The Zumwalt Class Destroyer

Bruzilla said:

I think the article spells this out pretty right. It does miss a few points. This mess all dates back to Frank Kelso, who I knew and was a great CNO but lousy at being a forward thinker. He was the CNO who ordered the dreaded From The Sea report in 1992. This was the guidance that started the whole Littoral Warfare concept that most of us knew was a failure from the start.

I was at the first Littoral Warfare/From The Sea lovefest in 1994, and I was there with two LCDRs from NAVAIR and we were about the whole aviation contingent. There were a couple dozen Surface Warfare types and a shitload of submariners. This made sense as we knew this was all about transitioning the Navy from being a "Blue Water" force blasting Russians on the open seas to a "Brown Water" force conducting operations close to shore. NAVAIR didn't much care whether we fight Feet Wet or Feet Dry, so they had little interest, and the Surface Warfare guys knew if you're close enough to shore to attack it from a small boy, the enemy is close enough to blow said small boy out of the water. The only forces that could really benefit from this shift were the submariners as they could operate unseen in shallow water/littoral environments where surface units would be a sitting duck.

This was also the time when you could get the government to buy ANYTHING if you had the word "Stealth!" in the nomenclature, and that's how this POS got sold. And just as we're seeing with the Sgt. York, the F-22/F-35, the Ford Class CVNs, etc., the over-reliance on technology in a platform that is meant to engage in combat and sustain damage is a very bad idea. The Zumwalts are even worse as they can't even handle peacetime ops. This is especially a problem when you factor in the mindset of our military managers.

Back in the 1990s, I was at a meeting where a senior Pentagon guy told me "we don't have to waste time or money educating sailors on technology because they already know this stuff when they come here." I said that today's sailors may know how to log onto the internet and send an email, or make Sonic the Hedgehog run around a TV, but the folks who know how networks function and how to keep them running don't join the Navy. They get high-paying jobs in industry. The folks who join the Navy are the ones who don't know **** and want us to teach them how to manage a network. I wish my message had struck home, but it wasn't five or so years later when the Navy ended the Data Processing Technician (DP) rating and merged it with the Radioman (RM) rating, which is full of people who know nothing of advanced computer networks. It was just a matter of time until failures like the Zumwalt and Ford would occur.

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