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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
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.
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 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.
I would support a call for 700 million treason charges.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
Can we have a link to a credible site? I mean, CNN's one step above Fox News, but only barely in credibility.
Your liberal bias is showing....
If you carefully weed out commentary from hard news Fox News is no more credible than CNN. Both have their biased ax grinding opinions that often get confused as being facts. Both report the news they deem worthy of coverage and are beholden to their advertisers to attract the largest audience they can. Both report "news" accurately and both present content that is opinion and commentary about the news with their own brand of bias.
Where they *really* differ is in audience size and rate of change. CNN is in a long term down hill slide which has been going on for more than a decade. Fox is generally been able to attract a larger and larger audience in that same time frame. Fox is being successful, CNN is dying.
It is interesting that the common liberal refrain is that Fox News is lying about stuff while CNN isn't. Or the alternate perspective that Fox News is unbiased and CNN is. Reality is BOTH are biased in their own ways, and if anything Fox is more creditable given that it's audience is growing while CNN's is in decline ...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Especially if you measure by the pound.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Where they *really* differ is in audience size and rate of change. CNN is in a long term down hill slide which has been going on for more than a decade. Fox is generally been able to attract a larger and larger audience in that same time frame. Fox is being successful, CNN is dying.
Meanwhile, in the Real World, where we can look at charts of actual numbers we see that this is nonsense. Fox News viewership peaked in 2009 and has been dropping ever since. CNN has followed a similar downward trend (it peaked a year earlier in 2008) but has maintained a steady market share for several years, its drop merely paralleling Fox's decline.
It is interesting that the common liberal refrain is that Fox News is lying about stuff while CNN isn't. Or the alternate perspective that Fox News is unbiased and CNN is. Reality is BOTH are biased in their own ways, and if anything Fox is more creditable given that it's audience is growing while CNN's is in decline ...
If only we didn't have studies like this one that shows that Fox "News" viewers score below those with no information while CNN viewers score above this information-free cohort.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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.
it's not exactly nonsense to him; he just went into a weird trauma-induced dissociative fugue when the black muslim democrat got elected, and still thinks it's 2007.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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.