The problem is that the military doesn't give a damn about money. They co-developed the ship class with the first four ships that were built. Those four ships are worthless and each cost $600 million. It would cost another $2 billion dollars to make them combat ready.
The philosophy of developing and building weapon systems is called "concurrency" and has been a subject of debate for 50 years. You can look at in different ways, but the cynical view, is that if the military first developed weapons systems then reported their final price to Congress, they would never get to run these wasteful programs. So instead, they promise a low price tag and then develop concurrently so that Congress falls into the sunk cost fallacy.
This kind of "money doesn't matter we'll do it live" mentality happens all over the world. It plagued the F-35. It's resulting in a disaster with Canada's new Type 26 frigates.
The simple solution is to ban all concurrency. You're given a budget, you design the system, then you build it. If you go over, we pay for the cost of the redesign, not the insane cost of upgrading half-broken ships or aircraft. The F-35 wasted more than $21 billion dollars on worthless aircraft https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2017/10/21-billion-worth-of-f-...
The philosophy of developing and building weapon systems is called "concurrency" and has been a subject of debate for 50 years. You can look at in different ways, but the cynical view, is that if the military first developed weapons systems then reported their final price to Congress, they would never get to run these wasteful programs. So instead, they promise a low price tag and then develop concurrently so that Congress falls into the sunk cost fallacy.
This kind of "money doesn't matter we'll do it live" mentality happens all over the world. It plagued the F-35. It's resulting in a disaster with Canada's new Type 26 frigates.
The simple solution is to ban all concurrency. You're given a budget, you design the system, then you build it. If you go over, we pay for the cost of the redesign, not the insane cost of upgrading half-broken ships or aircraft. The F-35 wasted more than $21 billion dollars on worthless aircraft https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2017/10/21-billion-worth-of-f-...