The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the “Little Crappy Ship”

By Joaquin Sapien Sept. 7, 2023

Littoral combat ships were supposed to launch the Navy into the future. Instead they broke down across the globe and many of their weapons never worked. Now the Navy is getting rid of them. One is less than five years old. 

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. 

Complicated equipment needed lot's of training. The ship’s executive officer, the second in command, complained of a lack of support from superiors.“We ask for help, but there isn’t enough,” he said, adding that he was told “they don’t have the bodies.”“I messed up everything because I was going too fast,” the sailor later explained.

 

The mistake damaged the ship’s combining gear, forcing it to sit for seven months while waiting on replacement parts.Ships were rushed to sea with faltering equipment. Shorthanded crews and captains without sufficient training or support tried to make them work. Breakdowns ensued. 

 

Then, the pressure to perform and restore the reputation of the program intensified anew and the cycle repeated itself. Foreign contractors, and often with manuals that aren't written in English. Intricate systems that failed to communicate with each other, The GAO, which has produced dozens of reports criticizing the ships, later learned that the Coronado failed to sail six times between 2016 and 2017 because “it did not not have correct parts on board to fix simple problems.”

 

Important items like “circuit card assemblies, washers, bolts, gaskets, and diaphragms for air conditioning units were not on board,” the report found. “The LCS may not have adequate space onboard to stock these items.”A month later, a fifth ship, the USS Montgomery, suffered a series of mishaps. Over a two-month stretch, its engine malfunctioned, it collided with a tugboat and it then cracked its hull after striking a lock in the Panama Canal.................“This story was originally published by ProPublica.  To Read More....Much More.....follow this link.”  

• Eight Things You Need to Know About the Navy’s Failed Multibillion-Dollar Littoral Combat Ship Program The key takeaways from ProPublica’s investigation into the decades long project that could end up costing American taxpayers more than $100 billion..............Here are eight takeaways from ProPublica’s report on the Navy’s littoral combat ship program, which has cost taxpayers billions but failed to deliver on its promise.

1. Navy officials vastly underestimated the costs to build the ship in estimates provided to Congress. The original price tag more than doubled.

Contractors were supposed to build the ships fast, in large numbers and at an original cost of $220 million each — cheap for a Navy vessel. The ships were based in part on designs for commercial car or passenger ferries. As the Navy began to apply tougher standards, costs soared.

2. The ships were supposed to be equipped with interchangeable weapons systems to allow them to fight, hunt submarines and detect mines. The Navy failed to make this happen.

Former officers said that the Navy’s haste to deliver the ships took precedence over the vessels’ combat abilities. After spending hundreds of millions, the Navy abandoned its plan to outfit the ships to find and destroy submarines; the system to hunt undersea mines is still under development. Without functioning weapons systems, one former officer said, the ship was only a “box floating in the ocean.” In response to questions, the Navy acknowledged the LCS was not suitable for fighting peer competitors such as China. The LCS “does not provide the lethality or survivability needed in a high-end fight.”

3. Scores of sailors and officers spent more time trying to fix the ships than sailing them.

Because the crews were so small, only the most elite officers and sailors were meant to sail the ships. But breakdowns meant that the ships often spent more time in port than at sea. Some sailors sought mental health assistance because of the challenges. The LCS program became known as a place where naval careers went to die. Over time, the Navy increased crew sizes on the LCS.

4. The Navy relied so heavily on contractors for maintenance and repair that sailors and officers were unable to fix their own ships.

Sailors and officers were not allowed to touch certain pieces of equipment because of complicated arrangements with Navy contractors. Cumbersome negotiations meant it could sometimes take weeks to get contractors on board. “An average week would consist of 90 to 100 hours in port doing, honestly, nothing,” one former officer said of his time. The Navy has recently increased the amount of maintenance performed by sailors.

5. A string of high-profile breakdowns at sea beginning in late 2015 laid bare the limits of the ships and their crews.

In late 2015, the USS Milwaukee broke down en route to its home port, the equivalent of a brand new car stalling on its way out of the dealership. In January 2016, the USS Fort Worth broke down when a crew of exhausted sailors failed to execute a routine procedure, costing the Navy millions in repairs. Months later, the USS Freedom saw its engine destroyed by a seawater leak. Then the USS Coronado had trouble with its water jets, followed by the USS Montgomery, which collided with a tugboat, then cracked its hull after striking a lock in the Panama Canal. Each incident added fresh embarrassment to a program meant to propel the Navy into a more technologically advanced future.

6. Top Navy commanders pressured subordinates to sail even when the crews and ships were not fully prepared to go to sea.

On the Freedom, sailors and officers understood that they had a “no fail mission” with “‘no appetite’ to remain in port.” Even though one engine was contaminated, the ship’s commander took it to sea. Afterward, the ship needed repairs that took two years to complete and cost millions. On the Fort Worth, one sailor complained that there was “no break, no reprieve, just increasing daily tasking.”

7. One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more of the 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 of $100 billion.

Time and again, senior officers voiced their concerns about the ineffectiveness of the ships, yet members of Congress, the Pentagon and Navy leaders advocated for them anyway. In some cases, officers assigned to review the ships’ performance saw their careers derailed after sharing their unvarnished, critical findings.

Former Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said the Navy took the breakdowns seriously, “but it did not seem, from what we were looking at, that it was a systemic problem.”

8. Lawmakers with shipyards in their districts played a key role in expanding the program and protecting it from scrutiny.

When the Navy decided to issue contracts to build 20 littoral combat ships in two states in 2010, it encountered stiff resistance from the then-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John McCain, a Republican. But Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican representing Alabama, where some of the ships were being built, slipped in an amendment that would allow the Navy to do so in a last-minute budget bill. 

“He made sure it happened,” a Shelby spokesman said at the time. Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, who was initially skeptical of the ships, supported the proposal. He said the plan to build 10 vessels at a shipyard in neighboring Wisconsin would provide “a major boost for the region’s economy.” Even after the Navy finally determined that it only needed 32 of the ships, Congress managed to fund three more.

• Despite Major Reform to Military Justice System, Navy Still Leaves Public in Dark A new law enacts sweeping changes to make prosecutions for serious offenses like sexual assault or murder more fair. The Navy is still fighting a ProPublica lawsuit to make those court cases public.........
• The Army Increasingly Allows Soldiers Charged With Violent Crimes to Leave the Military Rather Than Face TrialA federal watchdog called for ending the practice nearly 50 years ago, but the military pushed back. Now, soldiers leave the Army with a negative discharge, avoiding possible federal conviction and with little record of the allegations against them.............

My Take - First, we need to get over the idea career military people are brighter than everyone else.  In point of fact, they got promoted because they were go along get along guys, and based on my experience in the Navy, they were, over all, lazy, under bright, over educated, strutting, arrogant incompetent bullies, and this article substantiates that view, along with the corrupt politicians who supported all this obvious insanity.  As a former admiral who had concerns about all this but mostly kept quiet said: 

“As a subordinate naval officer, when your boss tells you, ‘Here’s a shovel, go dig the hole,’ you go dig the hole.”A fellow officer warned him that painting this kind of damning portrait for the highest ranking officer in the Navy, the chief naval officer, could hurt his career. At that point, the Navy had already committed to buying at least 20 more ships worth billions of dollars.Soon after, Perez was assigned to the international relations department of the Navy. About a year after that, he became liaison to the State Department. Neither are regarded as ideal assignments for an admiral who had spent a career carrying out missions at sea.

I despised most of the officers I knew.  As for the all the politicians and civilian authority that allowed this to go on, there needs to be a RICO investigation over this.   

“politics is king in the shipbuilding business.”

I had a couple of officers I worked for I actually thought were good leaders, mostly because they left us alone to do our work without harassment.  It's the senior enlisted personnel who make the Navy work, and a good officer recognizes that and doesn't interfere except to support those actually doing the work.

A friend of mine was a graduate of the Air Force Academy, and he said one of his room mates made the Air Force a career and became a two start general.  He also said was one of the dumbest members of his class.   

Col. John Boyd is one of my personal heroes, who became a legend spending his career fighting with the generals over this kind of  stupid, expensive boondoggle thinking.  So none of this is surprising, except for the massive costs involved.  Even I didn't think they were that stupid.

I've been criticized for my views of officers, and now we're seeing how the military has been corrupted by all these nitwits, and in the case of military officers, they swore an oath to support the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, but in reality there were nothing but heretics worshiping at the secular alter of the Church of Wokeness and it's destroying America's military.  

And whaddaya know, the bug man was right once again.  Imagine that.

 

The Dirty Money Behind the Lynching of Clarence Thomas

By Daniel Greenfield May 24, 2023 Supreme Court @ Sultan Knish Blog

The country is witnessing the second high-profile lynching effort of Justice Clarence Thomas. Even while the media ignores the millions from foreign nationals passing through shell companies to the Biden family, it has pushed invented scandals for Thomas while demanding his resignation to make way for a radical leftist Biden court appointee.

While no one expects anything but lies and smears from the media, few are aware of how the smear campaign against Justice Thomas was organized and who is funding it.

Before it was splashed all over the media, the Clarence Thomas smears were mostly generated by ProPublica with articles such as “Clarence Thomas’ Secret Life of Luxury” then rebroadcast by the media in stories such as “ProPublica: GOP megadonor paid private school tuition for grandnephew of Justice Clarence Thomas” which keep the smear campaign going.

While the media is deeply interested in who paid for Thomas’ grandnephew’s education, it’s uninterested in where the money that funds ProPublica’s smear campaign is coming from.

ProPublica has amplified the coverage of Harlan Crow, a conservative donor who is friendly with Thomas, but is less interested in discussing some of the men who back its operations. Its leftist smear campaigns are funded by the man who helped bring down the economy with his abusive tactics, a former Enron executive and FTX crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

The money that brought down banks is now trying to bring down a Supreme Court Justice.

ProPublica is a leftist nonprofit set up as an “ethical watchdog” by Herbert Sandler, listed by Time Magazine, as one of the 25 people to blame for the financial crisis of 2008, and more bluntly by Saturday Night Live as, ““people who should be shot”. (In a sign of the power and influence of the Sandlers, the SNL skit was quickly censored and cannot be found on NBC.)

Flush with billions from selling off their Golden West mortgage company, which had used “misleading” ads to prey on minority borrowers, to Wachovia Bank, tanking it and helping cause the financial crisis, Herbert invested his money in social justice.

And that made him “the man who made ProPublica possible.”

ProPublica had gotten its initial funding with the money harvested by Sandler from taking down Wachovia, and, more recently, it was promised $10 million by Sam-Bankman Fried whose collapse of FTX helped bring down Silicon Valley Bank and cause the worst wave of bank failures since the Wachovia collapse. When bad men bring down banks with their financial abuses, they write a check to ProPublica while their victims lose everything.

ProPublica, which claims that its mission is to “expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust”, makes no mention of any of this in its profile of Sandler: its beloved founder and chairman whose corrupt greed destroyed the financial security of millions of Americans.

Instead, ProPublica claims that Golden West, which took down the economy, “was considered to be one of the best managed financial institutions in the country” and “most admired savings institution”. This is exactly the kind of “fearless journalism” that has embedded ProPublica’s privately-funded smear campaigns against Republicans in media outlets across America.

ProPublica’s shameless lies are understandable as Sandler chaired the leftist smear group until his demise and Steve Daetz, the deputy general counsel at Golden West, and president of the Sandler Foundation, serves as one of ProPublica’s directors, and the Sandler Foundation continues to fund ProPublica’s smear campaigns of Republicans.

In addition to ProPublica’s origins in the money that helped take down the economy, its leading supporters include John D. Arnold, a former Enron executive who became the youngest billionaire in the country, and the leftist smear group was recently forced to give up $1.6 million from FTX crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried that was originally part of a $10 million grant.

When taking Bankman-Fried’s millions, ProPublica President Robin Sparkman claimed that the money would be used to “hold power accountable”. The exposure of FTX did not come from ProPublica’s vaunted “investigative journalism that holds power accountable” and the leftist group dragged its feet on giving up its latest pile of dirty money until late December 2022.

No word from ProPublica on whether FTX was also “one of the best managed financial institutions in the country”. Or was $10 million not enough to buy such shameless lies?

ProPublica’s list of its “leading” supporters is uniquely tilted to wealthy men in the financial industry who may be in a position to profit from a shift in the Supreme Court. The list of backers for ProPublica’s public smear campaigns includes hedge fund, private equity and venture capital figures. And those who are closely associated with them and their financial interests.

In a word, Wall Street and the Bay Area. Unlike Sandler and Bankman-Fried, there’s no scandal or investigation attached to the majority of such funding sources, but they do raise questions.

While ProPublica draws on money from the usual lefty foundations including Carnegie, W.K. Kellogg F, John S. and James L. Knight, James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation whose money can usually be found around nearly every leftist cause, it also draws on a large number of financial industry donors including S Donald Sussman, a hedge fund executive and party megadonor, Tom Unterman, a venture capital firm founder, Mark Colodny, a managing director at Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm, Bruce Golden, a venture capital firm founder, and Mitchell Lasky, a general partner at a venture capital firm.

Ronald Olson, famous as Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyer, as well as the lawyer handling Bill Gates’ divorce battle, is a ProPublica director and a major financial supporter. Olson is also a director at Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson. The ‘Munger’ is Charlie Munger: Buffett’s partner. Olson is also a Biden donor and sat on the board of Bill Clinton’s defense fund for his Whitewater and Paula Jones scandals.

What impact would removing Justice Clarence Thomas from the Supreme Court have on the finances of Berkshire Hathaway and the potential cases of a ‘super-lawyer’ who is rated as being able to argue cases before the Supreme Court? Olson testified at Justice Clarence Thomas’ Senate hearings and, as the LA Times put it, “chaired the American Bar Assn. committee that rated Clarence Thomas barely qualified for the U. S. Supreme Court.”

Another financial mastermind backing ProPublica is Sir Michael Jonathan Moritz, a Sequoia Capital partner, and major Democrat donor who has also funded dirty operations like Pacronym, American Bridge and the Lincoln Project.

The ProPublica money that raises the most questions comes from an unlikely source: the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Best known for its Golden Globe awards, the HFPA is a collection of foreign reporters that cover Hollywood. The Golden Globe awards are used to fund the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Charitable Trust which is supposed to be a charity funding “entertainment-related charities”. It’s not clear how smearing the only black man on the Supreme Court qualifies as an “entertainment-related” charitable cause.

I ended up playing a small role in the leftist hijacking of the HFPA when a former president sent out one of my Front Page Magazine articles which discussed the connections between Hollywood and BLM, only to be promptly purged and denounced by the organization..

The ugly act of political censorship, widely covered in headlines such as “Former HFPA President Calls BLM a ‘Racist Hate Movement'” and “Former HFPA president blasted over Black Lives Matter” played into a pressure campaign by leftist groups to which the HFPA surrendered. Its funding of ProPublica, a leftist attack dog group which has nothing to do with scholarships for filmmakers or protecting the culture of film, its stated goals, may have been one of the payoffs.

But the funding from HFPA raises its own legal and ethical questions.

The HFPA’s members are not necessarily American citizens and cannot fund political campaigns. While ProPublica is a 501(c)(3) which currently can be funded by foreign donors, at least until necessary reforms prevent the infusion of foreign money into American politics are put into place, its campaigns are obviously directed at achieving Democrat political goals.

While there is currently nothing technically illegal about foreign donors funding a campaign to force a Supreme Court justice off the bench, the problems with such a move are obvious.

Despite claiming to follow ethical standards and even to impose them on others, ProPublica has failed to distinguish which of its political activities are financed by American or foreign donors.

Could foreign money be financing its lynching of Justice Clarence Thomas?

We certainly know that dirty money, the cash that brought down two waves of banks, that destroyed the livelihoods and incomes of millions of Americans, is now trying to bring down a Supreme Court justice.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Leftist intimidation – and assassination?

When Leftists don’t win at the ballot box, little seems off limits for advancing their agenda

Paul Driessen

One year ago, ProPublica published illegally leaked IRS data on America’s wealthiest taxpayers. The “newsroom” said it obtained the information from “an anonymous source,” thanks to the ease with which people with access to information can secretly copy and transmit it with a few mouse clicks.

ProPublica piously claimed its actions were meant to advance “tax fairness” and help Congress and the Biden administration pay for all the trillions of dollars lavished on Covid and Build Back Better, by making it harder for the über-rich “to avoid tax burdens borne by ordinary citizens.”

But as I’ve noted previously, their approach is hideously complicated. Assets that increase in value from some retroactive mythical or arbitrary acquisition price would get taxed whopping amounts. If assets later depreciate, the wealthy will require credits or refunds for billion-dollar unrealized losses. Worse, the initial 700-1,000 ultra-rich would likely balloon to millions of taxpayers, as happened with the Alternative Minimum Tax, under this accountant, appraiser, auditor and lawyer appreciation legislation.

The IRS and Justice Department say they are deeply concerned, devoted to protecting taxpayer information, and committed to getting to the bottom of the data theft scandal. But the perpetrators have yet to be identified, prosecuted or punished – and ProPublica certainly hasn’t been canceled by or banished from Facebook or Twitter.

Indeed, ProPublica published more stolen confidential data this year. Again, no accountability for the perps – any more than there was for Lois Lerner, who used the IRS to target conservative groups and obstruct their tax-exempt certifications, so that they could not engage in activities that might have affected the outcomes of multiple elections.

Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) says the ProPublica saga is just “one more example of the government being weaponized” against the American people. However, only the chairs of relevant committees can demand that the IRS Inspector General brief Congress, the IRS told Jordan, and those Democrat chairs have little interest in doing so.

The saga also further documents how “public servants” too often assist “progressive” Democrats, Big Media, Big Tech and Big Academia in driving far-left economic, energy and “social and climate justice” agendas – employing the full heft of the Deep State and wealthy corporations.

Yet some still say they’re baffled that so many distrust and despise the IRS and Federal Government.

Despite the gravity of these data thefts, the anniversary was barely mentioned in most news media. Nor were other anniversaries. Five years ago this month, a former Bernie Sanders volunteer tried to gun down Republican congressmen during baseball practice. Six years ago, Antifa thugs and arsonists were ramping up their multiyear assault on 2016 election results, America’s democracy, police stations and courthouses, people’s homes and livelihoods, and conservative families in their favorite restaurants.

What did get extensive attention was the partisan House of Representatives inquisition into the January 6, 2021 “violent attack” on the Capitol, in an “attempt to prevent certification” of the 2020 election results. President Trump and others have been charged with “high crimes and misdemeanors” and “engaging in insurrection or rebellion against the United States,” despite asking his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” It’s a good distraction from our economic and energy problems.

Some of President Trump’s rhetoric was certainly intemperate, and some marchers certainly broke windows and entered the Capitol. However, the only serious violence was the unjustifiable killing of Ashli Babbitt by Capitol Hill policeman Michael Byrd, and Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) clearly failed to ensure adequate security that day.

But if some of President Trump’s language rose to the level of “inciting violence,” what are we to make of other rhetoric? Then-Senator Kamala Harris declared that the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests are “not gonna stop before Election Day, and they're not gonna stop after Election Day.” She also supported a Soros fund that helped bail rioters out of jail.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) demanded “No peace, no sleep!” for Trump officials. “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station,” she ranted, “tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Standing outside the Supreme Court, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) warned: “I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

The far-left group Ruth Sent Us published the home addresses of conservative Supreme Court justices, and even the school attended by Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s children. An anti-Israel Boston-area Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) outfit posted maps of Jewish organizations it wants to “disrupt.”

The consequences are predictable. Violent protests rage on, with more promised if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Jane’s Revenge extremists is firebombing pro-life and pregnancy counseling offices in multiple states. And a pro-abortion gunman arrested at 1:00 am outside the Kavanaugh residence told police he intended to assassinate the Justice. (The NY Times barely covered the murder plot.)

Threats and protests following a leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision reversing past abortion rulings prompted the US Senate to unanimously pass legislation protecting the Justices’ families. But Speaker Pelosi sat on the measure for five weeks, including a full week after the attempted assassination. It finally passed the House with 27 Democrats voting against it, including five Squad members.

Our system cannot abide blatantly different standards of justice and discourse. It’s flat-out illegal to threaten or intimidate judges or justices, to advance desired decisions. And censorship of unwanted opinions and inconvenient facts brings dictatorship and disastrous policies.

But the Democrat-run Congress and Executive Branch are clearly taking America down this path, weaponizing government institutions, imposing different rules and standards against different classes of citizens, and colluding with print, electronic and social media to control information and debate.

This final problem is rapidly metastasizing. Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted the White House is collaborating with social media companies to censor alleged COVID “disinformation,” while government agencies ramp up “disinformation research and tracking” – and flag “problematic posts that spread disinformation,” so that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can cancel and delete them.

Having already succeeded in getting social media to silence those who question climate crisis claims, White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy now wants Big Tech titans to cancel anyone who says “green” energy and other climate “solutions” will harm the environment and living standards. Even pointing out limitations of lithium-ion batteries is “disinformation” that threatens public health, she says.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security has proposed a Disinformation Governance Board that might forge “public-private partnerships between DHS and Twitter” – the better to combat disinformation about masking, vaccines and other “serious homeland security risks,” say internal DHS emails.

The Left clearly intends to gain full control, and will not settle for less. If it cannot achieve its ends via ballot boxes (no matter how stuffed or harvested they might be), then agencies will connive with print, electronic and social media – in clear violation of First Amendment prohibitions against government abridging freedom of speech. Failing that, it will resort to cartridge boxes and Molotov cocktails.

Unless, that is, We the People stop this assault on Americas’ democracy and personal freedoms.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and articles on energy, climate and other issues.