing within some percentage of budget then the entire cost is refunded, and the contractor is left with scrap metal.

That sounds like a great way to make sure no company ever bids to build an aircraft carrier.

Re: The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem

#74

Post by ceejayoz »

jakear wrote: post #69
ceejayoz wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instant scrapping of programs that exceed cost estimates So you're gonna build 75% of an aircraft carrier, and... then what?

Realize you’ve screwed your self over for underbidding and not do it again?

Given the timeframes on a project like an aircraft carrier, both sides are equally screwed here.

Re: The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem

#75

Post by hwillis »

gambiting wrote: post #27
trelliscoded wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess how much shipping is to the middle of the ocean. Go on, guess.

Surely no one sends a warship "just" with their shipment of toilet acid, an aircraft carrier will be getting resupplies regularly anyway. So either the resupply run is insanely expensive and $400k is just a part of it, or someone is being dishonest and uses a cost of a single run as the cost of the clean.

The DoD will not hesitate for a second to call in contractors if they aren't confident in their crew. I'm sure they did so in this case.

Even though you're just flying a few guys (say a few acid guys, maybe an engineer who knows the toilets, just in case) out for a day or two, that's stupidly expensive. Not even just the cost of putting them on a plane or helicopter- even though you may only be paying for a few hundred man hours, you need to pay a lot to pull those guys out of whatever they were doing.

4,700 people shitting in buckets is kind of an emergency in the middle of the ocean, unfortunately. The navy is notorious for its sleep deprivation and tight schedules. Seemingly small disruptions and timewasters can lead to major problems and mistakes.

Re: The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem

#76

Post by LatteLazy »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #68
LatteLazy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to make 120m each in campaign donations to 3 senators to get the contract, plus another 40m in actual cost of research, supply and profit margin and then the navy only wants to buy 1000 units because its new and they get in trouble for buying necessary supplies instead of cool shit like torpedoes, then you sort of have to charge 400k a unit...

" 120m each in campaign donations to 3 senators to get the contract" The contributions they are making are usually much lower. When you read the numbers it's actually surprising how little money you have to spend to get government money in return. Very good ROI.

Yeah, I'd heard that too. It's all so shameful...

Re: The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem

#77

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #63
hwillis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineering has a much stronger and more specific focus on avoiding "unexpected" problems like this. At its most general you use things like dimensional analysis to identify and avoid issues that you can't specifically foresee. This is, bare minimum, an embarrassing failure of design. No system, especially on a military ship , should have no redundancy. A single point of failure should not bring down every toilet on…

Engineering in the traditional sense plays very little role in modern defense systems. The overriding concern is profit: How can we extract the most money from the DoD? Good engineering that avoids recurring costs is discouraged in favor of gee-whiz technology that's easy to sell but expensive to build and maintain. The icing on the cake is that bids no longer matter; the largest contractors always underbid to get th…

How often does a “competitive” bidding process for being handed a temporary monopoly work out? The competition flies out the window the moment the contract is signed.

What if the Navy builds the ships itself?

Re: The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem

#78

Post by hwillis »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #63
hwillis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineering has a much stronger and more specific focus on avoiding "unexpected" problems like this. At its most general you use things like dimensional analysis to identify and avoid issues that you can't specifically foresee. This is, bare minimum, an embarrassing failure of design. No system, especially on a military ship , should have no redundancy. A single point of failure should not bring down every toilet on…

Engineering in the traditional sense plays very little role in modern defense systems. The overriding concern is profit: How can we extract the most money from the DoD? Good engineering that avoids recurring costs is discouraged in favor of gee-whiz technology that's easy to sell but expensive to build and maintain. The icing on the cake is that bids no longer matter; the largest contractors always underbid to get th…

> Engineering in the traditional sense plays very little role in modern defense systems. The overriding concern is profit: How can we extract the most money from the DoD? Good engineering that avoids recurring costs is discouraged in favor of gee-whiz technology that's easy to sell but expensive to build and maintain. The icing on the cake is that bids no longer matter; the largest contractors always underbid to get the contract then send bills that are 2x, 4x or 10x the bid, knowing they have the DoD over a barrel.

As a government contractor, I agree and fully endorse this.

> The solution for this nonsense is competition. Real, honest, open, transparent competition. Combined with laws that dictate refusal to pay in excess of the bid, instant scrapping of programs that exceed cost estimates, and a 10-year timeout window between when people in DoD leadership can transition out and get jobs with DoD contractors.

...And I disagree with this fully. The solution is for the government to return to in-housing, relax the rules they hold themselves to, and aggressively expand their own capabilities. The things the government makes are far and away superior to anything in the private sector. At its best, the government does it better, cheaper, and longer-lasting than anyone else.

Real competition for the things the government needs done is just not possible. Roughly 50% of contracts are based on just flat-out lies, and it's even worse for shitty contracts like SBIRs. I'll tell you, I have seen some real dumb shit. The BUYER needs technical expertise in order to not get ripped off, and if you already have expertise it makes much more sense to go the extra miles and build it yourself.

The market for government contracts would need to be way more lucrative to allow companies to fail honestly, and even then, why would they when lying is more profitable? Plus, this doesn't even cover the worst part of large contracts, which is that they're effectively negotiated by politics, either congress itself or inter-DoD factionalism. That, more than anything else, creates large-scale rot.

Re: The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem

#79

Post by hwillis »

throwanem wrote: post #71
grandinj wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any very large project is expected to have a number of embarrassing failures. You just don't hear about most of them. Not surprisingly, on a __military__ ship, sewage is not considered mission critical and required to have multiple redundancy. You can, after all, take a poop in a bucket and throw it over the side. Redundancy engineering is reserved for truly mission-critical things, like being able to find and shoot…

It's a shame they also haven't wasted redundancy resources on the electromagnetic catapult system used to launch aircraft, and which as of 2018 had a failure rate consistent with a 70% chance of completing a full day of flight operations without downtime. (1) It's easy to imagine that the toilet failures here under discussion represent an isolated concern and a teething problem for the kind of new, nonessential syste…

> It's a shame they also haven't wasted redundancy resources on the electromagnetic catapult system used to launch aircraft, and which as of 2018 had a failure rate consistent with a 70% chance of completing a full day of flight operations without downtime. (1)

Note that this system is a privately-contracted one and was supposed to work as delivered.

Re: The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem

#80

Post by hwillis »

Reason077 wrote: post #20

“system must regularly be cleaned with ... acid solution that costs $400,000 per use.” I realise the government/military procurement process can result in higher costs than the private sector would pay, but that is beyond ridiculous.

If you read the GAO report[1], most of the costs are due to commercial outsourcing- either outright failures on the part of private contractors, like the unreliable automated systems, plane arrestors, and other misc. equipment and services, or on the part of the DOD making assumptions about those equipment and services (like one notable instance in several classes where the navy assumed that commercial equipment would not require service or repair for the life of the ship).

These high costs occur when contractors have the government by the balls, because... that's what markets are for. The gov will pay $10,000 to replace a bulkhead (toilet cover), because well, toilets need to be covered on an airplane. $10,000 is just what it costs for someone to pick up the phone.

1: https://www.gao.gov/assets/710/705463.pdf

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