- President Trump ordered Doge d’Elon Musk to investigate the unnecessary expenses of the Pentagon.
- The Blank House NSA advisor Mike Waltz called on American shipbuilding as “an absolute mess”.
- Problems such as hot air balloon costs, delays and an dug industrial basis have an impact on naval construction.
President Donald Trump gave Elon Musk a new target – the Ministry of Defense. The White House expects it to find billions of dollars of waste, including in what its national security advisor called “absolute disorder” in American shipbuilding.
This opens the door to Doge Cost-Sectures trying to make its way to efficiency in the federal bureaucracy which oversees shipbuilding, part of the system that has trouble designing, buying and building American warships.
The biggest problem that stimulates delays and costs of the blazing of ships, by naval analysts, is not easily resolved: the decline of the American naval construction industry and the narrowing of its workforce.
This weekend, President Donald Trump said he was expecting the Musk Government Ministry of Efficiency “to have billions, hundreds of billions of fraud and abuse” in the Pentagon. The budget of the Ministry of Defense exceeds $ 800 billion, and it failed its seventh consecutive audit last year, which means that there is a lot of non -recognized funding. The goal is to change that.
“We have to know when we spend dollars,” Trump’s defense secretary Pete Hegseth said on Sunday in an interview with Fox News. “We must know where they are going and why. It is a simple accounting, and it did not exist at the Ministry of Defense.”
The National House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, a retired army colonel, specifically underlined the American military naval construction programs as a point of interest. On Sunday, Waltz said that during the NBC press meeting, there was “a lot to examine in shipbuilding, which is an absolute mess to examine contracts, purchases”.
He also expressed his concern about the process, which pays naval manufacturers to start working before the conceptions end. “You pay people from the start and then they do not deliver for years, years and years”, and “maintenance and costs are exceeding,” he said.
The unit of the upper arc of the future USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier is adapted to the main structure of Newport News Shipbuilding. US Navy Photo Gracious Huntington Ingalls Industries by Matt Hildreth / Released
What are the problems?
The American navy is the most powerful and most advanced naval force in the world today, but the programs and the industrial base of Big Navy on which this force is struggling.
There has been a series of broken programs, such as the coastal combat vessel, some of which are now put out of service of the decades before their time, and the Zumwalt class destroyers, the mission and the armaments that have been wondered for years . Each of the destroyers costs around $ 8 billion.
The new development of the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier has been paralyzed by the evolution of requirements and the integration of dozens of new technologies. He was delivered late for years up to around $ 13 billion.
And even now, the main programs are faced with enormous delays. Last year, a navy review revealed that the main military shipbuilding projects, new submarines and surface ships, are delayed by years and faced costs.
This includes the Virginia Block IV class attack submarines, the Columbia class ballistic missile submarines, the Constellation class guided missile frigate and the next Ford class aircraft carrier. The delays go, but most are a year or two late.
The design and construction of these warships are supervised by Naval Sea Systems Command, which has more than 75,000 civil and military people.
What are the causes?
Legislators, civil servants, government duty and experts drew attention to American naval construction problems, including industrial industrial capacity, budget and calendar problems, and design changes in design last minute.
The other challenges include the persistent effects of COVID-19, inflation, the supply chain breakdowns and a decreasing workforce.
The US Navy industry and expert officials, analysts and experts said that inconsistent defense budgets, naval costs requirements and estimates, and the reduction in interior capacity has struck the capacities of naval construction navy for decades.
The industrial base has decreased and the navy depends on some naval manufacturers for design and construction. This same problem limits maintenance and repair. The interior capacity is limited and international sites are not an option due to current prohibitions.
Last December, members of the Congress presented an act to revitalize and strengthen American shipbuilding. Seaman Curtis Burdick / Us Navy
Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior scholarship holder from the American Enterprise Institute, wrote last year that the navy needed to break what she called the “Doom loop”. Naval, maintenance and repair costs continue to increase as the fleet ages and shrinks. New construction problems arise in the process. And while the navy criticizes naval manufacturers, naval manufacturers deplore the increase in wage costs, inflationary pressures and budgetary uncertainty.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by virtue of the naval shipbuilding plan in 2025, total costs on average $ 40 billion per year in 2024 for the next 30 years, around 17% more than naval estimates . This occurs while the navy gives priority to the construction of a larger fleet with a more distributed firepower. The objective is 390 battle forces by 2054.
The CBO said that the Navy plan would put pressure on the American industrial basis, which means “over the next 30 years, the country’s shipyards should produce much more naval tonne they have produced In the past 10 years.
The commercial naval construction capacity of China overshadows the rest of the world. Costfototo / Nurphoto via Getty Images
Why are shipping problems important?
The best American rival, China, is the first naval manufacturer in the world. He built his navy by taking advantage of commercial and military shipyards. The non -classified data of the American navy indicate that China has 230 times the American capacity of shipbuilding. Seapower is an essential element of national power.
In a potential war with the United States, China could have the advantage in repairing and replacing the fight.
The American navy cannot catch up in quantity, but it has options. He seeks to better support his ships and his submarines, extend the life of certain assets, fix the arrears of maintenance and prioritize autonomous systems.
The question of whether Dogi ultimately targets shipbuilding when it begins to look in the Pentagon remains to be seen. There is a lot of waste in the department and bipartite concerns about this.
The DOGE acts as an internal consulting firm, triggering controversies and alarms while sweeping government agencies. His head, Elon Musk, sought to close USAID and tried to access the closely controlled payment systems of Treasury. An examination of Pentagon programs could arouse concerns about the security of defense systems and which, exactly, widens in the ministry’s plans and projects.
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