The U.S. Navy is in a tough spot. Sailors need cutting-edge technology, but full-scale vessel, propulsion and large system-level prototypes needed to test new technological approaches are often considered too costly for Congress to fund. Instead, vessel innovation too often done on the fly, kludged onto new procurement projects after a bit of ad-hoc computer modeling, some brainstorming at the systems level, or via the savvy guidance of some influential salesperson.
Given that research and development hard to fund these days, Navy innovation aboard ships and subs are now frequently blended into big procurements as immature, untested and poorly thought-out subsystems. This corner-cutting habit of hiding research and development in a big, expensive vessel procurement or forcing new technologies into an ongoing combatant production run has a real cost. And today, after taking too many research and development shortcuts, the U.S. Navy is feeling the pinch as it shifts to confront a rapidly changing maritime threat environment.
With too few ships ready to deploy, any delay or misstep in technical design imposes immediate consequences on the U.S. fleet. And as rivals press ahead in building new and advanced combatants, U.S. Fleet Commanders need shipyards to produce battle-ready vessels at ever-faster rates. In this dynamic maritime environment, the last thing Navy leaders want is for new combatants to be sidelined over pesky technology problems or pulled off-track by inadequate systems engineering oversight. But, again and again, with the U.S. Navy’s two Littoral Combat Ship classes, the Zumwalt class destroyer, and the Ford class aircraft carrier, naval combatants are being delivered incomplete, unready for contested oceans.
Managing this tension between technological innovation and warfighting demands the institutional fortitude to make tough decisions and pay some substantial “up-front” developmental, test and prototyping costs. Even though the U.S. Navy needs platforms with the best possible technology, naval stakeholders cannot keep burying new combatants under a tsunami of new and untested high-tech gear, ceding the solid warfighting priorities of reliability, lethality, and simplicity to the whimsy of, say, a technology-intoxicated ex-Admiral.
The U.S. Navy must learn to say “enough”, and build combatants that work while directing new and untested ideas towards a vibrant, well-funded prototyping program.
New ideas are only great if they are proven out.
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