Review: Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

The book follows the construction of the John F Kennedy aircraft carrier at Newport News beginning in 2011. At the time of the book’s release in 2021, the ship remained to be completed (the completion date has been announced as 2024 – it was christened in 2019 - and now is scheduled to be delivered in 2025). The Kennedy is the 2nd in the Ford class which had suffered spectacular cost overruns and delays as they tried to initiate new technologies for launching aircraft (EMALS) and to operate the ship with fewer sailors. At the same time, new techniques were being tried to speed up construction ordered by Robert Gates as a way to reduce costs and to complete the proposed 10 ship class as a replacement for the current Nimitz class of carriers. 

 

These ships are extraordinarily expensive, the Ford costing north of $12 billion. The Navy hoped to recover some of these costs with reduced manpower through the use of new technologies. The assumptions behind these predictions have been challenged by numerous officials. But it was also the first to be designed digitally, a system that was supposed to bring new efficiencies to the process. No more did workers have to carry around heavy rolls of blueprints. The simply looked at their tablets, scanned the wire bundle bar codes and it was revealed exactly where the cables should go and what they should be connected to. The amount of wiring was staggering. There was four million feet of fiber-optic cabling alone since the ship was to have all the communications interconnected. No more eyeballing or guessing where things went.  The tablets laid out everything instantly and corrected, saving dreaded and expensive rework.

At least that’s the way it was supposed to work, but sometimes, because those driving the computers didn’t have the historical knowledge and experience of building ships, they might not allow enough room to weld some pipes together, for example.  The idea was to create a “system” one that could be duplicated and save money and time building these dinosaurs.

I question whether the current trend to build extremely complex weapons systems like the F-35, the new class of carriers, and other systems, making them far more expensive thus reducing the number that can be built and requiring far more maintenance, is an intelligent use of taxpayer money, not to mention reducing the effectiveness of the smaller forces. The scandals of the Seventh Fleet revealed after the collisions showed poor training and deferred maintenance because of cost that can only hurt the country’s defense.  In a changing environment where drones do battle and are really cheap and expendable, I wonder whether carriers will not pass the way of the battleships.   I recommend any of a number of recent books on drone warfare.

A really interesting book.