Teaching Weakness in Shipbuilding?

I was speaking with a colleague recently who is presently employed at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI. We were discussing the curriculum there, and my colleague said something I found quite interesting given this blog's ongoing discussion over the crisis in shipbuilding. They said that there is not a great deal of budgeting or acquisition related material in the 'force planning' component of the NWC's curriculum, and that what was there was being 'cut back' and changed so as not to include any actual number-crunching, no matter how conceptual. Apparently there is a crunch on teaching hours available in the curriculum, there are few faculty who have any experience with the process or teaching it, and budgeting and acquisitions consistently rates the lowest on their student feedback, so (from an administrative point of view) it makes sense to chop it.

NWC, for those who aren't familiar with it, teaches (according to its website) 'mid-career level officers of the Navy' as well as foreign officers, mid-career officers of the other services, and civilians in federal service. These are the future leaders of the U.S. Navy both in operational and administrative command. When I asked what the students have to say about the acquisition and budgeting process, I was told (paraphrased): "the guys who have had some experience with the B&A; process in the U.S. tell us that there's no point in them spending time on that stuff here, because in order to have an impact on the process you need ten computer scientists and a network of hundreds of Unix workstations to game out the options, and they're not in that business."

In other words, thinking about budgets and the politics and strategic impact of the acquisitions process is something that requires the active participation of contractors or consultants, and which shouldn't rate teaching hours at one of our primary Naval teaching institutions.

All I can say is that this seems to both partially explain the current void in shipbuilding vision as well as bode ill for the future. I should stress that this is single-source, anecdotal evidence - but it is from a source whom I trust, and a source involved in the curriculum planning.