re: #77 Targetpractice

That bunch of idiots being Congress, the Marine Corps, and (to a smaller degree) the Army. The Zumwalts were supposed to total 96 ships, with the plan being to roll them into service as the Arleigh Burkes came up for retirement. But between the guns, the radars, the Vertical Launch System, and all the assorted “future-proofing,” that ships became so expensive that they finally cut the number down to 3. Problem is that economies of scale then kicked the project in the ass, as the bean-counters ran the numbers on not only manufacturing the shells for each ship, but maintaining a ready inventory in case of war, and realized that they could have a whole new fleet of Burkes for the same cost.

So now you have ships with useless guns, fitted with radars that are turning out not to be as capable as they were sold to be, and carrying anti-ship missiles which were developed when Ford was in office. The only reason they haven’t killed the whole program outright is because the Navy retired and donated the Iowas before Congress realized they’d been hoodwinked.

That’s what I found most amazing by even just a quick browse through the wiki on the Zumwalt-class ships: I mean, I can understand the idea of spending money (even on the vastly-bloated scale of U.S. Defense projects) on developing new ideas and new systems for naval applications: it just seems that with the Zumwalts, all those billions have been spent to produce new systems that only work grossly sub-optimally, where they work at all.
American Exceptionalism!