More awful news from the US Navy. I cannot even imagine what was going through this woman’s mind.
Seems to me the Chinese are fixin’ to start a war, a naval war. Our own navy is being sabotaged by disloyalty, laziness, and incompetence.
You have a gift for hyperbole.
I’m just stunned. I think about how much time and energy I and others spent to ensure that our submarines are as safe and effective as humanly possible, and you have someone who cuts corners like this. It’s incomprehensible to me that this one person was able to falsify the testing results of the steel produced by this foundry for decades.
Gosh, I hope you are right. I would be very happy to be wrong about this.
Though to be fair, subs can’t operate in -100 deg F water. 
My wife worked as a metallurgist at a foundry making airplane parts. 3/4 of her job was convincing the engine manufactures to accept the substandard parts they made and the vast majority of the time they did. She was constantly under pressure to get them to accept more and worse parts than she already did. From what I saw of their compliance department in not surprised one person could fake tests to get more parts accepted and no one would double check
True, but ships and submarines do operate in cold water (though not that cold), and you don’t want a repeat of what happened to the Liberty ships in WWII.
Hopefully this is something that happened in spite of the SUBSAFE program and a rare lapse.
Quality control of naval steel has a long history. As an example of a monopsony, naval armor plate is often used.
You see a lot of companies can make armor plate, but it only has one real buyer, the navy. It is easy to make inferior plate that passes all the quality checks. These cheats avoid throwing away tons of the stuff that have some internal flaw. But of course such plate is unable to provide protection against shells.
One solution is to have naval officers supervise the production of the stuff. Another is to simply buy the darn mills and let the navy make it themselves. No solution has been perfect.
As I said, an ongoing issue.
It doesn’t matter how many tags you affix, how many pages are in your work package, or how many signatures you collect if the first tag is a lie.
- QAO on a LID (pre-SUBSAFE) boat
ISTM that the solution would be to have the navy do acceptance testing and return anything that fails. Of course, there will be pushback against that too.
Well, you could have a policy that randomly chosen samples of provided armor plate would be penetration tested using live rounds, with the CEO of the steel company standing behind the sample. That’d probably ensure proper QC procedures.