Regretfully, I have to agree with the general assessment of this piece
"The Navy’s performance in developing new surface combatants is at a low ebb. The Navy began the century by unveiling three new classes of surface combatants. All three programs went awry, producing almost no gain in warfighting capability"
Four Reasons The Navy’s Bold Plans For Its Surface Fleet Are Doomed In The Biden Era (forbes.com)
There is a bit of good news. James F. “Hondo” Geurts is "PTDO (performing the duties of) under secretary of the Navy.
New PTDO Under Secretary of the Navy Designated - Seapower (seapowermagazine.org)
Why is this good?
"Geurts previously served as the acquisition executive, U.S. Special Operations Command, at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, where he was responsible for all special operations forces acquisition, technology and logistics"
For those that don't know, while Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is a Combatant Command (COCOM) they also have the ability and authority to buy stuff.
There is a pretty well established and functional Requirements to Capability Cycle there.
And pretty quick flash to bang. Talking Urgent Needs Statement from an O-3 validated by an O-6 in the field to a delivered capability in a year sometimes less.
And that organization also still does things like utilizing the Department of Defense Architectural Framework (DODAF) to ensure that there is traceability from the requirements document to actual capability delivery.
Yes DODAF can be painful and slow, if you don't have the warfighter, requirements developer and Architects in the same room.
Sometimes the warfighter wants things that are not possible. I would love to design a Ray gun for the warfighter, but that is probably not technologically feasible s the Technology Readiness level is just not there.
This cartoon pretty much encapsulates what happens when the people whom are going to use something have little input into design. And those designing it have little understanding of those whom are going to use it. See cartoon below.
But if you do have the warfighter, requirements developer and Architects in the same room through the entire process it can go pretty quick, as in months vice years.
Its been a while since I was doing Navy Centric DODAF stuff but back then in the 2010's we didn't do it as well as we could. As it was to hard and required to much effort
Had the Navy stuck with that process rather than gutting the DODAF shop and going all transformational in the 2000's and 2010's we might have avoided the LCS nonsense and the issues the Ford is having.
Since the slice of the pie is going to get smaller perhaps Mr Geurts will be able to determine which projects really need to be thrown out as they are not tied to any CONOPS.
Time will tell...
That being said, back in the 2010's I was working as a contractor on a Navy centric project.
Although the project had been defunded their was still funding mechanisms for that project. The output of the work was pretty much identical to a new project. So we did the work and re-purposed it.
It was a little intellectually dishonest. But we were able to use much of the old work to advance the new work.
Somewhere we have a lot of ROC/POE Required Operational Capabilities/ Projected Operational Environment documents sitting in file cabinets and a fair degree of preliminary work done on lots of things we are interested in doing now.
Lets leverage that rather than re-inventing wheels
Ooh the old project CG(X)
the new one Flight 3 DDG.
With luck perhaps Mr Geurts will take the something old something new and rationalize acquisitions
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