Snake oil and bridges to sell the LCS saga

 Happened to be perusing my traps and lines this morning and came across this bit from CDR Salamander

CDR Salamander about the LCS 

Thursday, April 29, 2021

When You Fool Yourself, You are One

 He linked to the following report 

Littoral Combat Ship: Unplanned Work on Maintenance Contracts Creates Schedule Risk as Ships Begin Operations (gao.gov)

Rule of 3's

 I'm going to translate the above bureaucratic speak into plain English in a minute.

But before I do that I'm going into the rule of threes as far as surface ship operations go. One that tends to work and if you deviate from it you start reducing readiness and material condition.

The rule of threes is simple. Lets say you have 9 ships. Generally that means you really only have 3. Or maybe if you push it 4 or 5. But you can't push that envelop for long or things and people start breaking

So generally if you have 9 ships,  3 are in the yards (more on that later), 3 are operationally deployed or capable of such and 3 have exited the yards an in the work of phases. 

Its pretty simple and it works.  Yes you are only essentially getting 3 ships operational for the 9 you have under that model but those three ships are going to last a lot longer.

The problem is that the US Navy decided to get cute.

We have pushed the model to essentially wanting and having 6 ships operationally deployed, with 3 of those ships the ones that should be going into the yards and ready for what they called surge tasking. 

For those that don't know when ships come back from a 6-9 month deployment they are generally pretty beat up. This is especially s we don't make as many port visits, and that means thing like painting and other maintenance that can really only be done in port gets what they called deferred. Or in Simple English speak - it doesn't get done when it should have and is rescheduled. 

Paying the shop vice doing it yourself and delaying (deferring) the work

A good analogy would be changing the oil on your car. So rather than say every 3000 miles you decide to push it to 6000 miles and then 9000 miles. Well you can imagine what impact that would have on your cars engine. 

Have I done that occasionally because I was to busy, yes, but I try not to do it that much. Because my car's service life is going to be shorter and I'm going to have a buy a new car sooner.

So back to this 

Littoral Combat Ship: 

Unplanned Work 

on Maintenance Contracts 

Creates  Schedule Risk 

as Ships Begin Operations (gao.gov)

Unplanned work: This means you had no idea using the analogy above that when you finally went in for an oil change the mechanic noticed that you windshield wipers were shot, your tires bald, you had some coolant and oil leaks and your hoses needed to be replaced. Well remember you planned for a quick oil change, and so did your mechanic. But now instead of a 29.95 30 minute oil change you are looking at a 800 dollar several day overhaul job. 

Maintenance Contracts: Well way back in the day much of the basic stuff mentioned above, was taken care of by the crew of a ship. Think rather than taking your car to the shop you head over to auto zone pick up your parts jack up the car and do the work yourself. You save the 50 or more an hour labor because your doing it yourself and avoid the markup on the parts because you did it yourself. Downside is your Saturday is lost. Well now - especially for the LCS the crew is not capable of doing this themselves due to minimal manning so we have to book an appointment with the mechanic. So we call him and say hey I'm just coming in for an oil change but can you do a once over on the car to see if there is anything wrong. Mechanic say sure, why don't you come in around 10 and we will do the oil change and you will be on your way by 11 at the latest. So you go in drop your keys and sit in the waiting room reading an old sports illustrated or car mag. At 1030 the mechanic comes in pale faced and says your car is jacked up and its nor really safe to drive as the tires are bald and a bunch of other stuff is messed up. 

Uh oh what do we do now?

Creates Schedule Risk: The mechanic says says look, I've got 3 other cars coming in and this was not really what we discussed, this is going to take three days to fix with all my people. You say fine do what you have to. Well what does the mechanic say, well he looks at his appointment book and realizes he  needs to call Ms Jones, Mr Smith ..ect and tell them not to bring their cars in to execute their scheduled maintenance contracts because his lift is going to be full the next several days. Well Ms Jones and Mr Smith now have to reschedule their maintenance contracts  

Creates Schedule Risks part II. So while its up on the lift they find a bunch more stuff that is wrong that was not revealed by the once over, Your now looking at a couple weeks in the shop. So that road trip to the mid west you planned - that's out. And you also need to find another car to go to work with in the mean time. 

As ships begin operations:  Remember that 3/3/3 rule. 3 ships deployed, 3 ships in training and 3 ships getting ready to go. Well think of it like 9 cars in a big family who have to be able to have the capacity to have three cars on the road at all times. And after a set period of time they change out. Well now one of the cars that was supposed to change out is broken. So the intricate schedule you developed is out the window. 

So how did we get here throwing stones at glass houses

So a while back I had a chance to tour and talk with some LCS sailors. I felt like I had entered the twilight zone where normal rules of surface ship operations do not apply.

To begin with the ships were purposely not manned at sufficient levels to do basic or intermediate level maintenance. I'll call that changing the oil, changing tires, coolant flush and maybe some  belts plus coolant change.

They are totally reliant on contractors to fix stuff. 

So again its my shop analogy.

But it gets worse. And I'll use another car analogy. 

Sometimes you get a complex repair, like changing out the engine in your car, because you blew it up as you forgot to check the oil. 

Now that is a repair beyond the ability of most. However, in my extended family's I have some non mechanics whom if we got together we could probably change the engine. I happen to have a decent size shop who the previous owners used to service semis. 

So I buy a case a beer we run out get the parts, swing my 5 tone crane and start the work. Its going to take a bit as we don't change engines out routinely, but we will get er done. 

The above is what we used to call SIMA or Shore Intermediate Maintenance Activities and our tender fleets whom could pretty much fix anything. 

We to my knowledge essentially defunded these and outsources it. The equivalent of me selling my shop and crane and deciding to take any work to a professional mechanic with all the increased costs but hopefully increased efficiency. In short we use contractors 

And these contractors are not (I could be wrong about this) onboard. (From GAO report)

Currently, the Navy is paying “fly-away teams,” meaning U.S. basedcontractors who travel overseas to conduct routine and non-major LCS maintenance, a higher cost unique to the LCS program. For example, Navy officials stated that starting in late 2020, they began sending flyaway teams to Panama to support LCS operating in the region. The Navy will continue to use fly-away teams of contractors at least until the METs are implemented, which the Navy expects to take approximately 5 years. Navy officials stated that they are still determining the balance of contractors and METs for future LCS maintenance.

Now it looks like someone finally realized that the above model is a bit stupid, and maybe those transformationalists and business process cult navalists from the 2000's may have been just a  but misguided 

While the Navy is introducing Navy-led Maintenance Execution Teams (MET) to take over some routine maintenance duties typically conducted by contractors, contractors will continue to play a role in the maintenance of LCS. The Navy is developing METs, which will consist only of Navy personnel separate from the LCS crew, to reduce the Navy’s reliance on contractors for LCS maintenance. The Navy expects that the METs will increase the self-reliance and flexibility of the ships to meet operational schedules and shift routine maintenance responsibility onto the Navy. Nevertheless, Navy officials stated that contractors will continue to have a role in routine maintenance in the near and long term as the METs are being stood up and after they are in place

MET = SIMA  thats what it looks like. 

But we have other problems with the whole LCS  design which was stupid from the get go and only really serves to line contractors pockets..assuming we can get them to come onboard to fix things in the first place 

here are a few nuggets

-the Navy and other contractors do not consistently have access to technical information necessary to maintain many systems and therefore need OEM support

-vendors from foreign countries provide a number of LCS systems, and Navy maintenance officials said it can be especially difficult to bring in foreign OEMs to execute ship repairs when LCS work is performed overseas during deployments. Specifically, officials said it is challenging to arrange access for foreign OEM technician

-the LCS program planned to use contracted maintenance, and as a result, program officials stated that they did not purchase the technical documentation necessary to maintain the systems used on the ship.

-The shortage of OEM technicians for the number of LCS currently in operation may increase the risk of schedule delays in the future as more LCS become operational. For example, maintenance officials stated that a commercial system had a broken part that required repairs and the OEM did not have a procedure to fix it. As a result, the Navy had to take the part from another ship to fix the first ship and put the broken part in storage

Even for routine maintenance, LCS is experiencing numerous instances of unplanned maintenance work, called growth work, which puts the program at greater risk of cost growth and schedule delays. A senior Navy maintenance official stated that the amount of growth work for LCS is “unbelievable.” In our analysis of 18 delivery orders, including 16 for non-major and routine maintenance, we found 760 requests for contract changes across both variants, with 651 requests due to growth work. Of those changes for growth work, the most common category—341 (52 percent)—was work that the Navy determined could not have been planned prior to the availability such as work that required inspecting the ship after the availability started. Figure 4 shows the breakdown of these categories in our sample

By the way "Growth" is the mechanic realizing you got big problems

So I have complained about the problem. What is the solution?

To start, we need to take back our maintenance, and our systems. Dialing 1-800 CON TRAC is not a solution when your in harms way.

Lets have the appropriate technical navy org take ownership of these systems, develop documentation and manuals. Lets break these contracts in for the good of the service and start developing "A" and        "C" schools

So unfortunately the snake oil salesman sold their oil to the navy and we bought the bridge that wasn't really for sale and never will be built and even it was we won't own it.

Its time to admit we go scammed go to the doctor and take the bitter medicine that is proscribed, and admit we can't afford to keep sending out car out for service and re-learn how do do that work in house with our own sailors. And yes increase manning as required. Maybe a module or two onthe LCS needs to go for a 30 man berthing for E-3 and below.