9123 posted:

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-plans-vast-ai-fleet-to-counter-china-threat-4186a186

the Pentagon plans on spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" to create a RoboMilitary by September 2025



:doomed:

Complications posted:

fighting in ways that we know would work is impossible now, therefore we must try ways that we don't know for sure won't

quote:

Ghost Fleet Overlord is a fleet of test unmanned surface vehicles operated by the U.S. Navy.[1]

Ghost Fleet Overlord is being developed by the Department of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office.[1] It is a partnership between the Defense Department's Strategic Capabilities Office and the Navy.[2]

quote:

While technically "uncrewed", the ships carry a crew of six human sailors. Most of the ship's functions are automated, but can be carried out manually by the onboard human crew if the need arises.

Frosted Flake posted:

That's all this is. If I can distil it, everybody knows that a trillion dollars wouldn't be enough for Americans living in their contemporary society to want to be infantrymen in the kind of war a conventional conflict with a major power would be. Neoliberalism completely dismantled that. Nobody is going to sign up to be an infantry replacement for a society that gives and promises nothing. No infantry obviously complicates the whole war thing.

America used to be able to make up for this with a preponderance of materiel. Lives are expensive, steel is cheap. Well, at the same time they were selling off public confidence in America, the neoliberals sold off the ability to make munitions and armaments. They can't rely on superior firepower to wear the enemy down, and they can't replace what they have.

That leaves all of the stuff that's been cast about for since around 2000. Cyber warfare financial warfare, information warfare. These are all hoped for alternatives, even if they cost a fortune and their effectiveness is unknown, because not being able to provide men or materiel, for pretty much all of history, has ended in defeat. They will throw money chasing fantasy because they have no alternative.

Trabisnikof posted:

Ghost Fleet Overlord is way too cool of a name to waste on a bunch of lovely robot boats

lmao

KomradeX posted:

Wait the idea isnt to drive these things into the hulls of other boats to explode? What the gently caress is their purpose?

Slavvy posted:

Their purpose is to make someone a shitload of money, op

9123 posted:

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-plans-vast-ai-fleet-to-counter-china-threat-4186a186

the Pentagon plans on spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" to create a RoboMilitary by September 2025



:doomed:

9123 posted:

a lot of these weapons are cheap and disposable. who's the target then? a boat of 13 migrants in the mediterranean? innocent fishingpeople?

a fully autonomous military would cost any nation Trillions with China being the closest but not that close

Frosted Flake posted:

That's all this is. If I can distil it, everybody knows that a trillion dollars wouldn't be enough for Americans living in their contemporary society to want to be infantrymen in the kind of war a conventional conflict with a major power would be. Neoliberalism completely dismantled that. Nobody is going to sign up to be an infantry replacement for a society that gives and promises nothing. No infantry obviously complicates the whole war thing.

America used to be able to make up for this with a preponderance of materiel. Lives are expensive, steel is cheap. Well, at the same time they were selling off public confidence in America, the neoliberals sold off the ability to make munitions and armaments. They can't rely on superior firepower to wear the enemy down, and they can't replace what they have.

That
leaves all of the stuff that's been cast about for since around 2000. Cyber warfare financial warfare, information warfare. These are all hoped for alternatives, even if they cost a fortune and their effectiveness is unknown, because not being able to provide men or materiel, for pretty much all of history, has ended in defeat. They will throw money chasing fantasy because they have no alternative.

Delta-Wye posted:

Slavvy posted:

*muttering* Jesus Christ

KomradeX posted:

Wait the idea isnt to drive these things into the hulls of other boats to explode? What the gently caress is their purpose?

Trabisnikof posted:

How that would actually help in conflict against China is a little less clear, outside of fantasies of some epic blue water fight.

9123 posted:

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-plans-vast-ai-fleet-to-counter-china-threat-4186a186

the Pentagon plans on spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" to create a RoboMilitary by September 2025



:doomed:

quote:

Key Takeaways

- One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more littoral combat ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons systems failed. The Navy wound up with more ships than it wanted, at an estimated lifetime cost that could reach $100 billion or more.

- The Navy’s haste to deliver ships took precedence over combat ability. Without functioning weapons systems the vessels are like a “box floating in the ocean,” one former officer said.

- Sailors and officers complained they spent more time fixing the ships than sailing them. The stress led many to seek mental health care.

- Top Navy commanders placed pressure on subordinates to sail the ships even when the crews and vessels were not fully prepared to go to sea.

- Several major breakdowns in 2016 exposed the limits of the ships and their crews, each adding fresh embarrassment to a program meant to propel the Navy into a more technologically advanced future.

quote:

On the morning of Nov. 23, 2015, the USS Milwaukee set out across the frigid waters of the Great Lakes for its maiden voyage. The cost overruns had made headlines, but with the fifth ship in the water, Navy officials were hoping the vessel’s performance would lessen the growing doubts about the project.

The Navy planned to sail the Milwaukee from the shipyard on the shores of Lake Michigan in Marinette, Wisconsin, to its new home port of San Diego. From there, it would eventually join its sister ship, the USS Fort Worth, in helping to counter the Chinese navy’s expanding presence in the Western Pacific.

In a press tour days before the launch, Cmdr. Kendall Bridgewater evinced confidence, proclaiming that the enemy “would be hard pressed to find a vessel that could come up against us.”

But the ship wouldn’t need a fight to suffer its first defeat. Its worst enemy would be its own engine.

On Dec. 11, about three weeks into the two-month journey, a software failure severely damaged the Milwaukee’s combining gear — a complex mechanism that connects the ship’s diesel engines and its gas turbines to the propulsion shafts, producing the power necessary for it to reach top speeds.

A Navy salvage ship had to tow it some 40 miles for repairs at a base near Norfolk, Virginia. The ship hadn’t made it halfway down the East Coast — let alone to the South China Sea — before breaking down. If the Milwaukee were a brand new car, this would be the equivalent of stalling on its way out of the dealership.

Some former officers look back on the breakdown and those that followed as a clear violation of a cardinal principle in Navy shipbuilding: to “buy a few and test a lot.” But with the LCS, the Navy was doing the opposite. Commanders were learning about the flaws of the ships as they were being deployed.

quote:

Given what happened on the Fort Worth and the Milwaukee months earlier, top Navy leaders “felt pressure to deliver a ‘win’ for the program,” according to the investigation, which called the pressure on Wohnhaas “severe.” One senior officer invoked the commander of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Scott Swift, as wanting to use the region as a “testing grounds” for the Navy. Reached by phone, Swift said he was a “believer in the LCS” and acknowledged that he had encouraged the Navy to test new weapons systems in the Pacific. But he emphasized that it was not an order to deploy ships at any cost. “We made it clear if you want to take them off line, take them off line, but I am not surprised that people further down the chain didn’t feel they had that option,” he said. “The offer could have been perceived as an order, or taken advantage of by those that wanted to push harder to get a win out of LCS.”

“As a four star, if you ask for something too often people think of it as a requirement,” he said.

On the morning of July 17, 2016, the ship finally seemed ready to go. The contractors completed the rinse and were packing up to leave. But when the chief engineer looked at samples taken from inside the engine, he was deeply worried. “Holy poo poo,” he thought, according to an interview in a Navy investigation. “There’s still water in the engine.”

He sent a message to Wohnhaas that he later acknowledged was misleading because it suggested the ship was ready to go. He blamed the mistake on “not proof-reading” the text prior to sending it. “Sir, the flush is done,” he wrote at 9:50 a.m. “I [assess] that we are still on track for tomorrow.” Wohnhaas took this as good news and passed it on to his superiors: “Everything is tracking toward an on-time departure,” he said in an email sent to his commodore, Warren Buller, at 11:36 a.m.

In fact, the procedure approved by the Philadelphia guru hadn’t solved the problem. Investigators would later determine the procedure could not have worked — it was meant to remove grit, not seawater, from engine oil. The following morning, as the Freedom was preparing to depart, a senior enlisted engineer ran into a contractor he knew as Joe. Joe told him that the engine was still contaminated. Alarmed, the engineer discussed the situation with his supervisor, the chief engineer, who was smoking a cigarette on the front deck of the ship. If they went to sea, the engine would rust, the engineer said. The chief engineer told him he knew it and he was on his way to tell Wohnhaas.

In an interview with investigators, the chief engineer said he told Wohnhaas something to the effect of “we can’t get underway like this, we gotta do something.”

Wohnhaas declined to comment for this story. In his interview with investigators, he said that when he learned of the contaminated samples from the chief engineer, he understood the engine was inoperable. But he was confident he could avoid further damage and complete the mission by relying on the ship’s other engines. “There was a strong sense that we couldn’t have another LCS not meet mission,” Wohnhaas said. He did not tell his superior officers the uncomfortable fact that the engine was still contaminated because of the pressure to get underway, the investigation said.

The Freedom sailed out and detected mines in the water. The mission was a success — at least so everyone thought.

But on Aug. 3, five days after Wohnhaas returned the ship, a routine inspection revealed major damage to the engine, corrosion so extensive that the ship was docked in repairs for two years. The engine needed to be replaced.

The Navy investigation found that one failure led to another on the Freedom: The inexperienced crew used the wrong procedure to stop the leak; the Navy’s “technical community” then recommended another incorrect procedure to flush the engine; contractors executed it, providing “false hope” that it would prevent the corrosion.

DancingShade posted:

So basically they can't recruit, can't retain and now its robots or nothing so technology maturity isn't a factor. Also everything is going to be 100% grift.

Great. I'm sure that won't end up as expensive landfill with nothing to show for it.

DancingShade posted:

So basically they can't recruit, can't retain and now its robots or nothing so technology maturity isn't a factor. Also everything is going to be 100% grift.

Great. I'm sure that won't end up as expensive landfill with nothing to show for it.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Propublica: The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the "Little Crappy Ship"

gradenko_2000 posted:

Propublica: The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the "Little Crappy Ship"

quote:

Minehunting Failures

Littoral combat ships were supposed to help find and destroy underwater mines, but the remote minehunting system often returned false alarms during testing, was unreliable, frequently broke down and was difficult for sailors to control. The Navy turned to a new form of minehunting technology, which is still under development.

Survivability

Because of the emphasis on speed, the ships were originally built in part on designs used for commercial ferries. The designs did not contain protections that could prevent the flooding of critical systems when under attack. The Pentagon weapons testing department found that the design requirements “accept the risk that the crew would have to abandon ship” in circumstances where service members on other vessels would not.

Combining Gear

The Navy traced many high-profile breakdowns of the Freedom-class littoral combat ships to a design flaw in what’s known as the combining gear, a complex mechanism that connects gas turbines and diesel engines to the propulsion shafts in order to help the vessels reach top speed.

The Anti-Submarine Warfare Package

Littoral combat ships were supposed to be equipped to hunt and destroy submarines with an interlinked package of sonar devices, helicopters and torpedoes. But the systems didn’t effectively communicate with one another, the towed sonar couldn’t function properly in the vessels’ wake and the Freedom class is considered too loud to hunt submarines. The Navy canceled that function in 2022.

Limited Endurance

The Freedom is considered a “gas hog” among Navy officers, meaning it can’t go very fast for very long without running out of fuel. This creates a logistical problem for the Navy because the ship can’t stray too far from its gas supply.

quote:

As Clark began sharing his vision, concerns began to brew among Navy shipbuilding experts, who feared it was overly ambitious and technologically infeasible. Clark was unbowed.

He was an unlikely candidate to begin a revolution in shipbuilding. With an undergraduate degree from Evangel College, a small Christian school in Missouri, and an MBA from the University of Arkansas, he hardly fit the mold of a prototypical chief of naval operations who was groomed for leadership from his earliest days at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

A self-professed “radical,” at times irreverent and impassioned, he wanted to run the Navy like a business, streamlining training, rooting out misspent dollars, retaining sailors who shined and getting rid of those who did not.

quote:

In keeping with his business background, Clark wanted as few people on the new ships as possible. “What I really want is an unmanned ship that’s got R2-D2 in it,” he said, recalling his thinking at the time.

quote:

The Austal ship, which was the basis for the Independence class, would be an aluminum trimaran — a ship with three hulls. The Lockheed Martin ship, which formed the basis for the Freedom class, would be a more conventional monohull forged of steel. The radically different designs meant that the ships could not trade parts or sailors, making them more expensive to maintain and crew.

quote:

General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin considered much of the data and equipment on the LCS proprietary — a problem that the GAO has identified throughout the military. As a result, only their employees were allowed to do certain repairs, former officers said.

quote:

One former officer said that a manual for a davit, a type of crane used to lower a search-and-rescue boat, was written in Norwegian. He said the Navy had to spend thousands of dollars to fly in a contractor from Norway to change two fuses

ModernMajorGeneral posted:

Lots of good US losing ww3 material here

As Clark began sharing his vision, concerns began to brew among Navy shipbuilding experts, who feared it was overly ambitious and technologically infeasible. Clark was unbowed.

He was an unlikely candidate to begin a revolution in shipbuilding. With an undergraduate degree from Evangel College, a small Christian school in Missouri, and an MBA from the University of Arkansas, he hardly fit the mold of a prototypical chief of naval operations who was groomed for leadership from his earliest days at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

A self-professed “radical,” at times irreverent and impassioned, he wanted to run the Navy like a business, streamlining training, rooting out misspent dollars, retaining sailors who shined and getting rid of those who did not.

Mister Bates posted:

literal combat ship more like figurative combat ship

Frosted Flake posted:

to zero in on this, this isn’t a coincidence, they deliberately select for people who are not Academy graduates - who are undesirable because they have an overriding sense of corporate loyalty and identity that overrides a lot of the initiatives that they want to push through. So for example, attachment to a naval tradition would preclude a bunch of the things mentioned in the design and procurement of the ship.

Someone who is educated outside that system, in this case the perfect combination of religious and business education, is the ideal candidate to oversee this project because he’s a self-proclaimed radical with a chip on his shoulder. He will sign off on things no academy naval officer would. He sees that as a positive trait and so will push through against institutional traditions and experience. In other words, people telling him it’s dumb acts as encouragement and that’s why he was picked for the position - to push through stupid, unpopular measures.

As much as that’s a liability from our perspective from the perspective of the managerial people over at DOD that’s ideal.

fits my needs posted:

https://twitter.com/CNBCtech/status/1699771248480334291?s=20

Cerebral Bore posted:

what's extra funny here is that even in the very best case fantasy scenario the us would end up with most innovative military tech in the world, and absolutely no way to build any of it

Regarde Aduck posted:

it's a real shame nukes exist because there's no better time for the PLA to invade and fix Americans

9123 posted:

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-plans-vast-ai-fleet-to-counter-china-threat-4186a186

the Pentagon plans on spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" to create a RoboMilitary by September 2025



:doomed:

Cerebral Bore posted:

what's extra funny here is that even in the very best case fantasy scenario the us would end up with most innovative military tech in the world, and absolutely no way to build any of it

fits my needs posted:

https://twitter.com/CNBCtech/status/1699771248480334291?s=20