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US Navy's $700 Million Mine-drone Won't Hunt (cnn.com)
New submitter ripvlan writes: CNN reports that a $700 million mine hunting system created by Lockheed Martin doesn't perform as expected. From the article: "The Remote Minehunting System, or RMS, was developed for the Navy's new littoral combat ship. But the Defense Department's Office of Operational Test & Evaluation says the drone hunting technology was unable to consistently identify and destroy underwater explosives during tests dating back to September 2014. ... In theory, the drone is deployed from the LCS towing sonar detection into suspected underwater minefields. The drone should then identify mines and communicate information about their whereabouts to the ship in real time so the explosives can be avoided or destroyed. But the program has come under fire from lawmakers after a series of testing failures, including continued performance issues and "RMS mission package integration challenges," according to the Defense Department's Office of Operational Test & Evaluation's 2014 annual report."
Of course it won't hunt - they named it RMS, so it's refusing to operate until all of its software is completely free and open. Guess they'd better start working on GNU/Mine Hunter.
maybe it's good at one but bad at the other. (glass half full but paying full price)
It can't find mines for the LCS? That's littorally useless.
eh heh heh heh.
Anyway I wish I could charge $700e6 for a project that doesn't work.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Is that 700 mil taxpayer money? If so, here is a solution: Don't pay the contractor a penny until they produce a working production sample. Then buy them for the original contacted price, not any additional "cost overruns"
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Didn't Lockheed-Martin also make the F-35, another dud? They must be Too Big To Fail or something.
Table-ized A.I.
I, for one, am disappointed the Navy is using the acronym LCS for Littoral Combat Ship, instead of the more imaginative C LITTORAL. At Cape Lisburne Airforce Station, the close-circuit TV network was named Cape LIsburne Internal Television. Yeah, now idea what was on those guy's minds...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
During the Reagan Administration, the Navy used oil tankers to protect their ships from Iranian mines in the Persian Gulf. Which was ironic considering that the Navy was supposed to be protecting the oil tankers. Minesweepers were hard to find back then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Will
Can we have a link to a credible site? I mean, CNN's one step above Fox News, but only barely in credibility.
Why not simply adapt and upgrade something much more simple (and effective) such as the Hedgehog? Granted it was designed to take out uboats, but an updated form of the weapon utilizing a proximity fuse should be effective at clearing a pathway in front of the vessel even in shallow water. Essentially you are using a naval version of a MCLC.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Actually, it performs EXACTLY as I would have expected. :)
Throw more money at it.
A $700 million dollar navy drone, remotely controlled by a local boat?
I wonder how long before Iran has grabbed themselves one?
What YOU can control remotely, so can someone else.
In DoD Acquisition, by the time you enter Operational Test & Eval (OT&E, which was either LRIP T&E or IOT&E, not sure which) everything is supposed to work. The "Test" is supposed to be not validating the system (as was done at the end of developmental T&E) but how it integrates into the operational environment, including usage, data communications, maintenance vs. operational availability, etc. Since this reads like the system itself is having the issues, there should be a LOT of backlash and turnover, particularly since the cost of the system is so high (ACAT I program).
See also, the OT&E failure of Navy's CEC (Cooperative Engagement Capability) Program
I worked on this project for a few years. It is the epitome of government waste
the hardware is 20+ years old and due to bureaucracy, upgrades are rare and expensive to initiate. There are a few alternatives that work! This project is not getting cancelled because I suspect someone is getting paid big money to keep this alive. All the LM team I worked for was/is incompetent.
Experimental combat systems don't always work the first time. The big issue is more the massive fraud--you sell it all to Congress with one budget knowing it is going to cost at least three times as much if magical unicorn engineers don't show up from the future and tell you how to make it all work. With another few years of development it'll get better and better. This is still fairly important in terms of conventional engagements because mines are relatively cheap and easy to build.
Specifically, testing revealed that the vehicle "cannot be reliably controlled by the ship or communicate when it is operating out of the line-of-sight of the ship, and the towed sonar cannot detect mines consistently," according to the DOT&E. The memo, cited in a September Senate Armed Service Committee report, also said the drone could only reliably operate for up to 25 hours before it failed during testing, falling far short of its required 75 hours.
Can't control it or communicate with it unless you can see it and battery life is 1/3 of requirement. For $700 million, that's a pretty dramatic implementation miss for some pretty straightforward requirements.
. race to the bottom.
I see what you did there...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Disclaimer: I am an R&D EE for the US NAVY, which is why I'm posting as an AC.
If I could only tell you all about how many projects fucking contractors screw up you would be amazed. Raytheon couldn't find their ass with both hands taped to it and Lockheed isn't any better. the last project I worked on with a contractor (Raytheon) had more than 15 engineers and 30 support personnel on it, and they STILL couldn't get it done right. 20 Million+ later the NAVY finally yanked it and we did it with 4 engineers and 1 Tech for less than 1 million. It's now being used by both the NAVY and the Coasties.. Contractors are leeches. contractors are clues (for the more part). Contractors just suck.
It might be a devilishly cunning ploy to fool the rest of the world into thinking that it doesn't work. Then, when the Crab People from Venus finally invade, it will surprise everyone by working exactly as intended after it finishes downloading Adobe updates and clearing its spam folders.
It just needs to be upgraded to Windows XP . . .
It transferred nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer public money into private hands.
But socialism is terrible if it's for medical care for everyone. Greasing up a slick billionaire's rectum, though, perfectly fine!
700 million dollars for a remote controlled airplane that doesn't work. We are all morons for continuing to pay taxes to these fucking people.
Imagine that, another multibillion dollar Lockheed project that doesn't perform as ordered. And people complain about the $500/mo that a single mom gets in welfare.
There is a very good reason why the LCS class "ships" are referred to as the "Little Crappy Ship" by a lot of people.
- They are too expensive and too big for what they can't do, and are being deployed in deep water environments instead of the littoral environments they were designed for.
- They have next to no cruising range to speak of.
- They are under armed. Bushmasters. What a joke. 3km? On a NAVAL ship? That regularly runs "blue water" navy missions?
- They are stealthy only to radar. The exhausts belch black smoke every time they change throttle settings. Those water-jet drive (monster ski-doo?) units leave a bright white wake for miles. The LCS "whine and chug" can be heard for miles.
- Undermanned and over-automated, they can go dead-in-the-water at a moments notice.
- They are intended for LITTORAL (dirty and brown water) use, but they do not have sea-strainers to block seaweed and flotsam from entering the pumps.
- They are intended for "sneak up, drop off, scram, come back and retrieve before you leave" missions, but can be outgunned by a BMP or Bradley.
Now, if you want to see what a LCS actually should look like, do a search for the Australian Navy's Armidale class patrol boat.
This is illegal. The contract is almost certainly cost or cost-plus (vs. fixed-fee which would give the power you describe). No one will bid on a fixed fee contract (it's been tried--the defense industry doesn't want to take the risk). Further, there is a law / act that guarantees a profit to contractors (can't remember the name but it was taught in Acquisition 101 at DAU). If a contractor gets called on giving a deliberately short / underfunded bid, they can just make up the rest later in a lawsuit if the DoD / Govt doesn't need to implement a contract change request (a contract change request is the safest bet you can make about any Govt contract--the underrun costs are gradually added back in as the change requests come in).
What needs to happen is that cost or cost-plus contracts make the contractor done work count as if they are direct contractors--all IP generated automatically becomes Government / public property. This doesn't currently happen, which (IMHO) is why the primary defense corporations are so untouchable. All their development is done at no risk to them, and they get to keep shafting the DoD for licensing rights to it (on top of the problems you already brought up).
The reason the initial requirements docs and RFP are inadequate is because the Government (not just the Navy; everybody's guilty of this) is trying to buy capabilities they don't already have and don't know how to completely describe. You should apply Hanlon's razor to your opinion of "shenanigans".
As the system develops, the contractors will need to choose design details which weren't spelled out in the spec. The contractor preference is more-or-less technically reasonable (depending on the experience level of their assigned engineers), but tending toward low cost. The Government usually wants something more robust than the low cost solution, and usually doesn't have the time or the estimating resources to fully understand the cost & schedule impact before issuing the technical response.
That's for a normal contract; LCS intentionally took a faster, higher-risk route. The RFP asked the bidding teams to submit their ideas of what the Ship Specification and the Interface Specification (between the ship and the modular warfare systems) should look like. (That, at least, meant that the Navy had three different inputs to mix and match).
A common opinion from people low down on the totem pole is that the effect (if not the intent) of the LCS program was to split up the cost overruns into separate piles for the ships and the weapon systems.
Now maybe there are a few things I don't understand about minesweeping. But it would seem to me that depending on a system which is towed behind a ship to detect things you don't want to run over with the ship isn't going to work very well. It's sort of like driving by looking in your rear view mirror [oblig. bad car analogy].
Have gnu, will travel.
You start by clicking a random square, and if you see 1's formed in an L shape, that is clearly a corner of a mine so you flag it as a mine. When you see 1221, then there is a pair of mines together...
and we might beable to make it do 10% of what you paid us to make it do in the first place. Also you should cut welfare to poor\sick people as corporate tax is too high.
The money for this was spent in a state and in a Congressional district. Jobs were created/preserved, each with more than one voter attached or related to it, on average.
Quite apart from the financial appreciation expressed by the employers of those voters directly and indirectly to re-election campaigns, there's also the ability of those politicians to brag about keeping/adding jobs, which impresses even those not living under the same roof as the holders of those jobs.
An unsuccessful weapons system would be one that was built of components from suppliers in few states.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Lockheed Martin should never be allowed another government contract. Period.
1. The F-22, underperformed and over-cost. Ended up too expensive and had to be cancelled, likes to smother its own pilots.
2. The F-35 (aka "The plane that broke the Pentagon") is over-budget, and under-performing.
3. Their Freedom-class littoral combat ships have ended up budget and under-performing
4. The Orion spacecraft: The design was selected based on the Apollo capsule to save time and money since all the properties for that shape were fully explored in the 1960s. The first Orion to take a man into space will not fly until about 2020 (that's about 15 years and tens of billions of dollars to do what North American Aviation did in the 1960's for a tenth the price and in half the time
A complete list of their post-Cold War bad behavior would be quite long (feel free to do yer own Googling). Basically, the once-great Lockheed turned to mud after being allowed to merge with Martin Marietta which also used to be competent. Typical American corporate Merger-Mania results.
As a defense contractor, they seem to have found the "sweet spot" for winning contracts: Offer better performance at a lower price and on a quicker schedule than the competitors in order to win the contracts, then have cost-overruns, schedule slips, and performance failures that are severe enough to make the contract as profitable as necessary but not quite bad enough to make the government send people to prison. In every contract, the government would likely have been better to have selected a different vendor.