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ships. I did, and this is what I heard. 13,000 ton vessels, 9000 ton vessels and funding will stop automatically for the • Design depends on design leader- 5000 ton vessel, etc. all with speci? ed next vessel to that design. It is up to the ship. Design leaders are unique profes- speed and range. There will be a ? xed Navy to ? gure out how they will ? x a sionals who have a solid grasp of the ? eet procurement budget and it is up to design. In this approach the designers process and the willpower to say “no” the Navy to pick the mix. However, if have a stronger barrier against mission ten times before they will allow a de- the prototype vessels do not make the creep, and it will be more attractive to sign to be modi? ed. They are still out speed, range, or go over displacement, design a simpler ship that will be certain there. I am even sure that there are quite a number of those people working at

NAVSEA and for US Navy design con- tractors. The problem is that they are not allowed to say “no”. Ship design is very complicated, but relatively simple in process terms. The process simply con- sists of getting a good team together of no more than 30 generalists and special- ists and lock them up for 6 months with an unalterable design assignment. They will come out with something that is just as good, if not better, than when there are hundreds of people over multiple years working on one project. Nothing is worse than a design team that is larger than needed and takes more than the ab- solute minimum amount of time.

• It is also good cost control. 30 En- gineers for six months should be bud- geted for no more than $6M, and that allows for the best of the best to work on the project with money for late night pizza to spare. • I used the term “unalterable de- sign assignment”. What I mean is that before the design effort starts, there has to be a clearly de? ned mission. If the mission changes, the design should not be altered to suit the new mission.

Instead, the design should be scrapped and a new design should be started. This puts a heavy burden on the Navy, but it will teach the Navy discipline, because changing missions will simply start a new 6 month cycle and if they don’t stop changing missions, they will never get to build a boat.

There is another way to install dis- cipline and that can be driven by leg- islation. The Navy can simply be told that they are allowed to have vessels of certain maximum displacement, top speed and top speed range. Maybe they are allowed to have 80,000 ton vessels, www.marinelink.com 9

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