Ships That Don’t Dare to Sail

[Snowden]

December 14, 2006
Editorial
Ships That Don’t Dare to Sail

The Coast Guard, supposedly our first line of defense against water-borne terrorists and drug smugglers, has been staggered by a shipbuilding scandal of enormous proportions. A long-term modernization program to replace nearly all of the Coast Guard’s ships, planes and helicopters — begun four years ago in the wake of 9/11 — is foundering while its projected costs are skyrocketing. In Iraq, lax government oversight and incompetence or profiteering by contractors have disabled reconstruction efforts. Now the same disease is undermining our coastal defenses.

The Coast Guard fiasco was laid out in depressing detail by Eric Lipton in The Times last Saturday, and in a similar article in The Washington Post. The misjudgments and slipshod work would be grist for slapstick comedy if the consequences, in cost and weakened defenses, were not so serious.

As described by Mr. Lipton, the estimated costs of the project, known as Deepwater, have ballooned from $17 billion when it started in 2002 to $24 billion today. The plans call for 91 new ships, 124 small boats, 195 new or rebuilt helicopters and 49 unmanned aerial vehicles. But don’t count on any of the new vehicles working.

The initial venture — converting the Coast Guard’s rusting patrol boats into bigger, more versatile cutters — has been canceled because hull cracks and engine failures made the first eight ships unseaworthy. Plans for a new class of ships with an innovative hull design were halted after the design was found to be flawed. And even the radios placed in small open boats proved faulty; they shorted out because they had not been made waterproof.

In the latest chapter in this disgraceful performance, Mr. Lipton reports in today’s paper that the Coast Guard did not inform Congress that it was warned two years ago by its chief engineer that a proposed National Security Cutter, meant to be the flagship of its fleet, had “significant flaws” in its structural design and should not be started until the problems were addressed. The Coast Guard began construction anyway. It plans to reinforce the first two versions that are being built and change the design on the remaining six.

How could this happen? Mostly because the Coast Guard, in an astonishing abdication of responsibility, gave two large military contractors, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, near total freedom to plan, supervise and deliver the new ships and helicopters. In some cases, the contractors made boneheaded decisions, as when their shipyard partner ignored warnings by Coast Guard engineers that the converted patrol boats might buckle under the extra weight. In other cases, they might have put their own interests ahead of the nation’s, as when they adopted a risky hull material that had never been tried on a large American military ship but was pushed by Northrop, which had just opened a new plant to manufacture the hulls.

No wonder the contractors are ducking for cover as the scandal reverberates, and are leaving all comment to the hapless Coast Guard. The Coast Guard seems, belatedly, to be moving in the right direction by giving its own engineers more supervisory power over the work and creating a division to oversee procurement and maintenance of ships and planes. Even so, the new Congress and the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for the Coast Guard, will need to keep a sharp eye on the Coast Guard’s performance. The industrial contractors have proved they were not up to the job.



http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/op...th&oref=slogin