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Wednesday at 8:45 PM
WHEN REPEAT WHEN THE NAVY GETS ITS SECRETARY?
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Pentagon refutes reports Trump's Navy secretary pick is about to withdraw
The Pentagon on Sunday joined the White House in disputing reports that President Trump's choice to lead the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps is planning to drop out.

If businessman Philip Bilden was preparing to withdraw from consideration,
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, it appears Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was influential in making him reconsider. Bilden, a former military intelligence officer, remains "fully committed" to serving as Trump's Navy secretary, pending Senate confirmation, the Pentagon's chief spokesman said.

Mattis, who is traveling overseas, spoke with Bilden early Sunday, said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis.

"Secretary Mattis remains fully committed to helping him ... [and] confident that Mr. Bilden is the right leader to rebuild the readiness of our Navy and Marine Corps," Davis added.

Attempts to contact Bilden were not immediately successful.

Bilden spent 10 years in the Army Reserve, from 1986 to 1996, before launching a successful venture capital firm in Hong Kong. He's also a board member for separate foundations associated with the U.S. Naval War College and the U.S. Naval Academy, where his sons have attended school.

On Saturday, citing unidentified sources, CBS News reported that Bilden was likely to walk way from his nomination to become Navy secretary because he's having trouble disentangling from his many financial interests. CBS noted, too, that Bilden has faced opposition from some lawmakers and Trump administration critics who believe he lacks sufficient knowledge about the sea services.

The White House refuted the Bilden report almost immediately. In
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last month, the administration praised Bilden's background, calling him a "cybersecurity leader" who would offer the Navy department "strategic leadership, investment discipline, and Asia Pacific regional and cyber expertise."

Trump's choice to serve as Army secretary, businessman Vincent Viola,
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earlier this month, citing financial reasons. Viola owns the NHL's Florida Panthers.
source is MilitaryTimes
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FORBIN

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
In a beautiful blue package

X-47B departs Pax River

An X-47B unmanned aircraft departed NAS Patuxent River, Md. Jan.26 for cross country trip back to Northrop Grumman's manufacturing facility in Palmdale, Calif. As part of the Unmanned Carrier Air System-Demonstration (UCAS-D) program, the X-47B demonstrated technologies to support the Navy's unmanned carrier aviation efforts. The second X-47B aircraft will make the same trip next month. Northrop Grumman plans to use both aircraft as test beds for future development programs

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X-47B.jpg
 

FORBIN

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
Pentagon refutes reports Trump's Navy secretary pick is about to withdraw
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Yet problems !

Mainly for the ramp up Trump need a new Lehman when he take office the Ohio class late of 2.5 years ... Ford... hummm fix the problem with the famous Rickover the father of US nuclear sumbarines Fleet by stirring a little all this little world and mainly necessary classes are delivered in time with propulsion which work ...
the last LCS, Zumwalt have propulsions problems the first much and some all new ships, scandalous ! the 2nd right now after last problems don't have left her homeport now to see in more they are so expensive price must down for have the number.

Curiously Spearhead, EPF Class very close Independence in aluminium, propulsion for high speed also fortunately don't have problems reasonnable cost delivered in time so possible to do.
The 3 new classes with Ford - for she others problems - are late and for price no comments !

In fact much stuff to do ! and urgently out... they build cheaper and in qty ... wake up time.
 
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TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
Spearhead class is a transport with 4 heavy machine guns. It's virtually unarmed by naval standards! IT's built to civil spec as a reserve.
Independence class is a combat ship, She may be thin skinned and a little light on weapons for a Frigate but night and day.
 
now I read
Navy to Impose More Rigorous Oversight in New Ship Classes; Will Hire More Engineers
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The Navy will need a larger engineering directorate as it grows the fleet in coming years, to avoid problems faced in past ship classes like the Littoral Combat Ship and the Zumwalt guided missile destroyer stemming from the Navy being too hands-off on technical specifications.

Vice Adm. Tom Moore, commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, said NAVSEA’s engineering directorate (SEA 05) had dropped to a fifth of its size from 1990 to 2005. Coupled with a shift away from Navy-dictated ship specifications and towards contractor-friendly “performance-based specifications,” four major ship classes designed in that period suffered from a lack of oversight.

“In one of our many eras of acquisition reform – and at that time, the vogue in acquisition reform back in the mid-90s was, hey, industry knows best, just throw it over the fence to them and let them build the ships and we’ll be fine – there was the thought that, hey, the way you get ships built best was to turn them over to the people who know what they’re doing, and you’ll get the best ships and you’ll get the best cost,” he said Feb. 15 at the American Society of Naval Engineers’ Technologies, Systems and Ships conference.
“So we kind of entered an era where we went from [production-based specifications], where the Navy was very specific about what we wanted on our ships, to an era of what we like to call performance-based specs, where we kind of told industry, this is kind of what we want. We provided some oversight, but we’re going to leave the specifics up to you. And so a completely different mindset.

“So as a result of that we moved away from (general) specs, we really got out of the gen specs business and the notion was it was too much oversight and too much telling industry how to do their business. So we started transitioning over to what we call American Bureau of Shipping naval vessel rules. … Much like performance-based specs, where the contractor had wide latitude, the naval vessel rules were not nearly … as rigidly specified as what we had done in the past. Now, both those cases have pros and cons associated with them, and as I said the thinking at the time was by doing this, in the era of acquisition reform, this would get our costs down,” Moore continued.
“But I don’t have to tell you, as we look back on it and we look at some of the challenges we’ve had with LCS and DDG-1000, and to a lesser extent with LPD-17 and Ford (aircraft carrier) – and Virginia-class submarine is probably the one program where we did not divest ourselves from our traditional oversight role in spec design – we’ve had some challenges.”

After these four ship classes entered the fleet and the Navy realized the problems that stemmed from the performance-based standards, NAVSEA in 2012 moved away from the naval vessel rules and to a new Naval Combatant Design Specifications, which more closely resembled the old general specifications.

In addition to reverting to a more rigid specification system, Moore said NAVSEA is building up its engineering workforce to resume a proper level of oversight. Specifically, in SEA 05, where there had been 1,292 engineers in 1990 and only 251 in 2005, Moore said he’s hiring. SEA 05 is up to 568 today and expects to reach 750 engineers by 2025.

He said that technical excellence and oversight would be important as the Navy designs and fields new ship classes in the coming years. Interestingly, of the ship classes Moore identified as suffering from a lack of technical oversight during the performance-based specifications phase – LCS, the Zumwalt-class destroyer (DDG-1000), San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock (LPD-17) and Ford-class carrier (CVN-78), in order of most to least affected by performance-based specs – three of the four will be used as the basis for future ship classes.

The LCS will soon transition to the frigate, an upgunned and uparmored multimission version of one or both LCS variants. The LPD-17 design is the basis for the upcoming LX(R) amphibious dock landing ship replacement. And lessons learned from DDG-1000 are expected to inform the Future Surface Combatant family of systems.

Moore said in his speech that “each of the four ships have had its challenges, and some of those are challenges you always have in first-in-class ships. And I’m not blaming all of these problems on technical oversight in the acquisition approach, but they were certainly contributing factors to some of the challenges we had.”

Asked if contractors who worked on these original classes of ships could expect a noticeable difference under the new Naval Combatant Design Specifications, Moore told USNI News that “as we move to the new frigate and we go to LX(R), those will be under the Naval Combat System Development rules and we will be much more in a procurement-based spec environment with them. That doesn’t mean that we’re back to an era in the ‘60s where NAVSEA basically did the design and handed it to them – and I don’t think it makes sense for us to go back to those days – but we will provide a lot more specificity to the shipbuilder, working side by side with them, but we’ll be a lot more specific in our contracts, in our specifications with them on what specifically we want in the ships going forward. And I think there’s an equal balance there that will still allow us to control costs and also when we get the ships out have ships that are easier to maintain and probably will reduce some of the early challenge that we’ve seen with some of these ships.”

DDG-1000 program manager Capt. Kevin Smith told USNI News on Feb. 16 at the same conference that turning the program over to the contractor to simply meet a performance requirement led to “unique solutions” in components that otherwise could have been common with other ship classes, complicating the sustainment of the ship class.

“So one of the challenges with a three-ship class is you have some systems out there like the Advanced Gun System. We have a steering gear that’s revolutionary but nothing else exists like this in the universe,” Smith said.
“So although it meets the requirements well, from a sustainment perspective, that’s one thing I think that the Navy as a whole will have to take a look at. There’s commonality and there’s NAVSEA codes that do this, but that’s one of the things I think is a lesson learned. We are going to have support mechanisms to support this, but when we have a three-ship class, what I’m hoping is a lot of these key technologies will get leveraged for Future Surface Combatant or other designs that the Navy is looking at” so as to avoid having to sustain these systems on only three ships for their full service life.

Rich Dumas, Raytheon’s Zumwalt-class systems engineer and architect lead, added during the same panel presentation that while “doing the ship from a clean sheet of paper was just a phenomenal opportunity, once in a lifetime opportunity … it resulted in some trade decisions and point solutions that, as it turned out, might not exactly have been palatable in the long term, as Capt. Smith points out, to how it’s going to be sustained across the infrastructure that exists today in order to support the class. So it could result in design choices, equipment choices, that don’t have a pedigree behind them and don’t have the sustaining infrastructure behind them. “

Dumas noted that, whereas a shipbuilding program today – and DDG-1000 in its later stages – might rely on program of record acquisition resource managers to buy and integrate existing systems, the freedom afforded to the contractors led to an innovative but complex total ship systems engineering effort that relied on new interrelated systems instead of proven and sustainable ones.
which sounded to me like a politically correct description of what I called Apr 10, 2016
... "concurrency" BALONEY when hulls/frames are being built for untested/unproven/unfinished components and oops, because of changes in components, hulls/frames which are being built need to be changed ...
 
Apr 6, 2016
is it that bad, or just an attempt to get more money?
Budget cuts are forcing the Army to lose its competitive edge

source:
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was the first time I posted about
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...
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is a reporter’s dream — a highly quotable
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. But will he be Donald Trump’s? “H.R.” is best known for
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in which he criticized the top ranks of America’s military for failing to stand up to the country’s political leadership and speak truth to power during the Vietnam War.

Now he will work for Donald Trump, a president who sometimes not seem to like it much when people
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to him if it contradicts his views — at least in public. Of course, a National Security Advisor rarely needs to speak his views in public, but Trump and McMaster may well clash on an issue that is central to America’s national security:
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. McMaster has long been skeptical of Russian intentions and views them as a serious threat to US interests. He’s
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for the Army to
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to cope with a possible Russian threat.

On China, his views seems to align much more closely with the Trump White House. China is “building land… to
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into the maritime and aerospace domains,” the Army’s chief futurist,
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, said in a May 2016 appearance
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He said the US Army needs to act much as the Chinese are, using island bases as a means to dominate the seas and airspace around them, allowing them to
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and
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— a central component of the Army’s new
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concept.

In one of his more notable public utterances, McMaster told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April last year that the US Army is “
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by many potential adversaries.” He took quite a bit of heat for those comments — even his friend and Chief of Staff,
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, felt compelled to qualify them — but the logical conclusion of his thoughts would seem to put him squarely in line with the Trump Administration’s plans to boost the Army’s size and increase the military’s readiness and lethality.

But what is McMaster like? I spoke with a former classmate of H.R.’s to find out. “He is not your standard ticket-punching careerist,” this person said. “He can be politically savvy, but not correct — ever. He’s put his balls on the line several times,” pointing to how much he roiled the waters with his comments about the Army being outranged and outgunned.

And as our deputy editor, Sydney Freedberg, noted in his excellent piece about McMaster’s promotion to three star,
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without the explicit support of
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s. In fact, the then-colonel had been turned down twice for promotion to brigadier, normally a career-ending action. But Petraeus flew to Washington for McMaster’s promotion board and fought hard for him. And H.R. got his first star. (We have a sneaking suspicion, but no evidence, that Petraeus suggested H.R. to Trump. How else does a relatively obscure Army three-star shoot up to the White House slot?) He became one of four horsemen to successfully challenge Big Army’s entrenched opposition to counter-insurgency warfare. “Without H.R. McMaster there was no COIN in Iraq and there was no victory,” his classmate says.

His greatest strength as
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, the man charged with coordinating national security policy across the federal government and helping to craft our national strategy, will be his strategic sense. “I think strategy is probably his strength. He looks at the deep problem and doesn’t buy in to the groupthink,” our source believes. Personally, H.R. “is a really sincere genuine guy; a bit boring, a bit earnest.”

Words From the Troops

When McMaster was promoted three years ago to lieutenant general — three stars in six years — a number of our readers commented on the man they had served with.

A reader called Bill D. said McMaster was the executive officer in his first unit, the 1-66 Armor.

“He was patient but firm, and showed signs of leadership beyond his years even then. An example of this was our unit’s annual football game played before the Army-Navy game, the ‘Toilet Bowl’. The game was played between the junior officers and the O-3’s and above of the battalion. HR was of course the quarterback, and any notion that this was a fun game was lost right away with the first nasty hits. I will never forget the chaplin (sic)d swearing and getting in a full fledged fist fight with the mortar platoon leader. That was a great unit! Anyway, a senior NCO had the thankless job of reffing the game. The battalion commander, who was a turd, was pulling rank and intimidating this poor guy. Most of the LT’s were pissed, but what are you going to do, tell the battalion commander he is cheating b–tard? Well McMaster did, he told the guy he was a cheat and a disgrace and we were going to beat them no matter how much the Colonel cheated. You could hear a pin drop on that field, but McMaster did not care, he stood up for what was right. The battalion commander yelled at him and told him to watch it (cause he was a turd), but McMaster did not care. That always impressed me and was an important lesson to me in leadership. When I heard many years later that he told Rumsfeld basically the same thing that he told the battalion commander at Fort Hood in 1986, I was not surprised.”

A regular commenter on Breaking D, Cincinattus (who appears to be a retired Army cavalry scout named Patrick Shrier who has a deep interest in military history) offered this:

“H.R. was my Squadron CO in 1/4 Cav in the early 2000’s. I can think of no one better suited to think realistically about future threats and advocate for the force structure changes the army so desperately needs going forward. I will never forget him POing everybody in the 1ID staff when he finagled the dollars for realistic training out of them for out Troop Challenge exercises in Germany. The bean counters were upset because he was using all of our Squadron STRAC allocation and borrowing ammo from other units who were not using theirs to get us fully trained. The only time I ever remember getting so much range time in my 23 year career was getting ready for the 1994 III Corps Cav Cup at Fort Bliss.

“H.R. has his detractors but at heart he is a soldier’s soldier like Omar Bradley and his first priority is making sure Joe is properly trained, equipped, and organized to defeat the enemy.”

While he won’t be running the military, H.R. will certainly help decide how and why and when and where it is used. Since strategy drives policy, which drives money, McMaster will have a key role in shaping his well-loved
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, as well as the rest of the services and
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, from the CIA to Treasury to State. Wish him well.
source:
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FORBIN

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
Confirmation first Block V N° 802 the 29th named up to 28th 801 Utah last Block IV in service in 2024.

New Block V N° 802 in service for 2025, 2023 was right now the last years with 2 Virginias coz futur SSBN and her price after 2023 one year on 2 only a Virginia.

21 m module so a Virginia Block V do 115 + 25 m : 140 m very long for hull of 10, 4 m of width - LA 10.1 Seawolf a bit less long but more width 12.9 m much more stocky - we can guesstimate a displ of about 9200+ tons for Virginia Block V ( others 7800 t ) , Seawolf 9100 t, possible a bit less fast to 32 kns as a LA instead ot 34 kns.

With 65 weapons he beat the Yasen 62 weapons the more powerful attack submarines except Oscar II modernised 949AM with normaly 100 weapons !

GDEB Awarded $126 Million by U.S. Navy for Virginia-Class Block V Long Lead Time Material

General Dynamics Electric Boat has been awarded a $126.5 million contract by the U.S. Navy for long lead time material for the first two Block V Virginia-class submarines, SSN-802 and SSN-803. Electric Boat is a wholly owned subsidiary of General Dynamics.
...
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