Builder Blames Navy as Brand-New Warship Disintegrates (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Builder Blames Navy as Brand-New Warship Disintegrates (2011)

wired.com

38 pointschrisbennet41 comments

Side issue, but this bit in the article is not quite right:

There are technical terms for this kind of disintegration. Austal USA, Independence‘s Alabama-based builder, calls it “galvanic corrosion.” Civilian scientists know it as “electrolysis.” It’s what occurs when “two dissimilar metals, after being in electrical contact with one another, corrode at different rates,” Austal explained in a statement.

First, it's strange to distinguish what the "civilian" term is, because there isn't any military/civilian terminology difference here that I know of. The standard civilian term for this kind of corrosion is also "galvanic corrosion". It's a common issue in water pipes, when there are joints between different kinds of metals (commonly steel pipes with copper joints).

Secondly, electrolysis isn't the same thing as galvanic corrosion. Galvanic corrosion requires only the dissimilar metals in contact, immersed in an electrolyte (the situation here). Electrolysis is a more general process, but in the context of corrosion, it refers to corrosion driven by an external current, usually some kind of stray electrical contact. Brief summary should be readable in this Google Books preview: http://books.google.com/books?id=Z3mTf1licJIC&pg=PA169

It should be (relatively) easy to find out which process has occurred here, as it is possible to eliminate electrolysis by grounding all the systems which make contact with the sea.

It is also worth noting that a large percentage of electronic device failures (after they get wet,) are caused by electrolysis. You can see this for yourself if you look at a circuit board after the device got wet and failed; the large green (copper oxide) and white (lead oxide) splotches on the board are symptoms of electrolysis.

It should be (relatively) easy to find out which process has occurred here

The fact that the article mentions that cathodic protection was not installed on the ship strongly indicates, to me (based on prior US Navy experience), that it was galvanic corrosion. It looks to me like someone signed off on eliminating cathodic protection to save money and didn't realize the technical implications.

Not that that exonerates the manufacturer: cathodic protection is not just a special thing for military ships, even small boats need it if they have metal props (because the props are generally a dissimilar metal from the prop shafts, so without cathodic protection the props just dissolve away over time). So the manufacturer should have waved a red flag about removing it.

The "USS Independence" is slowly disintegrating... Somehow that statement makes a lot of sense on many levels.

Not an expert on this in any way, but I did enough chemistry to know that galvanic corrosion is very well known, especially on ships.

I suspect that the protection system was cut from the ship in the understanding that the Navy would instead do ongoing maintenance to stop it (not exactly sure what that maintenance would look like - maybe sacrificial anodes instead of some kind of electrical system? - but stay with me...)

Doing that would cut the capital cost of the ships (ie, what is reported as "how much it cost") and move that cost to an ongoing operational budget.

I'm guessing the Navy was under pressure to squeeze the budget, so this looked like a good way to do it.

But it sounds like the Navy also had their operational budget cut to the point where they didn't do the ongoing maintenance? Or maybe they just forgot about it..

Anyway, I suspect that's what the real story would look like.

I was under the impression that sacrificial anodes, turning the ship's hull itself into a cathode, were standard equipment installed in all oceangoing ships (Navy or otherwise).

I'm surprised it's not the case.

Sacrificial anodes are a type of cathodic protection system (the simplest and most common type). They're not a substitute for it.

Anyway, you can't do "ongoing maintenance" to substitute for cathodic protection. Galvanic corrosion is going to happen continuously as long as the ship is in the water; the only question is what corrodes, the protection system (the sacrificial anodes, in the simplest case) or the hull and other parts of the ship. If there's no protection system, what does that leave to corrode?

I'm thinking the original plan was some non-sacrificial anode system, and that was replaced by sacrificial anodes (requiring maintance, which was never done).

If there is no protection then the hull corrodes, as this story shows...

I'm thinking the original plan was some non-sacrificial anode system, and that was replaced by sacrificial anodes (requiring maintance, which was never done).

This would be consistent with the manufacturer's claim that the Navy did not properly maintain the ships. However, a sacrificial anode system is a type of corrosion protection, so it wouldn't be correct to say that no corrosion protection was installed on the ships. Of course, it's quite possible that the journalists writing this story don't understand the technical details themselves and so are not correctly describing the situation.

One of the factoids linked in the OP:

> The Defense Department estimates that it will spend $114.5 billion over the next five years on the nasty nuisance.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/the-pentagon-declare...

For perspective, that's about as much as Canada spends on its entire military (over 5 years): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...

Five years of military rust is equal to 10 years of NASA's entire budget: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

For the other perspective, from the same article, right before your sentence, corrosion over the entire country consumes 3% of the national GDP (this is basically the cost of entropy...), at an average of $1000 per person per year. The stated $114.5 billion dollars per five years, given 1.5 million active personnel works out rather favorably then, when compared to the overall average.

Also, can we not call it a factoid. The proper definition (a statement of questionable validity/truthfullness), nor the standard misused definition of it (random trivial, yet interesting fact) doesn't really apply here, as the 'factoid' is clearly related, and not trivial to the original matter at hand.

It could also be argued that Canada doesn't need a military because its neighbor spends so much on its military that it drops a hundred billion fighting RUST.

Nothing new here. The blame game happens every time a new ship construction issue is discovered. PR has nothing (or very little) to do with it. It's all about who's going to foot the bill for repairs and design changes, so both sides have a financial incentive--many millions of dollars--to blame the other.

The article seems to say that the anti-corrosion system was cut from the project for cost-saving reasons. If accurate, that's pretty astounding. Presumably this would be a decision up to the customer so it's no wonder the contractor is blaming the Navy for the bad decision.

I'm not so sure this exonerates the contractor. Yes, someone on the Navy side certainly screwed up; but the contractor should have raised a red flag if they were technically competent. (If this should ever come to court, I have no doubt the government's lawyers will be able to point out multiple clauses in the contract that require the contractor to bring to the government's attention any technical issue that could impact the ship's performance.)

This small matter of corrosion seems to be the least of the problems with this ship.

This article implies Austal are the primary contractors, they are the primary sub-contractor. The program for the 'LTS' ships is split between Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, Austal are partnered up with General Dynamics building a very different design of ship to what the other guys at Lockheed Martin are doing.

This particular ship was supposed to cost $220 million dollars, it is now costing more than $700 million. That is a lot of money. The program as a whole is costing something like $80 billion, that really is a lot of money.

What I find amusing is that a contract for $300 million has been awarded for some company to create the training materials for the LTS ships. That is one very expensive operators manual.

Incidentally the Lockheed Martin LCS ships crack when going at speed, well, that has been the problem so far. So you have half the fleet corroding and the other half just cracking. Sure the concept of the ships is new (interchangeable modules) but the programme as a whole has been rushed into without proper testing.

Now there are tens of thousands of jobs depending on it in 43 states. It is 'too big to fail' yet it is doing a good job of failing as far as stated objectives are concerned. It is always the way with military projects. Well, not quite always. On September 12 2001 contracts went out for the rebuilding of the Pentagon, as damaged a day earlier. That project was delivered a month early with no cost overrun.

> It is always the way with military projects. Well, not quite always.

There were a few generations of military projects that, while very expensive and subject to many of the same distributed-construction politics, did seem to turn out well in the end. More recent ones (meaning the last 10-20 years) seem not to be doing as well. The F-16 program, for example, was led by the U.S. but pulled in several NATO allies from Europe as part of the program, and as part of that deal the construction was also split up between the partners. But all the partners were generally happy with the end result, and the F-16 is well regarded. Something vaguely similar was tried with the Joint Strike Fighter, but that one doesn't seem to be going as well, and a lot of the non-U.S. partners are now starting to regret having signed up for it. I don't know enough to explain why the F-16 process worked, though.

I'm nowhere near old enough to remember the F-16's development, but it sure looks like recent programs have suffered a great deal from bikeshedding and trying to be everything to everyone.

Look at some of the F-16's rough contemporaries: The F-14, F-15, F/A-18, A-6, and A-10.

Despite a fair bit of flexibility and overlap in mission capabilities, especially after post-debut tweaking, these are all different planes designed with different goals in mind.

Now think about the F-35/JSF. It's one program that's basically trying to replace everything leftover from the cold war. That seems like a big red flag.

It seems like something similar is going on in the LCS program. They're explicitly supposed to be "flexible" and "modular" -- aka "be ALL THE THINGS!" -- and "replace" a variety of more special-purpose ships.

Swiss army knives are handy, but I'm not going to try building a house with one.

I wouldn't worry about the cost. Those billions go to maintaining the capacity to produce ships in the future -- the engineering talent, the shipyards, the metallurgy, and other related industries.

In Canada, we worried about cost in the past couple decades, and are now reduced to buying second-hand rust buckets, or trying and failing to make up for the lost capabilities. Our supply ships cost three times more than your combat ships! http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/military-supply-ships-1-5b-o...

This is from June of 2011, anybody know of updates?

It sounds like the whole class is having trouble.

http://www.oldsaltblog.com/2013/03/uss-freedom-limping-towar...

Well LCS is at least two different types of ship at this point so problems that affect one are not necessarily class-wide.

The Navy has certainly had a lot of trouble overseeing development of either LCS type though, that's for sure.

AFAIK they added components to help resist galvanic corrosion (such components being used on ships for hundreds of years now...), and the immediate crises have gone away. But they continue to work out all of the bugs from the new class of ship.

"Littoral Combat Ships"

Does that mean lakes? Are we putting navy ships in lakes? If so, which ones?

I don't know if we have any in lakes, but in this context, littoral means "close to shore". So for use in coastal waters.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Littoral+Combat+Ships ... :)

I believe I remember seeing one of the LCS in the Great Lakes a few years back? It was some weird Navy ship, anyway.

Historically, this blew my mind when I learned about it a few years back: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Wolverine_(IX-64)

As an aside, why not use composite materials for ships?

Here's an article from 2004 on that; would be interested in any updates: http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/ARCHIVE/2004/JULY/Pag...

It would be much, much more expensive. Composites are used for some smaller structures, such as the stack enclosures on the San Antonio class LPD's.

The military cares about cost? :)

As it turns out, they do. Things built to MILSPEC through government procurement are expensive enough as it is without the added expenses you could start to introduce if you wanted. ;)

The point of these ships is to be cheap.

They make some fairly large yachts out of fiberglass.

The Norweigans do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skjold-class_patrol_boat

Just as pricey on that scale:

http://blogs.defensenews.com/intercepts/2012/10/huge-ddg-100...

The other two ships of this class will have steel deckhouses.

Nice Gen Chem pop quizz question.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_electrode_potential_(d...

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