Episode 696: A Constellation of Challenges, with Emma Salisbury

room over there on riverside. We'll be monitoring that during the course of the show and if there are some comments you would like to make, or maybe some questions you would like for us to direct to our guests during the course of the next hour, that is the perfect place to do it. And for the next hour, we're going to look at a challenge that people who pay attention to naval matters are aware of and may not fully get a lot of the details that we

want to make sure and talk about today. And that's not just here in the US, but across the anglosphere. There seems to be a systemic problem that is taking

naval requirements and producing something that displaces holes and displaces water and put holes next to the pier. And on the western side of the Atlantic, one failure LCS was going to be corrected with a short cycled production of an already existing frigate design and what is now known as the Constellation Class FFG. And we have found since twenty seventeen that the dream and the promise is not quite working out how we wanted it to be, but it's not alone as part of a larger systemic problem.

And coming back to mid Rats today to talk about this and other related issues is doctor M. Salisbury, the Sea Power Research Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy and a fellow at the UK Strategic Command Defense Futures. Emma, welcome back to mid Rats.

talk about it is. You spent a lot a lot of time soaked in US military industrial complex, specifically the naval side of the house and the Littoral Combat System program, and just as you're starting to clear ahead and take a deep breath and look at the beautiful world around you, somebody delivered the Constellation frigate there on your front doorstep thought, I just talk to you a little bit.

there is no shortage of terrible procurement plans in most of our militaries, I wasn't expecting another one quite so soon, especially one that was supposed to learn the lessons of LCS. It does give me something else to write about, which I'm very grateful for. And if anyone thinks there's some kind of conspiracy, then I couldn't possibly comment.

But what they were intending to do was to make the whole process quicker and more streamlined by having that based design, making some tweaks, and then being able to put it into production. And given that the LCS production was truncated because of the problems with it, there was that need for a small surface warship that Constellation was supposed to fulfill. But it just turns out that despite all of these good intentions, the Navy hasn't actually learned

the lessons of the LCS. So instead of taking a decent frigate, making a few tweaks, and then getting an into production, they have done exactly what they did with the LCS, which is just fitzing around with it, adding things on, not making decisions, taking things off, making it bigger, making and it's just turned into this lumbering program. That means that we just don't know when the US Navy is going to get frigates. And given that the US

Navy doesn't currently have any frigates. This is quite a large problem.

the litoral combat system. We still needed a frigate sized ship to do sized missions, and so we reached out I believe the first it was either the French or the Italian's commissioned their first from and twenty thirteen. In twenty seventeen we made the decision. So there's a few years after commissioning we had that, and there was a few compromises that gave the people who made lcs a chance to repurpose that, but luckily we didn't go in

that direction, and so the Navy made a decision. We had that eighty we sold it as eighty five percent commonalty, and then, like the plot of some b grade movie. We handed over the solution to a problem to the same people and processes that created the problem to begin with.

And it almost seems from the cheap seats that this system is not self aware of And you mentioned earlier on in your article that markmt reference learning the lessons of previous failures, as if none of that happened, and they were going to make a point about bringing in

an already designed ship. Is is that too cynical of a view or was there a lack of appreciation in the Big Navy arena that in paralleling the old doing the same thing again and expecting a different result as a definition of a sanity that we use the same people in the same processes, in the same procedures that brought us to a hard point again in law and behold, where do we find ourselves in the summer twenty twenty four.

And I don't know how many of those changes were necessary, how many were nice to have, how many were need to have, But the fact that it went from one percentage switched around to the other shows that there is a very serious problem here. And part of me does wonder whether people will had the good intentions of learning

the lessons from the LCS. But then you think, oh, well, if we just add this one tweak, that won't matter, and we'll just add this on and maybe we'll change this but over here, and then well, now we need to make it a bit longer. And it's just all kind of accreting into this avalanche of changes that ended

up with the point where we are today. So it isn't necessarily done deliberately, But it may just be the accumulation of a small group of people or a large group of people going through and just tweaking tweaking, tweaking tweaking until it becomes something completely different. But it's very

difficult to know from the outside. I mean, I would be absolutely fascinated to see some kind of list of all of these tweaks to see how necessary they are, if they actually bring any operational value, or if they're just doing the kind of American disease of wanting things to be exquisite and over produced for what is actually quite a simple task. And frigates are quite a simple thing.

And it's just feels very over designed. And I don't know where in the process that became a problem, or if it was just something that was sprinkled all the way through.

What would it take do you think for the US

Navy and probably the Royal Navy and a bunch of other navies to sit with the design and build a few of them and uh and just live with them for a while. Just is that out of our Is that out of our I noticed when you talk about the LCS program. That was part of the issue there too. They didn't want to build one office and then and then let the choice be made. It was it was more complicated now.

But then again, at that point you may run into the problem that the LCS has, which is why we have two classes of LCS, because they didn't pick a design, but then both of them turned out to be terrible in their own special ways. Maybe those could both have been iterated as well. So I think the our navies don't tend to think about iteration as a good idea

because it just seems messy, I guess. And you think when you think shit building, you think, right, here's our design we're going to build ten of them off you go. But if we cannot do that, then we do need to think about another way forward, because otherwise we're not going to have any ships.

least on the American side of the equation. But I know there's a lot of bleedover for what happens in America to our allies, because y'all send you your best folks here to go to our war colleges and to do tours with us. But it's before and after Goldwater Nichols. Is that whole Goldwater Nichols joint construct. Goldwater Nichols was

put in the law in eighty six. It really didn't start getting its teeth until two palm cycles later about nineteen ninety, and then really that whole change in mindset took place because before Goldwater Nichols, the last ship to really do its initial designs at least was the Arly Burke that the US Navy seems to want to build

to the crack of doom, which is mine. They do a good job, But the Arley Burke had a similar characteristics that the Spruance has had, and the Spruance had a different little aspect I'll bring up in different questions because you brought up in your article that kind of reminded me of it. But the Spruance was whole. One did not hit the water. As this is the ultimate DG. The Oliver Hazard Perry went through iterative changes. You had

the short Perris, you had the long Perry's. They had a couple of corrections you had to make were already in flight three of the Arly Burks. There should be the muscle memory in our systems of the iterative approach that really has shown a lot of success. But I think you're right. It's this desire to be perfect at

day one. And I don't know if that's so much written into law, or is it because we have accountants in NBAS vice engineers approaching our shipbuilding program, or have the politicians a different generation expect too much I'm not a believer in single causel there's always multi causs when

are in problems. But I think a lot of it has to do with with mindset and not realizing that both we have done things differently and better in the recent past in other nations, like you mentioned the People's Republic of China their navy, they have a different approach that arguably is being very successful. Is that a harder thing to try to approach or fix if you're dealing with a mindset issue.

got this design, we think it's pretty good. We're going to build a couple, might make some tweaks, give us

some money, and then we'll see how it goes. And I just I wonder whether there's a mindset in Congress that has less flexibility for failure essentially, and they want things to be perfect cookie cutter frigates that will just be stamped out in the shipyards, bash bash bash, there we go, and they don't have the risk appetite or the muscle memories you say, of the previous ways in which is this has been done to be able to have the ability to allow that kind of iteration in

building ships as opposed to designing them, because designing something on paper it's not cheap, but maybe it seems cheaper to those lawmakers than it does to actually weld something together.

So I don't know whether it's a conversation should be being had with and within Congress as to how you fix those programs going forward, Maybe to allow that wiggle room of the possibility of failure in a way that allows for iteration rather in a way that sends you down the LCS route of pumping good money after bad. There must be a way to rectify that without going down the same old routes that we've been down before.

the cruisers. There was a development of those. It was iteratived. So and during the war our destroyers were developed on so you had the Johnson class, which which turns into another class, which turns eventually into the Gearing Class. No, we did that before. But I was struck in your

dissertation where you talked about with the lcs. One of the problems was that the the the industry people were saying, if you do it the way you're proposing, this is what I got out of your dissertation, and this part is if you do what you're doing with the l C where you're gonna only have a couple, we're gonna have to We're gonna have to pause our work, we have to lay off our workers. We really don't want

to do that. That's that's bad. And I'm thinking, well, that's you know, if I'm a manufacturer, I probably don't want to do that. The Chinese have the advantage, of course, that they don't really have that kind of industry where they have to worry about laying off the workers. So I mean, how much of this is driven by those those uh what do you call it a malgative or something? What is the word you're using your dissertation that I can't remember right off the top of my end. You know,

all these other people have input. It's not just Congress, and it's not just the Navy.

view shaped as opposed to other lawmakers. And you know, in many ways that is understandable because you know, building a big program in a yard in your area gives jobs to your constituents, it gives economic spill over affects your communities, keeps people in work, so it's very understandable. But then also it can skew how lawmakers look at

whether the programs have merit in and of themselves. So you can get the effect where a lawmaker will look at a program and say, I'm not too sure about this, I don't think we need this, or I think it could be done better. But if I don't vote the money for this, then forty five thousand of my constituents will lose their jobs. And that kind of incentive is very very understandable, but can also skew how lawmakers approach

these kinds of decisions. And if you have the big prime companies like Raithion, Luckied, Martin and so on, they deliberately spread the production of their big programs across as many states as they can in order to say as many lawmakers as they can, Hey, there's our site in your district that gives ten thousand jobs. Maybe you want

to think about not canceling our product. The thing with Constellation is, like with shipbuilding, it's much more limited because obviously there are fewer shipyards because you have to have some water to build ship. So that does narrow the number of states and districts that are affected, but those shipyards do become really central economic hubs to those areas in a way that can often be a lot stronger than say an aircraft factory or an engine factory or

something like that. The effect is a lot stronger, I think with shipbuilding, but a lot more focused on certain districts. So with Constellation, that's going to be very focused on Wisconsin, and given the importance of Wisconsin to the upcoming elections in November, that might be a consideration. Again very understandable, but you can argue against that very strongly from a military operational need standpoint.

We've seen in the last few decades that as our ship building capacity has shrunk in the US. Everybody talks about the bracts and the nuxts is we have fewer and fewer shipyards building fewer, fewer ships, and I think we're past the point. But I think you could argue,

at best, we're at the pivot point that a loss of a yard here, are closing of a yard there, whether it's in Green Bay or or somewhere between Portsmouth and Glasgow, that it's a national issue. Is you cannot create a shipyard overnight. You cannot create it in a year. You really can't create it in two years or four years, because those shipyards also require machinery, they require infrastructure, They required workers and artisans, especially if you're in the nuclear field.

If you're a welder, you're an artist more than you or anything else there seems to be. And you mentioned Mike Gallagher on the US side of the equation. I think his retirement, combined with on the other side of the aisle in twenty twenty two, former Representative of the Lane Lauria leaving, we lost a lot of not just naval knowledge, but the people willing to invest political capital in the topic. But the loss of these capabilities of these yards is in many regards a national issues, a

national security issue. I'm not sure how many warship producing or auxiliary producing yards anyone in the anglosphere can be comfortable in losing in twenty twenty four, because as the world again gets more challenging ease, there is no surge capacity because our merchant yards that build merchant ships are almost non existent compared to what they were even within living memory.

we need to build ten destroyers. Let's build a shipyard that'll be done by the end of the year. Then we can start getting on with the destroyers. Like. It doesn't work like that, and it's much easier to keep facilities running than it is to build them. And if you'd stop giving orders to shipyards, you lose the facilities, you lose the talent, you lose the artisans, the designers, everybody involved in that process. The ones that you have

go off and retire or get other jobs, and nobody is trained to replace them because there's no need. And then you get this gap. And then once you get to the point where you think, oh, we actually need this capacity, you then have to start winding up your recruitment and your retention and your education and your facility building or bringing things out of a moth board state, or extending a shipyard in one place to have another

dry dock, and all of that. To have to do all of that at the same time under the pressure of need is very, very difficult. And I know a lot of people have criticized the current US administration and Secretary Del Toro for presiding over not that many ships

being built. But I think that this administration is taking this seriously in a way that so many previous administrations have absolutely failed to do of both sides, And I think del Toro is the first second now that I can remember, who has actually sat down, looked at this and thought right, Okay, this is a problem. We need the funding, we need the plans, and he's not going to get that done in a year, two years, three years because he hasn't had that. He's not building on

stuff that has been happening in previous administrations. He's having to do it all himself from whole cloth. And the Biden administration has got this great funding for the submarine industry, for example, but that would have been me did if there had been that long term planning from the nineties, twenty twenty tens, all those previous administrations who just failed

to do that. So I think the current administration and the next administration will have a very very difficult job because they are starting from a much lower point than would have been the case if previous administration had also taken this seriously. And I think that's a problem that shared in the UK as well. You know, we have similar patterns in our industry. From the end of the Cold War, things dialed down, you don't need to spend so much on defense, and we have that same kind

of pattern here in the UK. And it's only really under the Johnson administration that we had a shipbuilding strategy. We had a shipbuilding office. Things started to come together and once again that is starting to happen. Things are moving. But we shouldn't have had to start from scratch in such a tight time frame because previous people should have got that ball rolling.

prepare for war in Europe, land war in Europe. But you know how much of that is a forgetfulness of the fact that you are an island and the US is essentially an island too.

as does the RAF, as does the Royal Navy. So it's one of those circumstances where our entire armed forces have been underfunded since the end of the Cold War, and you can see that in our fighter jets, in our ships, in our auxiliary fleet, in our infantry, in our armored vehicles, in our tanks, in everything. And both the last government and the current one have had to

try and struggle with spending our defense budget in a way that manages to fix all of this at the same time, and that is a very very difficult thing to do. Obviously, I think that the Royal Navy should have priority because we are a maritime nation and our navy is what we do well, and I think the best support that we can give to later allies and other allies and partners is naval. But that's an argument that is going to be had at much higher levels

than my pay grade. But I would also like to see to have a decent army and a decent air force. So it's very very difficult to either the current government or future governments are going to be able to square this circle because fundamentally it's the same problem that you are trying to fill holes that have been left for forty years.

Sharp in June of twenty twenty four. It was titled the US Navy has fallen victim to the British disease for folks on this side of the Atlantic. What is the British disease that he was referring to?

But then reading it, I realized that he was actually talking about something quite a lot deeper, which is Project Creep and we're very favored that in the UK, and it's exactly what we're seeing with the constellations that you designed something, you need to tweak it and add more bits on it, and then you run out of space, and then the ship gets bigger and heavier, and you know,

it's the same problem with constellation. And also it's the problem that Tom also references in the article about times where we've tried to buy a design, a foreign design, and then we end up fitzing with it too much and then it goes wrong. So this happened with the Apache helicopters, and we should have just bought the American Apache and made it, but we didn't because we meddled with it and then it cost far too much, and then it turned out that we had to have them

rebuilt in America. Anyway, we did it with armored vehicles with Ascord, and we messed that up completely, and then we tried to build ourselves and now it's Ajax, which is a complete disaster and makes anyone who rides in it death, which is not great. So it's this jet Creek not being able to stop fitzing with things that

I think is the disease that Tom's referring to you, and something that I don't know whether we've communicated it across the Atlantic or if it's come the other way, or if it's just something that is shared between all Western armed forces, but it does seem to be something that we're seeing in a lot of places.

approached the kind of the the necessary re arming. You know, some people, I guess think we still don't need the kind of assets we have, But is there is that a big issue you think?

didn't need those capabilities at all. I think after Russia's second invasion of Ukraine in twenty twenty two, some people started to see that war in Europe is not a distant possibility, it is a very near possibility, and that all of the people who'd been saying this for a long time before that were not fearmongering and just wanting more defense money so they could buy stock in Lockheed

Martin or whatever. There was actually a threat, and if we'd started rearming previously, then we'd be in a much better position now. But I do still think there are people who don't think we need to be rearming even now, and you think that a wider war with Russia is not going to happen. Who think that, you know, on

the US side, you think that a military confrontation with China is not going to happen, and that if we all just sit in our houses with the window shut and our hands over ears, nobody will come for us because we're not doing anything and just leave us alone. And the world does not work like that, especially now, because everything is interconnected, our economies are interconnected, and our

alliances are important. And I just think that the argument needs to be made to the public more widely that defense spending, investment in our armed forces is not only desirable, but is necessary. And it's necessary now, not when the threat is immediate. And I think the thing that worries me is that people won't take that seriously until it's

too late. And you do not want to be in the position of having troops entering the borders of an ally and you don't know, you're not ready, and you don't have the capability, the personnel, the platforms to respond to protect our ally, whether that Taiwan or Estonia or Poland or wherever. And the public, a lot of the public, I think, aren't interested in hearing that argument, which means to chatter louder.

would want it to. When that doesn't just mean that as opposed to seeing one we see three articles of people asking for larger defense, but we actually see the investment, We see the allocation of resources in the change of mindset. But when it looked at the problem we have with the fleet, you know, there's the old phrase of throwing

good money after bad. Let's put in all of our own optimism filters, and let's say that we're able to change some mindsets and we have more of the people that have their hands on the levers of power and budgets on the civilian side of the national security and the political arena. We've got them on board, we've got them changing. But inside the lifelines of the uniform side of the shop, there's more money necessarily going to make

it better. You know, you mentioned the incremental Nitanoid changes. That's what killed over here in the US, the CGX program that they were going to turn into some Battlestar

Galactica looking creation that nobody could afford or explain because there was no program control where somebody said, no, we're not going to do that, We're going to do this instead, and it just grew out of control. And you even mentioned that when it comes to the Constellation class that I'll do a little quote for you this vision when you're talking about why we are bringing the Constellation on board. However, now has a number of holes below the waterline, all

caused by the navy. Unquote, where do you find the holemakers inside the Navy that if you could have your own little group of enforcers go in there and dig around and name where are some of those entities inside the navy proper you think that are part of the problem and not part of a future solution that need to be reformed, replaced or eliminated.

ballooning in the way that the Constellation has. And I was pleased to see last week that we're now having a program manager for the Maritime Industrial Base that SECNAV has hired and this man's entire job is going to be overseeing investments in the industrial base. And I'm hoping that will mean that there is accountability in leadership for this going forward. So I'm hoping that will help. But the problem is that wherever you go with trying to

place blame, I don't think it's really possible. Well, because this kind of thing is so systemic, and I think if I had to fire everybody who had badly contributed to a naval procurement program in the United States, we wouldn't have anyone left.

a frigate can do a frigate's job. Somebody in the chat room talks about Uh, the f FG's potentially being outgunned by Chinese ships. You know. His comment is why does that matter?

doesn't work. I think actually with these ships, sleek, simple outcomes are better. And this is where the FREM is a good idea, because that's what the FREM does. It is a decent frigate. And if you've just taken the frame, made a couple of weeks and churn them out, you would have had a fleet of decent frigates. That do what frigates do. They do not need to do everything else,

they just need to do what a frigate does. And with technology, I think there's a tendency to think that if something can be added, it should be added, and that extends to kind of more modern stuff like AI, machine learning, all of that kind of thing. If it

can be done, it should be done. And I think there needs to be much more thought about exactly which capabilities can be augmented by each of these technologies, should they be does it actually add value to that capability, And when it comes to uncrewed technology especially, I think uncrewed is the future. Having an uncrewed fleet would be spectacular. It would add mass, it would add ISR capabilities, all

this kind of thing. It would be great. But we are not there yet with the technology. Having a significant number of uncrewed vessels is not going to happen in the next twenty thirty years because that tech is still being developed and iterated and it needs to be fitted into the fleet structures. So there is going to be a next iteration of the fleet that needs to have

crued platforms. So we need to do those properly and not rely on uncrewed platforms to solve our problems with personnel because they don't, and to not rely on uncrewed platforms to solve our problems with overdesigning things because they don't. And I do worry that people look at modern technology and think, as you say, it's this magic pixie dust that's going to fix all of our problems, and I

just don't think that's the case. I think it will add great value to a future fleet, but we are not there yet, and we need to think seriously about traditional crew platforms in the interim, otherwise we're going to have a massive gap.

we have all this empty space here. Well, the empty space was designed into the ship at the beginning, going yes, because we're going to fill it over the course of the next decade with these different systems that are going to be coming online. But we're going to get the ship in the hole in the water. You know, a point eight of a d D is better than a point one of a DD at some point down the road that will never happen. And so by the time

the sprunces were starting to be decommissioned, they were full up with vlsls and weapons systems. They filled up all the gaps just fine. And on the bridge side of the house, I would argue a very successful classes ship your type twenty three frigates, I believe sufferers. Now it's been upgraded and added on so much that it's kind of like the HMS Hood becoming almost semi submersible. It's taken on so much additional weight. And here with the

Constellation we don't even have a whole one commission. And yet it is again in your article, yet twenty three feet longer and five hundred tons heavier than the original.

What we do know, there's a lot we don't know about the future, but one thing we can almost guarantee is we're going to need extra whites and spare displacement to bring on those systems that maybe we don't fully appreciate the requirement in twenty twenty four, but in twenty thirty three you probably want to be able to put that on.

but you don't have it there at the beginning. And that is really important to have the flexibility to be able to add capability in and it's what gives these ships their length of life, which is very very important. But that again could be potentially solved by having more

of this iteration that we were talking about. So if you had your flight one constellations, for example, and then the you know, something changed in a capability, and then you could take something out and put something in for the flight twos of the Constellation class, and do that again with the flight threes. So it's not necessarily that you have to leave space for every possible capability, because that could come at a cost of making the ships too big. But it is important to be able to

have the flexibility with huge capabilities. But I think that can be achieved by replacing things rather than adding them on, because then again, you get to this point where this ship is expected to do everything because hey, we've got this cool new via less capability, let's just whack that on the constellations for no reason, and you know, it could become another excuse for things to be overdesigned and far too heavy.

but you just you begin to wonder, how much how can we not say if we're going to add something else, something else. It's kind of like in your house. You know you're supposed to before you bring something new, and you're supposed to take something old out right? Is there is there not a way we can design chips to to accommodate new upgrades that but by by getting rid of whatever they're replacing.

France has eight, Italy has ten. The originally was going to be four different variants, but nobody ever built land attack variants. It's been a fairly successful program for the French and Italians.

Navy did intend to do. And then to have that all of these problems with Constellation, yet for that not to be caused by frem being a problem makes it, you know, robs even more salt into the wound because the French and the Italians are merely sailing around the seas with their lovely frigates and America still has no frigates, and it is just utterly frustrating.

a horse? An elephant? Is a horse designed by a committee. I mean that's kind of where we ended up with this fram concept. Brilliant idea, could have could have worked, should have worked. But I don't know if it was just not invented here, or if somebody said, now we can't you know, we've got to have this and uh, and then you end up with, as you've already said, a Frank, we're running up on time here. What what are you being What are you going to be working

on in the future. I love the stuff you've been doing, but what do you be working on in the future or now that we're going to be able to see here and about I'm sure more about naval matters.

so that should be quite a long project. I'll then also be doing something specifically on the Royal Fleet Auxidiary because my previous project in the role Maybe and the RFA, the RFA has quite a lot of red flags at the moment, so I'm going to be doing a deep dive into the RFA because I think although obviously your ships are not as sexy as their combat cousins, I think they are widely important and I've become a big fan of logistics. So that's my other one.