A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on April 25th, 2008 in US News

A friend over at Blue Jersey drew my attention to the saga of the littoral combat ship (LCS). It’s pretty short and asking for oversight from a South Jersey Republican who is very proud of sitting on the appropriate committee. But the full story from the New York Times gives a lot more detail.

The littoral combat ship is supposed to be an adaptation to the kind of fast-moving shallow-water threats our ships often face in such places as the Persian Gulf. Full-sized ships have to move slower in shallow water, and so they lose maneuverability. While it’s true that you can use a five-inch gun to take out a speedboat, it isn’t the weapon of choice. Plus, when you’re operating on the other side of the world, flexibility is a key component of keeping our fleet safe.

In the past, flexibility was achieved by building large ships that could carry a lot of stuff. The ship upon which I served – the USS Saipan (LHA-2) – cost more than two and a half billion to build several decades ago and ran through fuel oil like eggs through a hen. Which means that even at the way-over-budget cost of half a billion, the LCS is still a bargain – if it works.

But all of that will be worked out. Believe it or not, the Navy has professional mechanics and electricians who will make the damn thing work. They are every bit as good, if not better than, the ones being sent by private industry (in fact, the Navy is a prime area for recruiting for private industry). What is necessary to understand is the process by which this good idea became a boondoggle; because it was the guaranteed foreseeable outcome of blind ideology.

First, there is the ideological faith in private industry over government. It’s the old Milton Freeman “government can’t do anything right” plank of conservative ideology put into practice. I’ve always said that is about as wrong-headed as the view that government can always do everything better than private industry. The truth is that each does some things better than the other. But the problem is that this ideology was so firmly in place that the government forgot to act like a customer.

Look at it this way. If you were spending five hundred million dollars on a new house, you’d be there every day – double-checking construction methods and materials, ensuring that the plans were followed, and just generally making sure you would get your money’s worth. Under Donald Rumsfeld, the Department of Defense has simply not done that. That is just dereliction of duty, plain and simple. If an enlisted man had made the decision to not double-check the construction, he’d be in prison – and I mean that literally.

But if private industry always does things better than government, then why should the government try to oversee the production of anything? That’s the problem. Blind faith in anything created by man is just stupid.

That same ideological blindness led to another problem:

As Representative Gene Taylor, the Mississippi Democrat who leads the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Expeditionary Forces, put it, “Thinking these ships could be built to commercial specs was a dumb move.”

Everyone remembers the story of the $500 hammer. What they don’t get told is that the $500 was built to specifications above and beyond the one you’ll get at Home Depot. Sometimes hammers in the Navy have to be used in situations where the atmosphere is explosive, or when exposed to corrosive elements, or must be resistant to absorbing radiation or chemical agents – you want to grab a Stanley and hope it holds up when you swing it with all you got? Military specifications – milspecs – are crafted by engineers who understand the situations and conditions in which the equipment is to be used. That doesn’t always mean that it is used that way – as that $500 hammer found its way into regular usage because some clerk somewhere looked up “hammer”, found that one, and ordered it without checking the milspecs.

So some genius thinks “We can use a commercial ferry and just throw on some armor.” Ships, especially ones waying thousands of tons, can’t just have thing slapped onto them haphazardly. It would seem that, once again, that blind faith in private industry said, “Why should we use these military plans that cost twice as much? It looks the same to me.” Looks, in many military situations, will get you killed – and sometimes they will take out dozens or even thousands (in the case of a ship) more people with you.

There is a small problem with the article:

In their haste to get the ships into the water, the Navy and contractors redesigned and built them at the same time — akin to building an office tower while reworking the blueprints.

This always happens – it takes years to build a ship and technology doesn’t stand still. If you don’t change the prints as you go, you end up with a product that is obsolete the minute it launches. The problem was the extent to which they changed things as they went. The Saipan had a big hump in the floor halfway down its length because one of these changes wasn’t worked through the entire ship (and didn’t need to be – it’s a rather small hump) – but the Saipan was the second of its class, so most of the alterations had already been worked through. The initial ship of any class is always a crap-shoot.

So the problem with the LCS is actually one of degrees – as long as they get it working. But it is a degree that gives us an idea of how badly some ideologies work in real life. Even if someone believes that government is bound to screw up, they should still push government to be effective and efficient as possible at whatever actions is takes. If it isn’t going to build its own ships – and I wouldn’t even begin to argue that it should – then government must be a wise consumer and be involved at all phases of design and construction. Eventually some sailor is going to have his or her life on the line because of the accumulation of these decisions. That has to be remembered always and it has to be the top priority – make the ship safe.

It also demonstrates how conservative ideology is a self-fulfilling prophecy. They start out thinking government simply can’t work. So they decide to “trim costs” by canning the guys that know how to inspect ships as they are built – totally unnecessary because industry can self-police better. This lack of oversight leads to an atmosphere of blind faith in industry – which, ultimately, exists to turn a profit. Since industry lacks sufficient experience (Lockheed had never built a boat) and the government isn’t providing it, mistakes are made and then compounded, resulting in overruns and delays. When the product is finally delivered, the conservative points to the problems, the delays, the overruns and says, “See, I told you we couldn’t do it!”

As the old saying says, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t; you’re right.”

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