The Navy That Cried Wolf

This doesn't sound good. [Link]

In discussions with dozens of naval professionals over several months, few questioned the Navy's commitment to fielding an effective fighting force. But on a wide range of issues, the ability of Navy leaders to manage programs and explain service direction is being questioned, doubted and in some cases challenged outright.

"They need to take a hard look at themselves," one former senior officer said.

An element of denial is apparent in many service calculations, which are typically based on perfect-world scenarios to make everything come out right.

"They're constantly using optimistic cost and schedule assumptions," said Bob Work, a retired Marine Corps artillery colonel who is a top naval analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. "This continual optimism, the continually rosy assumptions, the effort to go too fast" have so eroded the service's credibility in Congress, Work said, that House lawmakers have difficulty even listening to the Navy.

One congressional source said he can't, at times, rule out deliberate deception.

"It's more a feeling rather than specific things," the source said. "An accumulation of a lot of little things which in and of themselves are perfectly explainable, but when you add them up, it doesn't work."