I find some of my correspondents gently berate me for being overwhelmingly negative so I am going to offer insights on occasion into tales of the human spirit that will cause you pause. So dear reader, first, the negativity the modern navy deserves.

The floating dumpster fire known as the Littoral Combat Ship continues to cost billions for no maritime combat return whatsoever. I can’t imagine receiving orders to command one of these buckets.

The real littoral combat vessel should have been an American renaissance in creating a whole new fleet of diesel electric submarines leaning heavily on the successful German boats that are proven and reliable.

The Littoral Combat Ship program has not gone well. Costing billions and billions of dollars, the return on the investment has been limited. Underscoring the failure of the program, several Littoral Combat Ships have already been decommissioned. I write “already” because the Littoral Combat Ship was designed to have a shelf life of twenty-five years. 

But the USS Freedom lasted just thirteen years. The USS Independence lasted just eleven. The USS Detroit served for just seven years before being decommissioned last September. The USS Sioux City five years. The USS Sioux City cost taxpayers $362 million. Five years for $362 million is a bad investment.

Five years.

The program has just been a mess, especially concerning the propulsion system. “High speed required a complex propulsion system that, two decades on, breaks so often…the type struggles to complete a deployment,” Forbes reported.

Another problem: the ship’s maintenance is highly contractor-dependent, meaning the Navy itself is often incapable of performing the oft-required maintenance.

And while the Littoral Combat Ship was designed to be a jack-of-all-trades, capable of serving in a variety of different roles, swapping role configurations has proven so troublesome that the Navy just sticks to one configuration per vessel.

“Perhaps worst of all, to keep down the roughly $500-million-per-ship cost of the hulls, the Navy chose to arm them only with light weaponry, guns, and short-range self-defense missiles,” Forbes reported. The light weaponry configuration would likely be a problem in a direct conflict with China. Indeed, as one 2010 Pentagon report found: the Littoral Combat Ship would not be able to survive in a hostile combat environment, yet is too large, and too expensive, to perform a scouting role.

Hats off to Harrison Kass for calling these dregs of the sea out.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/billions-dollars-wasted-navys-littoral-combat-ship-nightmare-213130

Triumph of the USS Samuel B. Roberts

The smaller destroyer escorts (now classified as frigates) designed and serving in WWII had more firepower and battle survivability than these LCS pigs. The Navy built nearly 600 of those ships in WWII. The LCS falls somewhere in length between the destroyers and destroyer escorts of WWII and delivers not a fraction of the combat power of those legends.

I know you may have seen this iconic photograph of some tin can sailors.

An unidentified ship rescues survivors of the Battle off Samar on 26 October 1944. Some 1,200 men of Gambier Bay (CVE-73), Hoel (DD-533), Johnston (DD-557) and Samuel B. Roberts (DE-413) survived following the action of 25 October. (U.S. Army Signal Corps Photograph 111-SC-278010, National Archives and Records Administration, Still Pictures Division, College Park, Md.)

Legends indeed:

Nearly 78 years after her loss during the 25 October 1944 Battle off Samar, the wreck of the USS Samuel B. Roberts (DE-413) was located in the Philippine Sea and identified in June. She lies at a depth of 22,621 feet—making her the deepest shipwreck ever found.

Some highlights of men who knew what they were about on that day:

After a failed torpedo attack run on [Japanese] heavy cruiser Chōkai, Cmdr. Copeland dodged incoming fire from the enemy cruiser’s 8-inch forward guns. Salvos from several Japanese vessels splashed near the lead American warships, including Samuel B. Roberts. Cmdr. Copeland turned his attention on the enemy cruiser Chikuma, ordering his gunners to open fire on her at 0805. The two 5-inch guns on board Samuel B. Roberts, Mt. 51 and Mt. 52, “beat a regular tattoo on the Jap cruiser’s upper works,” Cmdr. Copeland wrote. The gun captains fired 608 of 650 shells, the entire capacity of the destroyer escorts’ magazine. Firing star-shells and anti-aircraft rounds, the Japanese believed the attack came from a much larger force.

The battleship Kongō redirected her guns at Samuel B. Roberts, and using high-explosive shells fired three from her 14-inch guns at the hapless destroyer escort. Kongō’s salvo found their mark, with one Samuel B. Roberts crew-member comparing “the impact to that of two trains colliding head-on.” The first shell struck near Samuel B. Roberts’s waterline, in the communications and gyro room. Destroying the radar, the shell extinguished all lights on board (except for the battle lanterns), knocking out communications between the skipper and crew. The second shell tore through the lower handling room of Gun 51, knocking many of the gun crew down or up against the bulkhead. Flooding began almost immediately and the repair party quickly started moving ammunition topside. The third and final shell entered the main deck, crushing two sailors on its trajectory, before tearing a 4-foot-wide hole just aft of the hatch leading to Fire-room No. 1. The third projectile, failing to detonate until it cut through Samuel B. Roberts, also ruptured the main steam valve in several places. “All but two men…were instantly scalded to death in temperatures that soared to more than 800° or, half baked, begged for death as steam rose from their bodies.” Engine Room Number 2 was demolished while fuel and oil burned on the fantail and several smaller fires broke out below decks. Several other sailors on the 20-millimeter gun died, struck by flying shrapnel. Suddenly dead in the water, Samuel B. Roberts could not outrun her pursuers or mount a proper defense. The Japanese continued firing at her, and several destroyers rushed in for the kill.

The third shell also caused the escort vessel to dip in speed from 28.5 knots down to 17.5. Losing her two greatest assets, speed and maneuverability caused Cmdr. Copeland to realize, “we were then what you might call a ‘sitting duck in a shooting gallery.’” The aft 40-millimeter gun crew to no avail fired upon three torpedoes streaming towards Samuel B. Roberts. As several sailors braced for impact, they were relieved to discover the Type 93 torpedoes had passed harmlessly underneath. The Japanese, assuming the fighting would involve larger American warships, set the torpedoes to run too shallow. Just after breathing a sigh of relief, Cmdr. Copeland suddenly felt the bow of his ship lurch into the air.

Brave men and brave ships. Read the rest below.

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/danfs/s/samuel-b-roberts-de-413-i.html

We had a Navy to be proud of at one time.

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You recall that a rather spendy jet flew on its own for approx 11 minutes in 2023.

The pilot of an F-35 fighter jet that briefly went missing in September 2023 before crashing made an “inappropriate” decision in ejecting from the aircraft, a Marine Corps investigation concluded. 

The report released Thursday blamed the crash of the roughly $100 million aircraft on pilot error because “the pilot incorrectly diagnosed an out-of-controlled flight emergency and ejected from a flyable aircraft, albeit under extremely challenging cognitive and flight conditions.” 

On September 17, 2023, the pilot ejected from the F-35 during a heavy rainstorm and after experiencing a series of electrical and display malfunctions. The F-35 continued to fly on its own for 11 minutes and 21 seconds for a distance of about 70 miles, military officials said. 

The pilot landed in a driveway, according to the investigation, and then knocked on the door of the homeowner to call 911 and report the missing F-35. The crash site was located a day later in a rural area near Hemmingway, South Carolina. 

Before it crashed, the F-35 “plowed” through a dense forest, the investigation said. The debris field was approximately 1,800 feet long by approximately 300 feet at its widest point amid dense forest, cotton, and soybean fields. 

100 million dollars.

Scrap.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/after-pilot-error-f-35-fighter-jet-flew-for-11-minutes-on-its-own-before-crashing-last-year/

This is not the most epic thunderstorm mishap with an air force jet, this is; all hail the brass balls of LtCol William Henry Rankin USMC:

On July 26, 1959 Rankin and his wingman, 1st Lt. Herbert Nolan, were flying a pair of F-8 Crusaders from South Weymouth, Mass back to their home base at Beaufort, S.C. when they encountered a line of severe thunderstorms over North Carolina. Shortly after the fighters climbed up to 47,000 feet to go over the growing cumulonimbus clouds, Rankin heard a loud grinding noise followed by a loss of power from the jet’s only engine. About that time the jet’s fire warning light illuminated. Rankin tried pulling the auxiliary power handle but it came off in his hand. He tried to restart the engine several times but had no luck. At that point, with the fighter in an uncontrollable dive and going nearly supersonic, he knew he only had one option left. He keyed the radio and matter-of-factly told his wingman he “had to eject” and then pulled the handle. The senior Marine pilot wasn’t wearing a pressure suit, so as soon as he hit the surrounding atmosphere at that altitude his body was put through the ringer. The sudden decompression caused his stomach to swell, his ears, nose and mouth to bleed. The ejection tore his left glove from his hand, leaving it exposed to the brutally cold air. His skin immediately froze, which resulted in numbness and severe frostbite. During his fall Rankin managed to strap his oxygen mask to his face, which was a crucial element if he was going to survive his ordeal. From his training he knew that it would take about three and a half minutes to fall from just under 50,000 feet to 10,000 feet where his parachute was designed to automatically deploy. He looked at his watch and saw that more than four minutes had gone by. He figured his ejection seat automatic chute mechanism had malfunctioned, so he manually deployed it. But Rankin’s seat hadn’t malfunctioned. His descent had simply been slowed by massive updrafts created by the thunderstorm next to him, and as soon as his chute opened another powerful updraft filled it and rocketed him several thousand feet vertically a velocity of nearly 100 mph. Lightning flashed all around in what he later described as “blue blades several feet thick” and the thunder boomed so loudly he feared it would burst his eardrums. Rain pelted him from all directions. He felt like he was going to drown. When he reached the top of the thunderstorm the updraft turned into a downdraft. It was totally dark as he was pulled into the center of the thunder cloud, and his chute collapsed as he plummeted. It reopened once he was under the storm, and as it did, he caught another updraft that catapulted him back to the top of the cloud. Once at the top he was dragged back into the center of the storm and thrown downward again. Rankin was repeatedly buffeted through this cycle . . . a living hell he feared might never end. Finally, the storm dissipated enough that he wasn’t dragged back up after shooting through it, and he was unceremoniously blown into a thicket of brush in the middle of a field near Ahoskie, N.C. He was wet and beat to hell and had to draw on his survival skills to make it through the dark to a dirt road where — after being passed by a number of vehicles that refused to stop — someone was finally kind enough to take him to the nearest hospital. Colonel Rankin spent about 3 weeks in the hospital recovering from severe decompression shock, welts, bruising, and other superficial wounds. He eventually returned to flight status. In 2009 he died of natural causes at the age of 89.

Is national bankruptcy the sole solution to stop the malpractice and fiscal bleeding.

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The grift that keeps on giving and the poor performance across the board of the aircraft and the sticker shock of the high price for that mediocrity. I am going to say out loud: stealth is over-rated, the ea of manned combat aircraft is coming to a close and this particular air-frame is not aging well.

Two Trillion Debt Bucks.

The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is the Department of Defense’s most ambitious weapons program and plays a crucial role in DOD’s ability to meet current and future U.S. national security goals. At the same time, the F-35 has been plagued by mounting costs and delays resulting in what some have called a staggering price tag of more than $2 trillion over several decades.

In March, the fighter jet marked an important milestone — “full-rate production,” generally the point when development reaches an acceptable level of performance and reliability to start building more of them, faster. F-35s have already been in production at or near full rate for several years. At the same time, the military services that fly the F-35 (the Air Force, Marines, and Navy) plan to use it less.

That full rate production comes after fifteen years since it entered service in the USAF. No one has been held accountable and no one has been fired.

Projected costs for sustaining the F-35s have continued to rise from $1.1 trillion in 2018 to $1.58 trillion 5 years later (a 44% increase). This increase is in part due to the extension of the service life of the aircraft from 2077 in 2018 to 2088 in 2023.

Like the US Navy Little Crappy Ships (another trillion dollar investment in future fish apartments), these outrageously ludicrous projections of F35s being in service in the last half of he 21st century is silliness of biblical proportions.

Planning to fly the F-35 less. Over the course of the last couple of years, the Air Force and Navy have also reduced their projected annual flying times by 19% and 45% respectively. In part because of this reduction in flying, the services are now projecting they will meet most of their affordability targets. Affordability targets are the amount of money they project they can afford to spend per aircraft per year for operating the aircraft.

Fly the garbage aircraft less to increase its lifespan? Great idea. If they left it on the tarmac like the B1B “Bone” bomber, it will last longer and the decision may be wise due its lack of delivery on real world combat/performance expectations.

Is national bankruptcy the sole solution to stop the malpractice and fiscal bleeding? Stay tuned.

Read the full GAO report.

https://www.gao.gov/blog/f-35-will-now-exceed-2-trillion-military-plans-fly-it-less

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