MAGA wasted billions and scrapping LSC Littoral Junk Ship admitted failure

[tun_dr_m]

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/th...-admit-the-littoral-combat-ship-failure-21513

Did the U.S. Navy Just Admit The Littoral Combat Ship Is a Failure?

Sarah Sicard

July 12, 2017

TweetShareShare

After years of cost overruns, underwhelming demonstrations, and debilitating mechanical failures, the Navy appears to be looking to supplement the troubled littoral combat ship program with a new ship to serve the same purpose, but better.

The Navy posted formal requirements for a new frigate design on July 11 under the auspices of the Guided Missile Frigate Replacement Program or FFG(X). While the request doesn’t explicitly identify the FFG(X) as a successor to the LCS, meant to replace the its Cold-War era cruisers as small surface combatants, USNI News passive aggressively described the FFG(X) project as a ship “much like the Littoral Combat Ship that currently fills the small surface combatant role.”

More importantly, the RFI stated that proposals should include plans for a production run of 20 ships, with the first keel laid in fiscal year 2020. That 20-ship fleet may fill the gap created when the Pentagon in 2014 announced plans to cut the number of LCSs ordered from Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics as part of a 30-year contract down from 55 to 32 in 2014.

From the looks of it, this RFI suggests that the Navy is finally ready to bail on the LCS for, well, a way better version of the LCS.

“In many ways, this FFG(X) design goes beyond what today’s LCS can do, particularly as it relates to surface warfare,”as USNI News put it. “The RFI states the frigate should be able to conduct independent operations in a contested environment or contribute to a larger strike group, depending on combatant commander needs.”

This new version will also utilize unmanned systems to expand “sensor and weapon influence to provide increased information to the overall fleet tactical picture while challenging adversary ISR&T (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting) efforts,” according the RFI.

But why launch a new program instead of just upgrading the existing LCS fleet? According to The Drive, the “up-gunned” Small Surface Combatant version of the LCS costs an additional $70 million and still has one major flaw: It lacks air defense capability. The FFG(X), on the other hand, “will include integrated operations with area air defense capable destroyers and cruisers as well as independent operations while connected and contributing to the fleet tactical grid.”

In 2010, the Navy intended to begin a 30-year procurement cycle wherein it would purchase 55 LCSs for $40 billion, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Sean Stackley estimated the average cost to buy an LCS would be between $430 and $440 million, but in fiscal year 2011, the unit cost was $1.8 billion, according to a budget analysis.

And that’s a lot of cash for a vessel plagued by highly embarrassing malfunctions. The Motley Fool reported that the USS Milwaukee had a clutch failure in December 2015; a month later, the USS Fort Worth suffered $23 million worth of damage to its engines; the USS Freedom had a seawater leak in July 2016 that required an engine replacement; and the USS Coronado experienced an “engineering casualty” during its maiden voyage in August 2016. We think of the LCS as the F-35 joint strike fighter of the ocean, albeit significantly less expensive.

So far 11 of the ships are in service — the most recent being the USS Gabrielle Giffords, which was commissioned on June 10, 2017.

Task & Purpose has reached out to Fleet Forces Command for comment, and will update this story as more information becomes available.

This first appeared in Task & Purpose here.

More Articles from Task & Purpose:

• Here’s What Marines Have To Say About The New PFT Standards
  
  
• Army Announces Plans To Add Thousands Of Soldiers To Its Ranks
  
  
• Mattis To Send Nearly 4,000 US Troops To Afghanistan ‘As Early As Next Week’
  

TweetShareShare

Topics:


https://thediplomat.com/2015/12/us-navys-fleet-of-littoral-combat-ships-will-be-cut-to-40-vessels/

US Navy’s Fleet of Littoral Combat Ships Will Be Cut to 40 Vessels
U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter wants to save money to purchase more fighter jets and missiles for the Navy.

By Franz-Stefan Gady
December 22, 2015


In a December 14 memo sent to the U.S. secretary of the navy, Ray Mabus, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter ordered the U.S. Navy to reduce the number of Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) to be built from 52 to 40.

The memo, according to Defense News, calls for a reduction of “the planned LCS/FF [frigates] procurement from 52 to 40, creating a 1-1-1-1-2 profile, for eight fewer ships in the FYDP, and then downselect to one variant by FY 2019.”

In addition, Carter also ordered the U.S. Navy to only buy one rather than three Littoral Combat Ships per annum over the next four years and to pick only one supplier.

Enjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.
According to Carter, the money saved from the reduction in the number of LCSs will be reallocated to purchase additional F/A-18 and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft, SM-6 surface-to-air missiles, and Virginia Payload Modules (VPM) for Virginia-class submarines.

Block III Virginia-class submarines are currently being built with the new VPM – larger tubes that increase the ship’s missile-firing payload possibilities (See: “US Subs Getting Fire Power Boost”).

Future versions of the LCS will also be more heavily armed. According to Defense News:

Beginning with LCS 33, the Navy is planning to build a more heavily-armed LCS variant with the FF designation — the result of a 2014 directive from then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to produce a more powerful ship.

The “1-1-1-1-2” profile would provide for one ship each year in 2017-2020 and two ships in 2021, the end of the current future years defense plan (FYDP). That revised build plan would cover ship orders up to LCS 33.

The plan to reduce the number of LCS has met resistance among some U.S. lawmakers. Republican Senator Jeff Sessions issued a statement saying that the reduction “would be a monumental error and must not stand. It would overrule the long-settled priorities of the Navy.”

He continues:

The Navy has, for many years, stated its goal of building up its capacity to 308 ships. We are currently at only 282 ships. Cutting LCS procurement to just 40 ships will make the Navy’s 308 ship goal impossible to achieve, as the only alternatives to LCS are far more expensive to produce and maintain. (…) I intend to fight against this proposed reduction, and I will continue to fight for LCS.

The 3,000-plus tons LCS is specifically tailored for shallow coastal waters and can customize around 40 percent of its volume to adapt to different mission sets (minesweeping, anti-submarine warfare, surface combat, etc.).

It has been a controversial naval acquisition due to cost inflation and numerous design and construction issues.

As I reported previously, the vessel’s prime advantage was supposed to be its speed – the LCS was meant to cruise 50 percent faster (45-knot-plus) than most other war ships.

Yet, the U.S. Navy has sacrificed speed in future LCS versions and rebranded it as a frigate due to recent advances in effective counter-swarm defenses.


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...urges-cut-to-24-vessels-idUSBREA3900T20140410

April 10, 2014 / 8:16 AM / 4 years ago
McCain blasts Navy's LCS ship plan; urges cut to 24 vessels
Andrea Shalal
4 Min Read

• 
  

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senator John McCain on Wednesday blasted the U.S. Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program as a “shameful” and dangerous waste of taxpayer money, and he urged the Pentagon to cut its planned purchases back by another eight ships to 24 ships.

The United States littoral combat ship USS Coronado is shown during a media tour in Coronado, California April 3, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Blake
McCain, a senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Navy’s poor planning had led to a new class of ships that could not survive in combat, cost far more than expected, provided less capability than earlier warships and had not demonstrated their utility after 13 years of development.

Lockheed Martin Corp and Australia’s Austal are building two different versions of the ship, which was designed to be rapidly reconfigured to fight other surface ships, hunt for and destroy enemy mines and battle submarines.

A longtime critic of the program, McCain used a speech on the Senate floor to back Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s decision to limit LCS procurement to 32 ships instead of the 52 ships initially planned and called for a further cut to 24 ships.

“Production should not go forward until the Navy and (Department of Defense) confirm that LCS provides greater capabilities than the legacy ships it is intended to replace,” McCain said.

He said the Navy also needed to demonstrate that the three interchangeable weapons systems being designed for the ship provided military commanders the combat capability they needed.

McCain’s speech came a day before Navy acquisition chief Sean Stackley and other top Navy officials are due to testify about the fiscal 2015 shipbuilding budget at a hearing of the Senate Armed Service Committee’s seapower subcommittee.

Hagel announced plans on February 24 to stop building the current class of LCS ships after 32 vessels and focus on ships with more firepower and protection, saying he had “considerable reservations” about building all 52 LCS ships as planned.

Lockheed and Austal are each under contract to build 10 ships, which will bring the total number of LCS ships to 24.

The Navy has set up a task force to study alternatives for a new small warship and provide recommendations by July 31, in time to inform the Pentagon’s fiscal 2016 budget deliberations.

Initially designed to be a small, fast and affordable ship to augment larger ships in the fleet, the LCS program has seen numerous cost increases and schedule delays over the past 13 years, although Navy officials say production costs are now down sharply and the fielded ships are performing well.

Vice Admiral Thomas Copeman, commander of Naval Surface Forces, told the annual Navy League conference on Wednesday he was convinced that the Navy would wind up building 20 more small warships because they offered a relatively inexpensive way to essentially double the Navy’s presence around the world.

“We need to have a certain number of ships out there,” Copeman told reporters at the conference, before McCain’s speech. “You do have to make some trades. I’d love to have every ship be unsinkable and shoot down satellites and defeat every weapon and enemy there is, but that’s unaffordable.”

Copeman said the new LCS warships were much larger than World War Two destroyers and used far less manpower. He added that no warship could survive under all circumstances.

Copeman also said the LCS ships were also subject to far greater scrutiny than any other new ship class, and many U.S. lawmakers based their criticism on outdated information.

McCain said the congressional Government Accountability Office would soon release another report that criticized the LCS program and called for more rigorous testing and evaluation.

Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Cynthia Osterman

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

 

[tun_dr_m]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...vy-hedges-bets-on-high-tech-littoral-combats/

Littoral failure: Navy hedges bets on high-tech littoral combat ships
DoD looks for alternatives to modular ship that are less likely to be cannon fodder.
Sean Gallagher - 3/29/2014, 12:18 AM

The USS Freedom (LCS-1), designed by Lockheed Martin... or perhaps by a jilted British designer who is pressing IP theft claims against the Navy.
US Navy


The Navy’s littoral combat ship (LCS) was supposed to be the ship of the future, designed to be easily converted from one role to another with a relatively quick swap-out of “mission modules.” But what the Navy got instead was a range of headaches and a ship with significantly less flexibility and capability than the ships the LCS was replacing. Now, as National Defense reports, the Department of Defense has cut the number of ships to be built nearly in half, and it has put future purchases on hold while it considers its options.

But there could still be good news for the defense contractors building the LCS: the options include a beefed-up version of the ship that could raise its cost further—and increase the profits of Lockheed Martin and Austal USA in the process. Considering the fact that these ships have already had significant problems (including “aggressive corrosion“ of one design’s hull because it didn’t include cathodic protection), yet another design change could cost the US billions more for a class of ships that has never lived up to its concept.

Stu Slade, warship analyst for Forecast International, told National Defense, “This isn’t a done deal. It’s certainly a setback for the LCS program viewed in isolation, but it’s one that could yet be reversed” because the cuts won’t hit until 2016—when the White House gets a new occupant.

Back to the future
In a way, the LCS is a hangover from the Army’s Future Combat Systems program. The Navy intended the LCS to be an all-in-one replacement for its aging guided missile frigates and minesweepers, taking on both anti-mine and anti-submarine roles. But the Navy also wanted to use the ship to provide fire support for troops ashore, using technology being developed by the Army for its force modernization: the Fire Scout unmanned helicopter and the Non-Line Of Sight (NLOS) Missile system.

ARS TRENDING VIDEO
Blizzard answers unsolved mysteries of the Hearthstone universe
To accommodate all of these roles, the Navy pushed for a ship design that would ideally allow the LCS to change jobs by swapping out modules. Additional modules, such as anti-surface ship systems and “irregular warfare” packages to support special operations troops, could be built separately to avoid the need to build other specialized ships, saving money. And all of this was bundled together with technology to reduce the required crew size for the LCS.

The NLOS was supposed to give the LCS serious firepower, with a range of 25 miles and the ability to hit targets on land and sea. The modular missile system was supposed to provide two capabilities: a “precision attack munition” (PAM) using inertial and GPS guidance, with infrared and laser designation by the Fire Scout or a ground spotter, and a “loitering attack munition” (LAM) that could fly to a designated point and wait for a target of opportunity.

But the NLOS has never materialized, mostly because of the collapse of the Army’s Future Combat Systems project. Another system, the Griffin missile, is still being considered as an alternative. The Griffin, which only has a range of 3.5 miles, was designed for use on aircraft against ground targets and would only be effective against “swarm” small boat attacks.

The mission modules themselves also turned out to be something of a bust. After evaluations, it was determined that it would take weeks, not days, to swap out an LCS’ mission modules, and the process would be much more expensive than anticipated. So the Navy decided that those “modules” would be more or less permanent instead, fixing the role of the ships they were deployed on outside of a major overhaul.

In the end, what the Navy got was a ship that was suited to none of these jobs in particular, designed to operate in what Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recently described as “permissive environments.” In other words, it was designed for wars like the Iraq War, where there was no need to worry about threats from aircraft, ships, or coastal missile batteries. And by ordering 52 of them, the Navy was effectively guaranteeing that a sixth of its fleet would be made up of sitting ducks for those sorts of attacks.

The cost overruns of the LCS program haven’t helped its case much. The Navy ended up picking two winners for the program: Lockheed Martin’s more traditional Freedom class design and the General Dynamics/Austal USA trimaran Independence class. (Full disclosure: the Lockheed Martin program was run by my former commanding officer aboard USS Iowa, Fred Moosally.) Cost overruns caused the Navy to hold up building more ships several times. Only three LCS ships have been delivered so far; a fourth, the Milwaukee, was launched in December, and another 20 are already on order. So the Navy’s “freeze” actually allows the Navy to order 12 more ships before 2016, down from the 28 planned.


Enlarge / The Austal USA-built trimaran USS Independence.
US Navy
The Milwaukee is launched on December 18, 2013.
Back to the drawing board (sort of)
This month, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert created a task force to look into alternatives to the LCS that would be more effective against air attacks, submarines, and surface vessels. The Small Surface Combatant Task Force, which is led by Marine Corps Systems Command Director John D. Burrow, has until July to come up with the best option.

Given the constraints that the task force is under, the answer may turn out to be a bigger, badder version of the LCS, because anything else would require a totally new design process or a switch to another existing design. The Navy could conceivably go with a modified version of the Coast Guard’s National Security Cutter as an option, or it could buy a new multi-mission frigate being built for the French and Italian navies. But both of those options seem highly unlikely since the designs come from outside the Navy’s development process.

The most likely outcome of this trip back to the drawing board, then, is a bigger, heavier version of the LCS, with a bigger crew and more weapons systems. In other words, it will be a lot more expensive, and it will give the companies that built the LCS in the first place a chance to squeeze more money out of what has been a questionable effort from the start.

Promoted Comments

• RGMBillArs Scholae Palatinae
  jump to post
  Actually, the LCS concept is sound; it's the execution (design) that failed as far as Mission Modules was concerned. The core problem is that the underlying interface on the ship (the backbone of shipboard services) needed to be flexible for the systems that interconnect in order to integrate into the onboard CIC. Additionally, certain systems could not practically be swapped out (such as the main gun and some of the onboard radar systems). Additionally, (and you might see it from what I just said) some sensing systems cannot be easily added as mission modules; that meant you had to have robust data passing mechanisms through the modules to the ship and vice versa. All of that initial development needs to be done before you start matching current capabilities, or writing the software that allows new modules to be created. Once done, of course, it's reusable as a framework, but the Navy and LCS PO cheaped out on the framework, and neither allowed the proper development time, nor the proper funding to do it right. Which meant that every package became much more complex, and they were no longer "plug and play". They also made foundational decisions (and this was Austal and LMCO) which were WRONG about what COTS software and hardware would provide the most utility.
  
  The concept was sound; it was the execution that was borked.
  877 posts | registered Jun 28, 2004

Sean Gallagher Sean is Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.
Email [email protected] // Twitter @thepacketrat
reader comments
Share this story

← Previous story

 

[tun_dr_m]

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-u-s-navys-redesigned-future-ship-still-won-t-fight-7b2e066b4705


War Is Boring
We go to war so you don’t have to
Dec 16, 2016

The ‘Independence’-class Littoral Combat Ship USS ‘Coronado’ in October 2016. U.S. Navy photo
The U.S. Navy’s Redesigned Future Ship Still Won’t Fight
A new ‘frigate’ Littoral Combat Ship will remain vulnerable and ineffective

by MANDY SMITHBERGER & PIERRE SPREY

The Navy’s $29 billion Littoral Combat Ship program provides a step-by-step case study in acquisition failures and the costs and risks of unacceptable levels of concurrency.

Its design requirements were poorly conceived, the manpower planning was wildly unrealistic, Navy leadership and program managers repeatedly circumvented acquisition rules — increasing concurrency and cost risk — and production was approved despite poor and rushed analysis.

Production milestones were approved despite glaring program failures. Moreover, the program is an example of how unwilling Congress is to step in and hold defense acquisition programs accountable. Congress repeatedly failed to intervene despite warnings from the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service and experienced independent analysts that this program was grossly off track.

Now the Navy has announced that it is abandoning the LCS’s radically new manning concept as well as the fundamental concept of a multi-mission ship with swappable mission modules, completely overhauling the justification and total concept for this program.

This necessitates large increases in crew size and a significant redesign of crew spaces and weapons installations, almost certain to significantly increase acquisition and operational costs.

In response to the mounting storm of criticism, on Dec. 16, 2015, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced that the original buy of 55 LCSs, already cut to 52, would be cut to 32 ships plus an additional eight “frigate” versions of the original LCS. The Navy prefers to go even further by cutting the LCS buy to 28 ships plus 12 “frigate” LCSs — and is requesting approval of a 12 ship block buy to lock in the program’s production commitment with a concomitant large increase in concurrency.

Approval of a block buy committing the taxpayer to full production of a revamped $1.2 billion “frigate” LCS — one immune to cancellation in the event of failed operational tests — is the largest LCS decision now facing the new Department of Defense and the new Congress.

That decision needs to be considered carefully in light of what the “frigate” LCS actually represents.

Namely, a superficial redesign that leaves the LCS’s excessive vulnerability unaddressed, eliminates the urgently needed mine countermeasures mission, does little for improving the ship’s lethality in the surface warfare and anti-submarine warfare missions, and results in a “frigate” that cannot accomplish traditional frigate missions due to lack of the requisite sustained speed, endurance and survivability.

Ultimately, the upcoming congressional and Pentagon decisions regarding the LCS program’s future, including the proposed block buy and frigate, will dictate whether American crews will be forced to risk their lives going to war in ineffective, excessively vulnerable ships.

The ‘Freedom’-class Littoral Combat Ship USS ‘Fort Worth’ in October 2015. U.S. Navy photo
Recent problems spur changes
The program has been plagued with design failures and unreliability. In fact, the U.S. Naval Institute reported in September that just in the last year the LCS experienced six major losses of combat capability while deployed.

In response to all of these issues, the Navy has announced yet another major revamping to the LCS program and there have been new calls from Congress for additional changes to the program.

The first four of the 28 LCSs meant for deployment will instead be turned into dedicated testing vessels. Six others will have to be assigned as dedicated training ships, doubling what had originally been planned. This means diverting deployable assets because of the unprecedented burden of the multi-specialty cross-training needed for every sailor in the LCS’s radically reduced crew.

Out of the first 28 LCSs that have been built, only 18 are really available for deployment.

But the Littoral Combat Ship program has been unnecessarily complicated from the beginning.

One of the more distinctive elements of the LCS program was that its seaframes and the three mission packages are being developed separately and concurrently, each with substantial risk. Compounding this, there are two versions of the seaframe in production. Lockheed Martin manufactures the Freedom class and Austal builds the Independence class.

Initially the Navy aimed for each ship to cost $220 million, but the Government Accountability Office estimates procurement costs for the first 32 ships is currently about $21 billion, or about $655 million per ship — nearly triple what they were supposed to cost. The program’s three mission packages, according to the latest select acquisition report, add about $7.6 billion.

One of the iterations of this program originally planned for the Navy to down-select between the Freedom and Independence classes to increase acquisition and lifecycle cost savings. When the Navy decided to keep both designs, critics — including the GAO — expressed concerns that the Navy had not adequately considered the lifecycle costs and operational challenges of maintaining two separate fleets.

We are starting to see the operational impacts of that decision now. The two fleets will be operating and training separately, with the Freedom class based and supported out of Mayport, Florida, and the Independence class based out of San Diego, California. While the Navy doesn’t say so explicitly, the significant differences between the two classes has almost certainly driven the decision to double the number of training ships.

In the decade and a half since the program was first sold to Congress, the LCS has already been forced into multiple major program changes, initially driven by large cost overruns, the lack of combat survivability and lethality discovered during operational testing and deployments, the almost crippling technical failures, and schedule delays in each of the three mission modules.

Now the Navy has announced it is abandoning the two fundamental concepts behind the program — a multi-mission ship with swappable mission modules and a radically new way of manning it. Instead, each LCS hull will have a single mission and a significantly larger crew assigned a single primary skill set.

Government Accountability Office comparison of ship operating costs per year. Illustration via GAO
The operating cost per ship-year has skyrocketed due to crew size increases, the continued unreliability of the ship systems, and the unprecedented need for expensive contractor support. In 2014 a GAO analysis of the Navy’s life-cycle cost estimates found LCS operating costs are 3.3 times greater than current minesweepers the LCS was supposed to replace, and amazingly, 90 percent of the operating cost of the 9,000-ton DDG-51 ballistic missile defense destroyer.

“The miracle of the LCS didn’t happen,” Paul Francis of the GAO told the Senate Armed Services committee last week. “LCS has taken longer, cost more, and delivered less capability than expected.”

The Navy is now paying the costs of their buy before you fly approach. The concurrency in the program is so extreme that taxpayers will have paid for 90 percent of the LCSs before seaframe operational testing is scheduled to be finished in 2019 — in other words, before the Department of Defense and Congress know whether the seaframes are suitable or unsuitable for combat. Suitability of all LCS mission packages won’t be known until at least four years later.

The ‘Independence’-class Littoral Combat Ship USS ‘Gabrielle Giffords’ in February 2015. U.S. Navy photo
Failed transformation
A useful starting point for considering the LCS program is an overview of its original requirements compared to where it stands today. As Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld directed the services to propose a series of “transformative” programs based on unconventional ideas and technologies.

This included the Army’s Future Combat Systems that was canceled after spending $19 billion in taxpayer dollars. The LCS was the prime Naval example of this “transformative technology.”

It was originally sold in fiscal year 2003 as incorporating radically new characteristics that would totally change naval warfare.

As the table shows, the current LCS fails to achieve even a single one of the “transformative” characteristics that were promised — and fails in each by substantial margins.

No combat survivability
In December 2011, Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, reported concerns about combat survivability.

“LCS is not expected to be survivable in a hostile combat environment,” Gilmore wrote. “[LCS design requirements] do not require the inclusion of the survivability features necessary to conduct sustained operations in its expected environment.”

In 2012 POGO obtained documents showing that the Navy’s lack of oversight resulted in ships being delivered with significant cracking, and that there were over 80 equipment failures on the ship. “These failures were not trivial, and placed the crew of the ship in undue danger,” we wrote.

In one instance, there was a darken ship event during a counter-drug trafficking operation that temporarily left the ship adrift at sea.

A 2012 DOT&E report provided additional insight — “LCS is not expected to be survivable in that it is not expected to maintain mission capability after taking a significant hit in a hostile combat environment.”

The Navy, due to the program’s concurrency-driven lack of survivability testing, has “knowledge gaps related to the vulnerability of an aluminum ship structure to weapon-induced blast and fired damage,” DOT&E wrote, referencing aluminum’s tendency to sag and melt in ordinary ship fires and to burn with nearly inextinguishable intensity when hit by shaped charge cannon shells or missile warheads.

In addition to pointing out the LCS’s lack of combat survivability, the Pentagon’s testing office also found that Freedom’s surface warfare module was defective because the ship’s 30-millimeter gun “exhibit reliability problems,” and that on both classes “ship operations at high speeds cause vibrations that make accurate use of the 57 mm gun very difficult.”

Worse yet, the integrated weapons control and air/surface radar system on the Freedom has “performance deficiencies” that degrade the “tracking and engagement of contacts.”

The surface warfare module wasn’t the only one in trouble — the mine counter-measure module was much worse. The AN/AQS-20A sonar was supposed to identify bottom mines in shallow water, detect, locate and classify bottom, close-tethered and volume mines in deep water, and to communicate all that information to the ship to avoid or destroy any identified mines.

To do this it needed to be towed either by Lockheed Martin’s Remote Multi-Mission Vehicle underwater drone or the MH-60S helicopter. In every test over the last decade, the RMMV drone proved grossly unreliable. Finally in 2016 the Navy officially cancelled the RMMV drone, which had cost taxpayers over $700 million and 16 years.

Calling the U.S. Navy’s Littoral Combat a ‘Frigate’ Doesn’t Make It Any Less Crappy
Watchdog agency slams up-gunned LCSwarisboring.com
The Navy now plans to choose among three substitute surface and underwater drones still in development — but testing and assessing the winner’s suitability cannot be completed until 2023, according to DOT&E.

As for the combination of MH-60S towing the AQS-20A, the 2012 DOT&E report found they were “not operationally effective or suitable.” The Navy’s own testing determined the MH-60S helicopter cannot safely tow the AN/AQS-20A Sonar Set or the Organic Airborne Sweep and Influence System because the helicopter is underpowered for these operations. The MH-60S helicopter will no longer be assigned these missions operating from any ship.

Thus, the Navy predicts no LCS will have any mine countermeasures mission capability until 2020 — and the seven to 10 (or fewer) LCSs assigned permanent mine warfare duty may not be equipped with fully operational MCM modules until 2025, if ever.

It may be nearly a decade before a portion of the LCS fleet makes even a modest contribution to the Navy’s grossly inadequate minesweeping capabilities, currently the weakest they’ve been since the beginning of World War II.

The third module, the anti-submarine module, has been in trouble from the start because the waterjet propulsion built into both LCS variants is so much noisier than conventional propellers that it severely limits the sonar’s ability to detect submarines.

Moreover, the ASW module is years behind schedule because its components, particularly the large stern towing rig for the towed array sonar, are being reengineered to lighten them enough to meet the 105-ton weight constraint imposed by the LCS’s severe overweight problems.

Testing has also been sparse and unrealistic. In 2014, testing had been “highly scripted” due to the early stage of integration for the program, so that there was “full knowledge of the target submarine’s position throughout the test, and the operators focused their search only in the region where the submarine was known to be.”

In 2015, according to DOT&E, there was no actual at-sea testing at all. In other words, no test data whatsoever exists for even estimating whether the LCS may have a combat suitable ASW mission capability.

Rep. Gene Taylor receives a Distinguished Public Service Award from Navy Secretary Ray Mabus in December 2010. U.S. Navy photo
Congressional oversight, little accountability
Requests to start major programs or make major changes are ordinarily submitted to Congress at the beginning of the budget cycle — usually around February. But throughout the history of this constantly changing program the Navy always seemed to submit major LCS budget requests out of cycle, making proper congressional oversight significantly more difficult.

This started from the get-go. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Navy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense had excluded the first request for major LCS research and development funding from their budget submission for fiscal year 2003.

It was only later in the year, after the House and Senate Armed Services Committees had held their budget-review hearings to inform their annual authorization bills, that the Navy announced they wanted to pursue a rapid acquisition program. This meant Congress would have had to schedule hearings outside its usual budget process to “review in detail the Navy’s accelerated acquisition plan,” the CRS pointed out. They didn’t.

Quickly the program became, as The New York Times put it, a “lesson on how not to build a Navy ship.”

Costs doubled as the Navy deliberately both designed and built the ships at the same time. With approval from the Office of Secretary of Defense, this acquisition plan baked in an unacceptably high level of concurrency between production and testing.

As mentioned above, the concurrency in the program is so extreme that taxpayers will have paid for 90 percent of the LCSs before 2019, before we know whether they’re suitable or unsuitable for combat, and long before 2023 when we’ll know whether the LCS with its mission packages is effective in combat.

Concurrency was further intensified because the Navy’s terms of competition between the two shipbuilders prioritized acquisition speed over cost or survivability.

Six years later in 2009, the Navy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense requested their first funds for building two full-scale competitors for the LCS production contract. Once again, this was announced mid-year and, predictably, Congress failed to go to the trouble of special review hearings.

After receiving the bids a year later in November 2010, the Navy, with approval from Pentagon acquisition officials, changed strategies for gaining congressional support and asked for authority and funds to switch from a competition for a single winning LCS design to a dual-block buy strategy of 10 ships from each contractor and then down-select.

As before, the Navy’s request came out of the usual budget cycle.

The guarantee of a long block buy to both competitors significantly decreased the government’s leverage for obtaining competitive price bids for each successive LCS production lot, and totally wiped out the possibility of significant savings from two or more shipyards competing against a single LCS design. The Navy told Congress they needed to approve the new plan quickly or risk losing the deal.

For Rep. Gene Taylor (R-MS), then a Democrat and Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s Seapower subcommittee, approval of the dual-buy strategy was one of his top priorities, even though the year before he had insisted that “true competition” of a single design was essential to getting the program back on track.

In reversing his position, he claimed the dual-buy would help the Navy reach its then-target of 313 ships, and echoed the Navy’s assertion that its fixed-price contracting and the two shipyards’ low-price bids would protect the taxpayer. Protection of the taxpayer did not extend so far as publishing the actual bid amounts, which were kept secret.

Campaign contributions may have been a factor. According to Open Secrets data, Taylor’s top contributor was the sea transport industry, providing him $38,999 between 2009 and 2010.


CRS critiqued the dual-buy and in 2013 the GAO again questioned the Navy’s business case for continuing to buy LCS seaframes “given the unknowns related to its ability to address key warfighting and support concepts.”

When Congress requested additional detail, the GAO found “the Navy essentially suggested that since the two variants are built to the same requirements they perform the same way.”

To say that was ludicrous is an understatement. The Navy now has two separate home bases and two different training programs for Independence and Freedom class crews because the ship differences are so marked. The increase in operating costs is significant. As just one example, the need to dedicate six ships for training is almost certainly twice the number that would have been required had the Navy down-selected to only one ship design.

“The use of fixed-price contracts won’t necessarily prevent an underperforming shipyard from simply rolling its losses into its prices for follow-on ships,” POGO warned Congress at the time. And, in fact, the GAO later found that “the Navy paid for almost all of the shipbuilder-responsible deficiencies discovered after delivery using cost-reimbursable orders under basic ordering agreements.”

For LCS-3 and LCS-4 “the Navy spent $46 million and $77 million, respectively, under these post-delivery agreements to correct defects, complete ship construction, and assist with tests and trials, among other tasks.”

Overall, the GAO found shipbuilders earned between a one and 10 percent profit or fee under the follow-on arrangements for fixing problems the shipbuilders had caused.

Congress could and should have resisted the Navy’s artificial deadlines and taken more time to review the proposals before approving this strategy. Instead they largely accepted the Navy’s optimistic and unrealistic acquisition strategy. As POGO wrote at the time, the Navy was asking Congress to approve the purchase of 20 seaframes “without any real data indicating the program is likely to perform adequately in the future.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing, but ultimately ignored the unanimous advice of CRS, GAO, and the Congressional Budget Office to get more information before approving the strategy.

As problems increased, waivers from requirements began
As it pursued the “dual-buy” strategy the Navy continued to waive key acquisition requirements. At Milestone B, when a program is approved to proceed to Engineering and Manufacturing Development, a program must have approved requirements, an independent cost estimate, and a “program baseline” for cost, schedule, performance, and supportability.

But the Navy, with approval from Pentagon acquisition officials, waived a number of these mandates, including using an independent cost estimate and certifying that “appropriate trade-offs among cost, schedule and performance objectives” had been made.

Congress only learned about these waivers after the Senate had considered its authorizing bill. In the case of “appropriate tradeoffs,” the Navy initially didn’t even bother to write a justification for its waiver.

As each of the LCS’s mission modules ran into serious trouble, Congress became more vocal about the expensive and risky concurrency throughout the LCS program.

“The committee has significant concerns regarding the levels of concurrency associated with the mission modules and the expected delivery of the Littoral Combat Ship seaframes,” the House Armed Services Committee wrote in its report for the FY 2014 National Defense Authorization Act. “This dichotomy in capability development appears excessive.”

But the “significant concerns” did not extend to slowing production or fencing money, so the Committee requested GAO conduct another study.

A sailor heaves a mooring line aboard USS ‘Fort Worth’ in 2015. U.S. Navy photo
Do more with less, and do it badly
The most important factors impacting survivability are the skills and size of the crew. They are crucial for effectively employing weapons, preventing and repairing system failures while underway, controlling damage and fire when hit — and then continuing to “fight the ship.”

That makes the LCS’s manning and training concept just as crucial as the ship’s technical requirements. The LCS’s ill-considered choice of ultra-lean manning and interchangeable crews uncommitted to single ships, the Navy Times reported, “creates a kind of super-sailor, where crewmembers take on jobs out of their rate and above their paygrade.”

Long-time surface Navy officer and blogger CDR Salamander was a little more pointed, describing the manning as “one of the most infuriating” aspects of the program, as it required sailors to take on others’ duties.

“When you are busy doing other people’s job, you can’t bloody well do yours,” he wrote in a recent post. “[W]hen everyone is a jack of all trades — then you have a ship where no one is a master of anything.”

The whole post is a powerful, comprehensive indictment of the poorly thought-through basis for the LCS’s manning concept, written by an experienced shipboard leader, and is well worth reading in full.

In its 2014 review, the GAO identified a number of risks to the safe and combat-effective operation of the LCS, including that the crew experienced an excessive workload “and fell short of the Navy’s sleep standards despite adding personnel for the deployment.”

The inadequate testing of LCSs and their modules before deployment — a direct result of concurrency — meant the crew uncovered problems while deployed that would have been better addressed in before-deployment testing.

The first trip of the USS Freedom to Singapore, even with a hastily expanded crew of 50 instead of 40, revealed the crew to be largely dependent on contractors for “core crew functions” the Navy manning plan had assumed the crew could perform themselves.

The first trip also revealed that the crew needed considerably more training, that the LCS’s unanticipated maintenance and parts burden limited the ship’s range, and that the crew was so overworked they averaged only six hours of sleep per day.

To solve these easily foreseeable problems identified by the GAO and additional deployments, the Navy was forced to:

1. Increase the core crew size for all LCSs to 50. In September they increased the crew sizes again to 70 — a 75 percent increase over the 40 originally planned and one that requires expensive revamping of the crew spaces.
2. Increase the number of crews per LCS from 1.5 to two (another 33 percent increase in manning), and abandoning the original LCS manning concept of interchangeable crews that rotated from one ship to another instead of being specifically trained and responsible for a single ship.
3. Triple the number of shore support personnel from 271 in 2011 to 862.
4. Pull six LCSs from routine deployments and dedicate them to crew training.
5. Pull four LCSs from deployment and dedicate them to testing.
6. Abandon the LCS’s original justification as an ultra-flexible multi-mission ship capable of swapping mission modules in a few hours or days. Each LCS is now permanently assigned one mission module and a specialized mission crew of 19 or more.

Defense News reported that after the most recent of last year’s six serious engineering casualties on four of the six in-service LCSs, the commander of U.S. naval surface forces “ordered an engineering stand down on all LCS crews and directed all LCS sailors to be retrained in engineering procedures.”

In a letter to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, the leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee suggested the Navy should also reduce the days the ships deploy overseas to reduce crew burnout and risks of major reliability failures.

Tripling the shore personnel, more than doubling the crew members per ship, reducing days of deployment, and withdrawing four ships for testing and six for training from the routinely deployable force mean that the LCS program cost per deployed day has increased enormously.

With only 18 out of the first 28 LCSs deployable — and with only nine out of those 18 deployed at any one time — the LCS fleet is putting on station less than a third of the ships bought and paid for.

The Littoral Combat Ship USS ‘Coronado,’ foreground, with a multi-national flotilla in July 2016. U.S. Navy photo
The Navy’s counter-gambit
A mounting storm of criticism — focused on lack of survivability and lack of offensive punch — from Congress, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the media, and even from within the surface Navy itself impelled then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to direct the Navy to study better-protected, more heavily armed LCS alternatives in February 2014.

An independent study might have produced real alternatives: the Spanish F-100 guided missile/ASW frigate, for instance — 5,800 tons with far better sea-keeping and far more lethal surface and anti-air weaponry than the LCS — currently being sold on the international market for $600 million apiece. That’s 20 percent cheaper than a non-upgraded LCS and 50 percent less than the latest cost estimates for the “frigate” LCS.

Instead Hagel effectively asked the Navy to grade its own work.

Unsurprisingly, after reviewing all the non-LCS alternatives, the Navy study concluded in July 2014 that none were as cost-effective as an LCS, minimally modified to be slightly more lethal and survivable and reclassified as a “frigate.”

The new LCS’s actual configuration changes include:

1. Moving two existing components of the troubled ASW mission module into permanent installation on “frigate” LCSs, specifically the multi-function towed array sonar and the torpedo defense/countermeasures system.
2. Permanent installation of the two 30-millimeter guns and the short-range modified Hellfire missile of the existing surface warfare module on both variants, along with making some needed improvements and fixes to the current search radar of the module. Given the ongoing failures in testing, fixes and changes in these components will more than likely be necessary.
3. Integration of a yet-to-be-determined longer range anti-ship missile into all new “frigate” LCSs — possibly the Norwegian NM Naval Strike Missile or the Navy’s Harpoon Missile, which failed to hit its target in a test this July.
4. Replacing the current three-nautical-mile range self-defense missile with the five-nautical-mile SeaRam.
5. Shrinking the new LCS’s mission to just ASW and surface warfare, simply dropping the mine warfare mission, presumably because the MCM module was the most troubled of all and the new LCS has even more severe weight problems than the original LCS. It was unsurprising the LCS’s minesweeping mission was first on the Navy’s chopping block since mine warfare is traditionally a low-priority Navy mission.

The subsequent GAO review of the Navy study found the Navy had heavily biased the study to favor the LCS-based alternatives. This bias included making “assumptions related to crew size that resulted in the non-LCS options appearing more costly by comparison.”

The Navy had assigned to the alternatives a worst-case scenario of crew sizes that was “considerably higher than even the upper range identified by the manning estimates.”

For the LCS, the Navy picked an overly optimistic scenario, with a lower crew estimate for the modified LCS options, making any non-LCS design appear considerably more costly.

Even more troubling, the GAO found the minor configuration changes incorporated into the LCS “frigate” option would not provide much greater capability than what was offered by the earlier LCS — but they would add at least $190 million in procurement costs to the $720 million cost of each LCS — not including the R&D cost incurred in modifying or integrating the new or upgraded weapons systems.

More disturbing yet are the conclusions of DOT&E. “The vulnerability reduction features proposed for the LCS-frigate, while desired and beneficial, provide no significant improvement in the ship’s survivability.”

“Notwithstanding potential reductions to its susceptibility due to improved electronic warfare system and torpedo defense, minor modifications to LCS (e.g., magazine armoring) will not yield a ship that is significantly more survivable than LCS when engaged with threat missiles, torpedoes, and mines expected in major combat operations.”
DOT&E director Michael Gilmore told the House Armed Services Committee’s Oversight and Investigations subcommittee: “t will be less survivable than the Navy’s previous frigate class.”

So far Congress has responded to these major cost concerns and effectiveness deficiencies by including money for an additional LCS beyond what the Pentagon requested, and a series of hearings.

The ‘Independence’-class Littoral Combat Ship USS ‘Coronado’ in July 2016. U.S. Navy photo
When is a frigate not a frigate?
In the widespread urge to cure the LCS’s inadequate self-defense capability and lethality shortfalls by turning it into a frigate, few seem to have stopped to consider the actual missions a frigate needs to accomplish.

Traditionally, frigates serve as anti-submarine escorts for convoys, freeing up more expensive and scarcer destroyers for higher-priority missions. They also accompany task forces, either adding to the screening and scouting or air defense provided by destroyers, or substituting for them in lower-threat environments.

By far the most common frigate missions in our conflicts of the last 65 years have been supporting small task force landings or insertions, interdicting enemy freighters, tankers and smaller logistics craft, or countering pirates.

To escort convoys or task forces, a frigate needs to match their cruising speeds and have enough endurance for the transit, particularly in rough seas. For open-ocean escort duties, the original LCS has neither the speed nor the seakeeping ability to do the job.

Both merchant ship convoys and task forces make at least 18 to 20 knots.

To maintain the endurance to cross oceans, the Independence LCS is limited to around 14 knots while the Freedom class has to slow down to nine or 10 knots. In moderately rough seas at or above Sea State 4, the LCS is even more limited due to the slamming of the Freedom — an inevitable consequence of its semi-planing hull — and the need to avoid rear quartering seas for the Independence, because of the trimaran’s propensity to capsize when heavy rear seas lift the stern of one hull.

The frigate version of the LCS will be even more restricted in speed and endurance in moderately rough water because it will be heavier, slower, less stable and less seaworthy. All of this applies equally to coastal zone operations. Shallow coastal waters are not necessarily smooth seas. In fact, the shallower the ocean bottom, the steeper and choppier the wave action.

Put more bluntly, no matter what armament is added to the LCS, it can’t accomplish the traditional missions of a real frigate.

Secretary of Defense chops the buy, the Navy goes further
In December 2015 Secretary Carter reacted to the Navy’s insistence on a thinly disguised continuation of the current LCS program by cutting the LCS/frigate buy from 52 ships to 40–32 LCSs plus eight of the new “frigates” — and mandating a down-select to a single ship design for the new version in FY 2019.

Since that announcement the Navy has indicated it wants to down-select one year earlier and cut the LCS buy even further to 28 in order to increase the “frigate” buy to 12 — which may be a telling sign of their lack of confidence in the original LCS.

The ‘Independence’-class Littoral Combat Ship USS ‘Fort Worth’ in the Sulu Sea. U.S. Navy photo
More concurrency, less oversight and far less accountability
The Navy’s plan for developing and buying the new “frigate” version of the LCS seems simple. Sign a new block buy contract this year for 12 standard LCSs, and issue a request for proposal in late 2017 — not for a new contract for a redesigned “frigate” LCS but instead a proposal for a vaguely specified set of engineering changes to the old LCS contract.

This would be followed by picking a winning shipyard in 2018 to do the detail design of the engineering and production-line changes needed to switch from producing original LCSs to “frigate” LCSs.

If implemented, this plan could set a new benchmark for what Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Frank Kendall has termed “acquisition malpractice.”

First and foremost, signing a block buy for 12 ships this year commits taxpayers and the next administration to 12 ships and $14 billion at least three years before operational testers have determined whether the original LCS seaframes are fit for combat.

Since the Navy intends to convert these 12 into a new and unspecified design — with no plan for new developmental or operational testing in place — it will be at least six to eight years before developmental testing, fixing of problems, and then operational testing can be completed for the “frigate” LCS in order to determine its suitability for combat.

As the GAO has observed, this approach “does not form a sound basis for a future frigate procurement; a robust frigate competition once designs are firm would be a more informed approach.” Committing to this procurement before designs are stable would commit taxpayers to 12 more $1.2 billion “frigate” LCSs “even though these ships have not demonstrated lethality and survivability capabilities.”

The rush to issue an RFP doesn’t leave the Navy enough time to do the in-house feasibility and tradeoff design studies required to be precise and specific about the desired capabilities.

Moreover, issuing an RFP less than a year after initial program approval means there will only be general guidance on the desired extra capabilities of the new LCS. The same is true of costs — without careful in-house studies of the cost consequences of alternative designs and capabilities, the Navy will have little or no basis for judging the cost realism of the proposals they will be receiving.

An RFP with only general guidance means the Navy is almost entirely dependent on the contractors to make decisions about crucial capability tradeoffs and final determination of such things as the ship’s required range, speed, stability, seakeeping, ammunition storage, rate of fire, survivability, reliability and maintainability. Outsourcing to contractors these critical determinations about combat effectiveness would be repeating the mistakes that have resulted in the devastating problems the LCS is suffering today.

The Navy also lacks any plans to revise key mission and performance effectiveness thresholds in order to have contractually binding requirements for new “frigate” contracting. As a consequence, no shipyard can be held accountable if the revised LCSs fail to deliver adequate capabilities.

Cost oversight and accountability will also be further hindered because the Navy appears to have no plans to track costs for the acquisition of new “frigate” LCSs transparently and separately from the cost of the old LCS program and its ongoing and costly fixes.

The Pentagon’s chief tester has warned of exactly these problems. In a recent memo, he states that the Navy’s contracting approach — relying on contractor-generated engineering design specifications rather than on key program requirements — “permits the combat capabilities desired in these follow-on ships to be traded away as needed to remain within the cost constraints.”

In the worst-case-scenario, the new ships could “be delivered with less mission capability than desired and with limited improvements to the survivability of the ship in a combat environment.” The ship could meet all of its key requirements “without having any mission capability.”

The $14 billion program cost incurred by the modified “frigate” buy is so large that it needs to be monitored as a separate major defense acquisition program, not a routine add-on to the existing LCS program. But, the GAO warns, “there are no current plans for official DOD milestone reviews of the frigate program … In addition the Navy does not plan to develop key frigate program documents or to reflect frigate cost, schedule, and performance information in the annual” select acquisition reports.

The history to date of DoD and congressional oversight has been weak, to say the least. If this “frigate” acquisition approach is approved, the Navy will have further weakened accountability and oversight while significantly increasing concurrency and risk.

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA), at left, and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), at right. The House Rules Committee blocked their amendment to strip money from the LCS. Skyline View and Gage Skidmore photos via Flickr
Program momentum overcomes common sense in Congress
Despite the overwhelming failure and dangerous precedents of the LCS program, Congress is continuing to shovel money into this program. A bipartisan amendment by Reps. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Jackie Speier (D-CA) to strip the money out was blocked from consideration by the House Rules Committee.

In an unusual move for Congress’s auditors, the GAO’s most recent LCS report recommended that Congress zero out funding for 2017 to allow time to devise a responsible, well thought-out approach to managing the new LCS.

Usually Congress resists stopping programs because they are worried about the “industrial base” — code for jobs in their districts. But in this case, the GAO found, those concerns “are less compelling, as both yards will be building LCS currently under contract through fiscal year 2021.”

“Haven’t we done enough for the industrial base?” the GAO asked the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. “Isn’t it time for the industrial base to come through for us? Can we get one ship delivered on time? Can we get one ship delivered without cost growth? Can we get one ship delivered without serious reliability and quality problems?”

Recommendations
The presidential election has brought a renewed call from the public to drain the swamp of Washington’s self-dealing habits. Congress has consistently failed to do so, egregiously so in the case of the LCS program where they have rewarded failure by adding money.

If Congress agrees with the Navy that 28 LCSs is enough, they should end production and fully fund an operational test that is as realistic as possible in order to uncover and fix the ship’s many remaining deficiencies.

Rejecting the Navy’s risky block buy approach will be a true test of the new administration’s and the new Secretary of Defense’s commitment to the promised swamp-draining. The block buy approach is simply the foot in the door for committing the taxpayer to spending $14 billion more on LCSs thinly disguised as “frigates” — frigates that will be incapable of executing traditional frigate missions.

Approving this acquisition malpractice when the industrial base already has plenty of work rewards concurrency, technical failures and cost overruns while making contractor oversight and accountability nearly impossible.





If supporting industrial base employment and capability in the years past 2021 remains a high priority, the new Secretary and Congress need to apply out year LCS budget savings to purchasing effective minesweepers that are far more urgently needed than slow, overpriced, under-armed, vulnerable LCS “frigates” without any mine warfare abilities at all.

We should be able to buy four minesweepers for every LCS we cut — or 6.5 for every LCS “frigate” we cancel — and thus more than quadruple the pace to reach a 300-ship Navy.

Focusing our resources on thoroughly testing and fixing the LCSs we’ve already bought and turning around the Navy’s 75-year neglect of mine sweeping will send a clear and welcome signal to the sailors and grunts who have to fight our wars — we care more about their lives than about funding crony contracts and greasing revolving doors.

Mandy Smithberger is the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight.

Pierre M. Sprey is a co-designer of the F-16 fighter jet, was technical director of the U.S. Air Force’s A-10 concept design team, served as weapons analyst for the Office of the Secretary of Defense for 15 years and has been an active member of the military reform underground for the last 35 years.

This article originally appeared at the website of the Project On Government Oversight.

 

[tun_dr_m]

http://gcaptain.com/u-s-navy-lcs-fit-service-incredible-failure/

U.S. Navy LCS – Fit For Service Or ‘Incredible Failure’?

April 9, 2014 by Bloomberg

190shares

• 190
• 
  
• 0

SAN DIEGO (March 1, 2013) The littoral combat ship USS Freedom (LCS 1) departs San Diego Bay for a deployment to the Asia-Pacific region. Freedom will demonstrate her operational capabilities and allow the Navy to evaluate crew rotation and maintenance plans. LCS platforms are designed to employ modular mission packages that can be configured for three separate purposes: surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare or mine countermeasures. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class John Grandin/Released)
by Tony Capaccio (Bloomberg) U.S. Navy officers in the Pacific fleet say the service’s Littoral Combat Ship may lack the speed, range and electronic warfare capabilities needed to operate in Asian waters, according to a congressional audit.

“Several 7th Fleet officials told us they thought the LCS in general might be better suited to operations” in the smaller Persian Gulf, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a 56-page report, labeled “For Official Use Only,” obtained by Bloomberg News.

The Navy should consider buying fewer of the ships if its limitations prevent effective use in the Pacific, according to the report by GAO, Congress’s watchdog agency. The report follows others that have questioned the cost, mission and survivability in combat of the ship that’s designed to operate in shallow coastal waters.


Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said in a Feb. 24 memo that “considerable reservations” led him to bar negotiations for any more than 32 of the vessels, 20 fewer than called for in the Navy’s $34 billion program. The Littoral Combat ship is made in two versions by Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT) and Austal Ltd. (ASB)

Hagel’s doubts may be bolstered by the new audit, with conclusions that were summarized in its title: “Littoral Combat Ship: Additional Testing and Improved Weight Management Needed Prior to Further Investments.”

The first two vessels — one from each maker — are overweight, resulting in “not meeting performance requirements” for endurance or sprinting over 40 knots (74 kilometers per hour), the GAO said.

“This situation has led the Navy to accept lower than minimum requirements” on the two ships, the report said.

‘Incredible’ Failure
The report is likely to be discussed today at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s seapower panel headed by SenatorJack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat. Senator John McCain ofArizona, the panel’s top Republican, recounted the ship’s troubles in a speech yesterday on the Senate floor.

“Failure this comprehensive is incredible, even for our broken defense procurement system,” McCain said of a program that received congressional approval to spend more than $12 billion since 2004.

Lieutenant Caroline Hutcheson, a Navy spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement that the service was aware the report was coming out and expects “it to cover areas already being collaboratively addressed by the Navy and industry.”

“We continuously refine and test the LCS program to learn the full extent of possibilities for these first-of-a-kind ships,” she said. “We’ve incorporated engineering modifications which improve performance and continue to look at the concept of employment, as exemplified” by a recent war game.

Singapore Deployment
The GAO reviewed the 10-month deployment to Singapore last year of the USS Freedom, a ship built by Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed.

Pentagon officials highlighted the Freedom’s visit as a step in the U.S. refocusing on Asia, demonstrating the Defense Department’s commitment to send its best equipment there to reassure allies.

While the deployment provided “important real-world lessons” that “are being used to refine plans for subsequent deployments,” the GAO said, “significant unknowns persist regarding LCS concepts and use.”

The Freedom’s stay was marred by 55 days lost due to mechanical problems with gears, hydraulics, generators and water jets, “which is a significant portion of its” deployment, the agency said.

Contractors Criticized
On the ships’ burgeoning weight, the GAO criticized the performance of Lockheed and of Henderson, Australia-based Austal. It said the companies repeatedly submitted inaccurate or incomplete reports, and those deficiencies “have hindered Navy oversight of LCS weight challenges.”

The agency suggested that the Pentagon examine withholding funds from the companies to ensure more accurate reporting.

Joe North, Lockheed’s vice president for ships, said in an e-mailed statement that its version met “the U.S. Navy’s weight requirements at delivery, and the company has submitted all weight reports” in “accordance with contractual requirements.”

Michelle Bowden, a spokeswoman for Austal USA, said in an e-mail that the company had no comment on the agency’s report.

Hagel has ordered a Navy report by the end of this year on potential ship options that would be “generally consistent with the capabilities of a frigate,” including a modified version of the Littoral Combat Ship or a new vessel.

(c) 2014 Bloomberg.

 

[tun_dr_m]

http://www.businessinsider.com/us-navy-littoral-combat-ship-problems-2018-4/?IR=T



The US Navy basically admitted that the Littoral Combat Ship looks like a massive failure

• Jared Keller, Task & Purpose
• Apr. 14, 2018, 11:26 AM
• 53,092

• facebook
• linkedin
• twitter
• email
• print

General Dynamics

• The Navy “may not” deploy any of the dozen small surface combatants this year despite officials’ previous plans to deploy several to join the 7th and 5th Fleets in Singapore and Bahrain respectively, the US Naval Institute reported.
• The report suggests that the Navy has run out of patience for the disappointment mill that is the Littoral Combat Ship, once the backbone of the future fleet that could have 355 ships.
• A recent review of the Navy’s LCS fleet by the Pentagon’s operational testing and evaluation arm also revealed significant structural problems with the program’s Freedom and Independence variants.

After 16 years and billions of dollars, the Navy may have finally acknowledged that its Littoral Combat Ship program looks like a miserable failure.

The service “may not” deploy any of the dozen small surface combatants this year despite officials’ previous plans to deploy several to join the 7th and 5th Fleets in Singapore and Bahrain respectively, the U.S. Naval Institute first reported on April 11.

Given the embarrassing cost overruns and frequent mechanical failures that have plagued the program, the exquisitely-detailed report suggests that the Navy has run out of patience for the disappointment mill that is the Littoral Combat Ship, once the backbone of the future fleet that could have 355 ships.

General Dynamics

Here’s the money graf from USNI News explaining the strange lack of upcoming deployments:

Three of the Navy’s four original LCSs are in maintenance now, and four of the eight block-buy ships that have commissioned already are undergoing their initial Post Shakedown Availabilities (PSA), Cmdr. John Perkins, spokesman for Naval Surface Force Pacific, told USNI News.

In addition to the deploying ships themselves being in maintenance, so too are the training ships that will be required to help train and certify the crews. The Navy upended its LCS training and manning plans in 2016 when then-SURFOR commander Vice Adm. Tom Rowden announced a change to a blue-gold crewing model and a ship reorganization … not only does the deployable ship have to be in the water and ready for operations, but so does the training ship.

It’s clearly not just a matter of organizational chance that’s complicated the deployment of the LCS. Not only did the Navy reduce the number of LCSs ordered from Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics back in 2014 out of concerns over the vessel’s performance, but a review of the Navy’s LCS fleet by the Pentagon’s operational testing and evaluation arm, conducted between 2016 and 2017 and published in January 2018, revealed significant structural problems with the program’s Freedom and Independence variants.

This problems include: a concerning deficit in combat system elements (namely radar systems), limited anti-ship missile self-defense capabilities, and a lack of redundancies for vital systems necessary to reduce the chance that “a single hit will result in loss of propulsion, combat capability, and the ability to control damage and restore system operation.”

The Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords pierside at Naval Base San Diego preparing for final contract trials.US Navy/Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Abby Rader

“Neither LCS variant is survivable in high-intensity combat,” according to the DoD report. “Although the ships incorporate capabilities to reduce their susceptibility to attack, testing of analogous capabilities in other ship classes demonstrated that such capabilities have limited effectiveness in high-intensity combat.”

While the report recommends that the Navy continue to address the Pentagon’s recommendations, the service is already eyeing other hulls to take on the coastal combat operations initially envisioned for the LCS. In July 2017, the service posted official requirements for a brand new frigate under the Guided Missile Frigate Replacement Program or FFG(X) that will “employ unmanned systems to penetrate and dwell in contested environments” — basically, be the LCS but without the headache (and the additional costs of upgrading each LCS warship to an FFG(X) configuration.)

“In many ways, this FFG(X) design goes beyond what today’s LCS can do, particularly as it relates to surface warfare,” as USNI News put it at the time. “The RFI states the frigate should be able to conduct independent operations in a contested environment or contribute to a larger strike group, depending on combatant commander needs.”

Will 2018 be the last gasp for the troubled LCS program? Knowing the DOD, probably not — but the USNI News report on the lack of LCS deployments only solidifies one truth about the vessel: LCS, as The War Zone put it, almost definitely stands for ‘Little Crappy Ship.’

Read the original article on Task & Purpose. Copyright 2018. Follow Task & Purpose on Twitter.

 

[frenchbriefs]

Can still sell to sinkieland for 1 billion as ambulance carrier.

 

[tun_dr_m]

Now the JOKE ON PAP RSN SAF JIAK SAI wasted our Tax Dollars! Blindly Swallow Ang Moh's Crap!

 

[tun_dr_m]

All will be sunk by PLA missiles! No need torpedoes because these ships are to light and tiny.

 

[winnipegjets]

All will be sunk by PLA missiles! No need torpedoes because these ships are to light and tiny.

We don't know for a fact. Let's have the battle to determine the truth.

 

[tun_dr_m]

We don't know for a fact. Let's have the battle to determine the truth.

Reading the wiki will give the answer already. LCS are too WEAK in FIRE POWER. Only got speed and a silly so call Stealth. & Speed.

It's missiles are very light very short range. Lack killing power to kill any warships, can only whack speed boats or light crafts. Essentially, Hellfire missiles are just anti-tank missiles carried and fire by single man or 2 man team. After using as infantry and ground war anti-tank, it got upgraded (without adding much fire power) to Apache Helicopter anti-tank. Now used also as a cheapo ultra-light navy missile. It's warhead only @20lb or 9kg. Warships are from 1000 tons to 100K tons. 9kg warheads can do only tiny insignificant scratches to them!

Hellfire missile's max range = 8km only. PLA missiles can kill LCS from 250km away! YJ-18 range 500km!

So called stealth only means they appears to radar as a much smaller fishing boat. But, their position course behavior and speed immediately gave away that they are LCS! So there is no point of this stealth at all.
Missiles can still be fired at them to kill them, they hull are very light for purpose of speed. They can be killed too easily by a single smallest anti-ship missile. As long as these missiles can track and kill fishing boats they can kill LCS.

Their speed are not faster than any missiles - more than certainly.

LCS is not steady nor strong enough to go oceans, that's why called Littoral.

Meaning they can not even be used to counter Somalia pirates who go much further out than Littoral zone. Somalian pirates use mothership to tow speedboats out to blue water zones to attack commercial ships.

 

[tanwahtiu]

Junk gunboats.

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/th...-admit-the-littoral-combat-ship-failure-21513

Did the U.S. Navy Just Admit The Littoral Combat Ship Is a Failure?

Sarah Sicard

July 12, 2017

TweetShareShare

After years of cost overruns, underwhelming demonstrations, and debilitating mechanical failures, the Navy appears to be looking to supplement the troubled littoral combat ship program with a new ship to serve the same purpose, but better.

The Navy posted formal requirements for a new frigate design on July 11 under the auspices of the Guided Missile Frigate Replacement Program or FFG(X). While the request doesn’t explicitly identify the FFG(X) as a successor to the LCS, meant to replace the its Cold-War era cruisers as small surface combatants, USNI News passive aggressively described the FFG(X) project as a ship “much like the Littoral Combat Ship that currently fills the small surface combatant role.”

More importantly, the RFI stated that proposals should include plans for a production run of 20 ships, with the first keel laid in fiscal year 2020. That 20-ship fleet may fill the gap created when the Pentagon in 2014 announced plans to cut the number of LCSs ordered from Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics as part of a 30-year contract down from 55 to 32 in 2014.

From the looks of it, this RFI suggests that the Navy is finally ready to bail on the LCS for, well, a way better version of the LCS.

“In many ways, this FFG(X) design goes beyond what today’s LCS can do, particularly as it relates to surface warfare,”as USNI News put it. “The RFI states the frigate should be able to conduct independent operations in a contested environment or contribute to a larger strike group, depending on combatant commander needs.”

This new version will also utilize unmanned systems to expand “sensor and weapon influence to provide increased information to the overall fleet tactical picture while challenging adversary ISR&T (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting) efforts,” according the RFI.

But why launch a new program instead of just upgrading the existing LCS fleet? According to The Drive, the “up-gunned” Small Surface Combatant version of the LCS costs an additional $70 million and still has one major flaw: It lacks air defense capability. The FFG(X), on the other hand, “will include integrated operations with area air defense capable destroyers and cruisers as well as independent operations while connected and contributing to the fleet tactical grid.”

In 2010, the Navy intended to begin a 30-year procurement cycle wherein it would purchase 55 LCSs for $40 billion, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Sean Stackley estimated the average cost to buy an LCS would be between $430 and $440 million, but in fiscal year 2011, the unit cost was $1.8 billion, according to a budget analysis.

And that’s a lot of cash for a vessel plagued by highly embarrassing malfunctions. The Motley Fool reported that the USS Milwaukee had a clutch failure in December 2015; a month later, the USS Fort Worth suffered $23 million worth of damage to its engines; the USS Freedom had a seawater leak in July 2016 that required an engine replacement; and the USS Coronado experienced an “engineering casualty” during its maiden voyage in August 2016. We think of the LCS as the F-35 joint strike fighter of the ocean, albeit significantly less expensive.

So far 11 of the ships are in service — the most recent being the USS Gabrielle Giffords, which was commissioned on June 10, 2017.

Task & Purpose has reached out to Fleet Forces Command for comment, and will update this story as more information becomes available.

This first appeared in Task & Purpose here.

More Articles from Task & Purpose:

• Here’s What Marines Have To Say About The New PFT Standards
  
  
• Army Announces Plans To Add Thousands Of Soldiers To Its Ranks
  
  
• Mattis To Send Nearly 4,000 US Troops To Afghanistan ‘As Early As Next Week’

TweetShareShare

Topics:


https://thediplomat.com/2015/12/us-navys-fleet-of-littoral-combat-ships-will-be-cut-to-40-vessels/

US Navy’s Fleet of Littoral Combat Ships Will Be Cut to 40 Vessels
U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter wants to save money to purchase more fighter jets and missiles for the Navy.

By Franz-Stefan Gady
December 22, 2015


In a December 14 memo sent to the U.S. secretary of the navy, Ray Mabus, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter ordered the U.S. Navy to reduce the number of Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) to be built from 52 to 40.

The memo, according to Defense News, calls for a reduction of “the planned LCS/FF [frigates] procurement from 52 to 40, creating a 1-1-1-1-2 profile, for eight fewer ships in the FYDP, and then downselect to one variant by FY 2019.”

In addition, Carter also ordered the U.S. Navy to only buy one rather than three Littoral Combat Ships per annum over the next four years and to pick only one supplier.

Enjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Just $5 a month.
According to Carter, the money saved from the reduction in the number of LCSs will be reallocated to purchase additional F/A-18 and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft, SM-6 surface-to-air missiles, and Virginia Payload Modules (VPM) for Virginia-class submarines.

Block III Virginia-class submarines are currently being built with the new VPM – larger tubes that increase the ship’s missile-firing payload possibilities (See: “US Subs Getting Fire Power Boost”).

Future versions of the LCS will also be more heavily armed. According to Defense News:

Beginning with LCS 33, the Navy is planning to build a more heavily-armed LCS variant with the FF designation — the result of a 2014 directive from then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to produce a more powerful ship.

The “1-1-1-1-2” profile would provide for one ship each year in 2017-2020 and two ships in 2021, the end of the current future years defense plan (FYDP). That revised build plan would cover ship orders up to LCS 33.

The plan to reduce the number of LCS has met resistance among some U.S. lawmakers. Republican Senator Jeff Sessions issued a statement saying that the reduction “would be a monumental error and must not stand. It would overrule the long-settled priorities of the Navy.”

He continues:

The Navy has, for many years, stated its goal of building up its capacity to 308 ships. We are currently at only 282 ships. Cutting LCS procurement to just 40 ships will make the Navy’s 308 ship goal impossible to achieve, as the only alternatives to LCS are far more expensive to produce and maintain. (…) I intend to fight against this proposed reduction, and I will continue to fight for LCS.

The 3,000-plus tons LCS is specifically tailored for shallow coastal waters and can customize around 40 percent of its volume to adapt to different mission sets (minesweeping, anti-submarine warfare, surface combat, etc.).

It has been a controversial naval acquisition due to cost inflation and numerous design and construction issues.

As I reported previously, the vessel’s prime advantage was supposed to be its speed – the LCS was meant to cruise 50 percent faster (45-knot-plus) than most other war ships.

Yet, the U.S. Navy has sacrificed speed in future LCS versions and rebranded it as a frigate due to recent advances in effective counter-swarm defenses.


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...urges-cut-to-24-vessels-idUSBREA3900T20140410

April 10, 2014 / 8:16 AM / 4 years ago
McCain blasts Navy's LCS ship plan; urges cut to 24 vessels
Andrea Shalal
4 Min Read

• 
  
  

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senator John McCain on Wednesday blasted the U.S. Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program as a “shameful” and dangerous waste of taxpayer money, and he urged the Pentagon to cut its planned purchases back by another eight ships to 24 ships.

The United States littoral combat ship USS Coronado is shown during a media tour in Coronado, California April 3, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Blake
McCain, a senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Navy’s poor planning had led to a new class of ships that could not survive in combat, cost far more than expected, provided less capability than earlier warships and had not demonstrated their utility after 13 years of development.

Lockheed Martin Corp and Australia’s Austal are building two different versions of the ship, which was designed to be rapidly reconfigured to fight other surface ships, hunt for and destroy enemy mines and battle submarines.

A longtime critic of the program, McCain used a speech on the Senate floor to back Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s decision to limit LCS procurement to 32 ships instead of the 52 ships initially planned and called for a further cut to 24 ships.

“Production should not go forward until the Navy and (Department of Defense) confirm that LCS provides greater capabilities than the legacy ships it is intended to replace,” McCain said.

He said the Navy also needed to demonstrate that the three interchangeable weapons systems being designed for the ship provided military commanders the combat capability they needed.

McCain’s speech came a day before Navy acquisition chief Sean Stackley and other top Navy officials are due to testify about the fiscal 2015 shipbuilding budget at a hearing of the Senate Armed Service Committee’s seapower subcommittee.

Hagel announced plans on February 24 to stop building the current class of LCS ships after 32 vessels and focus on ships with more firepower and protection, saying he had “considerable reservations” about building all 52 LCS ships as planned.

Lockheed and Austal are each under contract to build 10 ships, which will bring the total number of LCS ships to 24.

The Navy has set up a task force to study alternatives for a new small warship and provide recommendations by July 31, in time to inform the Pentagon’s fiscal 2016 budget deliberations.

Initially designed to be a small, fast and affordable ship to augment larger ships in the fleet, the LCS program has seen numerous cost increases and schedule delays over the past 13 years, although Navy officials say production costs are now down sharply and the fielded ships are performing well.

Vice Admiral Thomas Copeman, commander of Naval Surface Forces, told the annual Navy League conference on Wednesday he was convinced that the Navy would wind up building 20 more small warships because they offered a relatively inexpensive way to essentially double the Navy’s presence around the world.

“We need to have a certain number of ships out there,” Copeman told reporters at the conference, before McCain’s speech. “You do have to make some trades. I’d love to have every ship be unsinkable and shoot down satellites and defeat every weapon and enemy there is, but that’s unaffordable.”

Copeman said the new LCS warships were much larger than World War Two destroyers and used far less manpower. He added that no warship could survive under all circumstances.

Copeman also said the LCS ships were also subject to far greater scrutiny than any other new ship class, and many U.S. lawmakers based their criticism on outdated information.

McCain said the congressional Government Accountability Office would soon release another report that criticized the LCS program and called for more rigorous testing and evaluation.

Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Cynthia Osterman

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

 

[Leongsam]

Why do I keep seeing "clittorial".

 

[swine_flu_H1H1]

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/th...navys-littoral-combat-ships-punch-below-23042

Here Is Why the U.S. Navy's Littoral Combat Ships Punch below Their Weight

Sebastien Roblin
November 5, 2017

TweetShareShare

The U.S. Navy’s newest class of small surface combatants, the Littoral Combat Ships, come with a few minor flaws. They don’t have the firepower to hit anything more than a few miles away. They’re unlikely to survive being hit by anything in return. They cost more than twice as much as promised, and require 75 percent more crew to operate than planned for. The modular-mission capabilities that were a key selling point had to be abandoned. And they’re breaking down constantly.

A review of the ships by the Department of Operational Testing in 2011 concluded: “LCS is not expected to be survivable in a hostile combat environment.”

In fact, if you look at the history of when the LCS was conceived, you can grasp why they were built with such modest combat capabilities. Unfortunately, in today’s global environment, the LCS’s shortcomings are glaring.

Recommended: Could the Battleship Make a Comeback?

Bodyguards and Handymen of the Fleet

The Littoral Combat Ship is taking over the mission formerly performed by the Oliver Hazard Perry–class frigates retired from service in 2015. Frigates are smaller surface warships specialized in protecting more powerful destroyers, cruisers and aircraft carriers from incoming aircraft or marauding enemy submarines. Nothing beats having more ships to form an effective defensive perimeter and divert incoming attacks, even if those vessels are individually less powerful. Frigate-size vessels contribute to a new doctrine emphasizing “distributed lethality” by spreading firepower across the fleet to avoid putting too many eggs in too few baskets.

Recommended: Why Doesn't America Just Kill Kim Jong-un?

Frigates can also serve as useful handymen, operating closer to shore due to their shallower drafts, and undertaking missions that don’t warrant the massive firepower and expense of deploying, say, a billion-dollar Aegis cruiser bristling with 122 missile-launching cells.

Recommended: 8 Million Could Die in a War with North Korea

In the 1990s, a third Battle of the Atlantic with Soviet submarines and surface warships ceased to be a consideration, as China fielded only a modest green-water navy. Instead, the Navy deemed it worthwhile to develop cheaper, more numerous vessels to engage in humanitarian and peacekeeping missions, perform global “presence” missions for political purposes, nab Somali pirates in motorboats and, at worst, duel with the mini submarines and fast attack craft of so-called “rogue states” (i.e., North Korea and Iran) in their shallow coastal waters.

Therefore, the Navy decided to build a new generation of smaller, more expendable and maneuverable “street fighter” corvettes specializing in littoral operations to replace its frigates. These Littoral Combat Ships would employ automation to run with smaller crews and use interchangeable equipment modules to adapt the ships on the fly for surface combat, antisubmarine warfare, minesweeping (a long-neglected mission), or even amphibious-landing support for special operations.

One Mission, Two Ships

But the LCS was saddled with a decidedly unconventional development process. Offered two competing designs by Lockheed and Austal USA, the Navy paid to develop both—and then decided to produce each as well, to save on the swollen costs of the first ships of each class. This, even though operating two different types of ships to perform the same mission costs extra money due to the need to operate distinct training programs and maintain different spare parts.

The ships also swelled in size from the original leaner concept, bulking considerably more than corvettes without a commensurate increase in armament.

Of the two types, the larger Freedom class displaces 3,900 tons, is more conventional in appearance and is considered better for shallow-water ops; it has a tougher steel hull, possesses superior maneuverability, and can more easily deploy launches for special ops and boarding missions. By contrast, the Independence class has a space-agey trimaran (triple) hull made of lightweight but flammable aluminum; it boasts a huge flight deck and extra fuel storage, and is considered optimal for blue-water antisubmarine escort duty. Both can carry similar armament and mission modules.

One of the major virtues of the small ships was supposed to be their low cost, at a mere $220 million dollars each. But the design process led to final costs ballooning to around the $500 million mark instead.

Then the vessels were tested at sea—and began breaking down. Freedom-class ships suffered repeated engine failures. USS Milwaukee had to be towed back to port shortly after being commissioned. The Independence’s hull exhibited massive corrosion, necessitating design modifications for the entire class. The vessels have consistently failed reliability and performance thresholds. The contractor support needed to keep the ships running has inflated lifetime operating costs nearly to the level of a much larger Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, according to the GAO.


What of those neat interchangeable modules? Well, several billions of dollars later, only the surface-combat and antisubmarine modules are nearly ready. It was found that switching back and forth between them was technically impractical, so now the ships will be permanently dedicated to one of three missions.

And those Mine Counter Measure modules? Not happening until 2020s at the earliest, as the onboard helicopter proved incapable of safely towing the mine-detection module and the remote mine-hunting system was canceled. Even the antisubmarine module is overweight and has undergone little testing under realistic conditions.

It was also found that the core crew of forty sailors and officers were too few to safely operate the ship without overworking personnel and forcing them to perform tasks they’d barely trained for. The complement increased to seventy, and the ships had to be redesigned with extra bunks. Furthermore, a radical new crewing concept based on the interchangeable modules had to be abandoned when the module idea didn’t pan out. And because ship operation proved so demanding, six LCS—three of each type—will be dedicated solely to training new crews and another four to testing.

The LCSs do have their strengths—particularly the ability to operate in shallow waters due to their draft of only thirteen or fourteen feet, and surge to high speeds of forty-four to forty-seven knots (about fifty miles per hour), affording them superior mobility. Furthermore, their hulls have been designed for stealth, and should benefit from lower detection ranges. Therefore, some argue the LCS is still effective in at performing the mission they were designed for, and have merely received bad press due to teething issues typical to new weapons systems and a poorly managed procurement process.

Punching Below Their Weight Class

The problem, however, is that the world has changed. China’s surface fleet has grown dramatically in capability. The U.S. Navy now faces a proliferation of long-range antiship missiles—for example, rebels in Yemen launched several in 2016 at U.S. ships. These also include deadly high-speed weapons such as the Russian Kalibr and the Russo-Indian BrahMos. And both China and Russia field boats even smaller than the LCS with heavier firepower.

Consider the LCS’s surface-warfare armaments: a rapid-fire fifty-seven-millimeter autocannon for blasting small ships, two short-range thirty-millimeter cannons and Rolling Airframe Missiles for self-defense from missiles and aircraft, and Hellfire missiles that can strike targets five miles away with twenty-pound warheads. These might be excellent for destroying swarming motor boat attacks—a concern in the Persian Gulf—but none can strike targets beyond visual range, even though the frigates it replaced could fire Harpoon missiles with a range of sixty miles.

Let’s compare the LCS to a Buyan-M–class corvette, five of which are active in the Russian Navy. Each of the boats displaces considerably less at 949 tons, and come with a hundred-millimeter gun and Kalibr sea-skimming supersonic antiship missiles in four vertical-launch cells with a range of around three hundred miles, while packing 440-pound warheads.

And keep in in mind than an LCS, with its lightweight hull—possibly built with highly flammable aluminum—and smaller crew available for damage control, would be unlikely to remain combat effective after being struck by an antiship missile.

Now, defenders of the LCS point out advantages in the vessels’ soft systems, and their ability to deploy MQ-8C drones and advanced MH-60R or S Seahawk helicopter on search, sub-hunting and even attack missions. And tackling surface combatants with long-range missiles was never their intended mission profile.

They also contend that the LCS’s predecessor is seen through rose-tinted glasses: the Oliver Hazard Perry frigates had only a single launch rail for long-range missiles that it lost in 2003 anyway, employed more primitive SH-2 helicopters, and lacked the modern computers and sensors that we take for granted today. The frigates cost slightly more to build in inflation-adjusted dollars, were atypically heavily armed and required more than twice the crew complement.

Nonetheless, the Navy is apparently growing concerned about the LCS’s shortcomings. In December 2015, it downsized the order from fifty-two to forty ships. Then in 2016 the Pentagon announced the last twelve LCSs in the order would be upgraded to serve as “fast frigates” featuring extra armor, combined antisubmarine and surface-warfare modules, and tweaked armament. However, the up-gunned and up-armored ships will likely cost as much as more capable vessels, lose much of their speed advantage, and still currently lack over-horizon antiship missiles.

Proponents of the little ships are optimistic the platform is flexible enough to adapt currently missing capabilities in long-range missiles or mine-warfare capability. Harpoon missiles were tested on an LCS in July 2017, for example, and the Naval Strike Missile and Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles are also to be evaluated. Eventually, and at great cost, all the bits of tech may fall into place for the LCS to perform as expected. However, the Navy is apparently looking ahead to develop tougher and more heavily armed frigates in its FFG(X) program, to succeed boats conceived in a very different threat environment.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.

Image: U.S. Navy

 

[TKB]

meanwhile, China is testing out it's self-made aircraft carrier....

 

[winnipegjets]

Reading the wiki will give the answer already. LCS are too WEAK in FIRE POWER. Only got speed and a silly so call Stealth. & Speed.

It's missiles are very light very short range. Lack killing power to kill any warships, can only whack speed boats or light crafts. Essentially, Hellfire missiles are just anti-tank missiles carried and fire by single man or 2 man team. After using as infantry and ground war anti-tank, it got upgraded (without adding much fire power) to Apache Helicopter anti-tank. Now used also as a cheapo ultra-light navy missile. It's warhead only @20lb or 9kg. Warships are from 1000 tons to 100K tons. 9kg warheads can do only tiny insignificant scratches to them!

Hellfire missile's max range = 8km only. PLA missiles can kill LCS from 250km away! YJ-18 range 500km!

So called stealth only means they appears to radar as a much smaller fishing boat. But, their position course behavior and speed immediately gave away that they are LCS! So there is no point of this stealth at all.
Missiles can still be fired at them to kill them, they hull are very light for purpose of speed. They can be killed too easily by a single smallest anti-ship missile. As long as these missiles can track and kill fishing boats they can kill LCS.

Their speed are not faster than any missiles - more than certainly.

LCS is not steady nor strong enough to go oceans, that's why called Littoral.

Meaning they can not even be used to counter Somalia pirates who go much further out than Littoral zone. Somalian pirates use mothership to tow speedboats out to blue water zones to attack commercial ships.

RSN swears by it leh!