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New Canadian Shipbuilding Strategy

  • Thread starter Thread starter GAP
  • Start date Start date
there is good reason why the yanks do not want floating lemons, starting with mechanical issues
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FSV Alya McCall GA


 
We're not the only one with delays. Apparently the USN sub program is a solid 400 months behind schedule (aka 33+ years).

The AOR replacement project has been ongoing since the 80s I think, depending on what they are using to get that number. There were two restarts and an unsuccessful RFP (because the big honking ship was impossible to build below the dollar value requirement). If you include the pre NSS efforts of JSS we're probably at over 40 years now.
 
The AOR replacement project has been ongoing since the 80s I think, depending on what they are using to get that number. There were two restarts and an unsuccessful RFP (because the big honking ship was impossible to build below the dollar value requirement). If you include the pre NSS efforts of JSS we're probably at over 40 years now.
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The AOR replacement project has been ongoing since the 80s I think, depending on what they are using to get that number. There were two restarts and an unsuccessful RFP (because the big honking ship was impossible to build below the dollar value requirement). If you include the pre NSS efforts of JSS we're probably at over 40 years now.

This one kind of bothers me.

Come the day, when we want to get kit from Canada to Riga or Tokyo, what type of hull are we going to charter to get there? I would suggest "any available" and it will likely be built to civvy standards.

Will it require an escort? Probably. But there again so would a MilSpec ship loaded with an army's worth of kit.

So do we really have to pay the price for the MilSpec transport capability?

Or could we just go the Point Class RoRo route - chartered by MOD but also used on the civvy market.

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This one kind of bothers me.

Come the day, when we want to get kit from Canada to Riga or Tokyo, what type of hull are we going to charter to get there? I would suggest "any available" and it will likely be built to civvy standards.

Will it require an escort? Probably. But there again so would a MilSpec ship loaded with an army's worth of kit.

So do we really have to pay the price for the MilSpec transport capability?

Or could we just go the Point Class RoRo route - chartered by MOD but also used on the civvy market.

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The way the RFP was structured was fundamentally flawed; the requirements would have been okay if there wasn't a hard max bid value. There was no ability to cut capabilities in normal trade offs so it made no sense. Ask for the world if you want, but don't have a dollar value limit.

From talking to someone that retired after spending their entire career on the 3, the first project never got to the approval point of getting funded by TBS, so was more a Canada defence funding thing, as I guess they figured the status quo was enough.
 
WTF? wow or is someone exaggerating?
We planned on expanding the USN SSN fleet without fully engaging with industry and don’t understand the effects that COVID had on industry. As well Industry BD folks tend to over promise.

So it isn’t so much that it is 33 years behind, but that given the last 5 year average build rate versus the current planned requirements for SSN’s we will not make it.

Industry has said it can build 3-4 boats a year in the short term, it now needs to deliver on that promise.

There are two VA commissions this year and there were two last year, so 1.3 boats a year isn’t exactly a correct number - but over the past 5 years that number is the average. I suspect that FY25 will see 3 boats, which as long as that can be kept up or expanded upon there will be no shortfall.
 
The way the RFP was structured was fundamentally flawed; the requirements would have been okay if there wasn't a hard max bid value. There was no ability to cut capabilities in normal trade offs so it made no sense. Ask for the world if you want, but don't have a dollar value limit.

From talking to someone that retired after spending their entire career on the 3, the first project never got to the approval point of getting funded by TBS, so was more a Canada defence funding thing, as I guess they figured the status quo was enough.

Or, if you have a dollar value limit be prepared to buy what you can afford and live with those limits.
 
Or, if you have a dollar value limit be prepared to buy what you can afford and live with those limits.
Even then, government procurement adds a lot of process, risks and costs which the GoC pretends don't exist. There isn't a good way to say 'propose something you can deliver for $X' unless it's simple and quick delivery, plus would be impossible to compare bids for scoring. Our entire RFP process is designed against setting a standard, then people bid against that standard, with extra points for various add ons.

NSS kind of did that, except we selected a partner shipyard for the build so gives us more freedom to change the actual ship requirements (which can be good and bad).
 
Even then, government procurement adds a lot of process, risks and costs which the GoC pretends don't exist. There isn't a good way to say 'propose something you can deliver for $X' unless it's simple and quick delivery, plus would be impossible to compare bids for scoring. Our entire RFP process is designed against setting a standard, then people bid against that standard, with extra points for various add ons.

NSS kind of did that, except we selected a partner shipyard for the build so gives us more freedom to change the actual ship requirements (which can be good and bad).

So here is a real world case study.

I was preparing a budget for a plant. The first couple of iterations plus my own experience suggested something on the order of 20 Million of which 10 Million would be infrastructure and premises. The meat of the plant would come from the other 10 Milllion.

Two courses of action available

  • detail each subsystem and price it individually searching for the least cost supplier on each
  • seek out one supplier capable of providing all the sub systems.

My inclination is always to the second case because my experience working for suppliers tells me that even if I buy everything separately with the deepest discounts on the market the suppliers (plural) are still making money and the customer is on the hook for the integration and takes responsibility for the errors. By the end of the commissioning stage any deep discount savings are long gone and the plant is well behind schedule.

The alternative, trusting a single vendor, gets me a faulty solution, but one that is probably less faulty than the deep discount solution and easier to bring up to the desired operating standard.

With this in mind I approached a couple of reputable vendors with my 10 million in my back pocket and had discussions that resulted in them coming up with 5 million dollar appreciations. I informed them that given they now understood my intent with respect to process requirements I wanted them to prepare a 6 million dollar proposal. They were competing for a 6 million dollar contract and the winner would be the team that not only met my needs but surpassed them. It was up to them to convince me that they had the better solution.

Both proposals met all my Must Haves. They were free to define the remainder of the Scope of Supply according to their best state of the art practices.

The result was that I got two top of the line proposals, with capabilities I didn't know were available at a cost I could afford. And I still had 4 of my 10 Million in my jeans pending Unknown Unknowns turned up during commissioning.

That plant is running today.

Is there any mechanism for a similar process within current government practices?
 
My inclination is always to the second case because my experience working for suppliers tells me that even if I buy everything separately with the deepest discounts on the market the suppliers (plural) are still making money and the customer is on the hook for the integration and takes responsibility for the errors. By the end of the commissioning stage any deep discount savings are long gone and the plant is well behind schedule.

The alternative, trusting a single vendor, gets me a faulty solution, but one that is probably less faulty than the deep discount solution and easier to bring up to the desired operating standard.
I work in tech and though I'm not invovled directly with any aquisition, I've seen us move from having litterally several dozen products and vendors all manually tied into each other to just a handful of vendors (mostly Microsoft). The 99% perfectness of a bespoke solution just became too expensive and required too much institutional knowledge to be worth it over a 90% solution that does everything we need and is only missing some quality of life features.
 
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