In the beginning, the U.S. Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship, or LCS, was an acquisition shipwreck.
The original idea was to replace aging U.S. Navy frigates with a cheaper, faster, stealthier, nimbler warship that could counter a range of threats and was capable of operating in both the open ocean and the littorals, the shallow waters close to shore.
The Navy first envisioned the LCS in 2002, and Congress approved the first contract in 2004.
Two variants were eventually built — Lockheed Martin’s Freedom-class, which has a traditional hull, and the Independence-class, which features an aluminum trimaran hull built by Austal USA and General Dynamics.
But this month the Navy announced that the first four ships of both designs would be retired as an ignominious testament to fact that despite decades of efforts at acquisition reform, the Pentagon is still capable of wasting billions by rushing weapons development without adequate testing.
The first four ships, Freedon, Independence, Fort Worth, and Coronado, had already been relegated to use as test platforms to debug the troubled program.
Now, the Navy says that making the ships, between 6 and 12 years old, combat-capable would be throwing good money after bad.
“They’re not configured like the other LCS, and they need significant upgrades, everything from combat to structural to you name it,” said Rear Adm. Randy Crites, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for budget, at a Pentagon briefing. “It’s expensive to upgrade them.”
The decadelong travails of the flawed LCS program earned the ship the disparaging nickname “Little Crappy Ship” and drew the increasing ire of the late Sen. John McCain when he was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“The Littoral Combat Ship … is an unfortunate, yet all too common example of defense acquisition gone awry,” McCain railed at a December 2016 Senate hearing on cost overruns and failed fixes, calling the LCS “an alleged warship” that “can’t survive a hostile combat environment and has yet to demonstrate its most important warfighting functions.”
What was supposed to make the LCS revolutionary was the idea that the ship would allow for interchangeable mission packages. That means mine countermeasures, surface warfare, and anti-submarine warfare.
But what seemed like a great idea at the time turned out to be a $2 billion mistake.
The concept proved unworkable with technical and logistical challenges that negated the advantage of modularity.
By the time the Navy deep-sixed the concept in 2016, the cost of each ship had more than doubled, from $220 million per ship to $478 million and growing.
Critics charged that the Pentagon was making the same mistake it made with the F-35 joint fighter.
Seduced by the prospect of a single high-tech platform that could be configured to perform multiple missions and the potential for savings, they argued, the Navy went all-in before the concept was ready for prime time. In doing so, the Navy violated the cardinal rule of acquisition that in Pentagon parlance is known as “Fly before you buy.”
“When the Navy awarded the first LCS construction contract in 2004, it did so without well-defined requirements, a stable design, realistic cost estimates, or a clear understanding of the capability gaps the ship was needed to fill,” McCain said in 2016.
“Like so many major programs that preceded it, LCS’s failure followed predictably from an inability to define and stabilize requirements, unrealistic initial cost estimates, and unreliable assessments of technical and integration risk made worse by repeatedly buying ships and mission packages before proving they are effective and can be operated together,” he continued.
But like the F-35, the sad saga of the LCS has begun a more hopeful chapter.
After a restructuring of the program five years ago the latest, both Lockheed Martin and Austral have been turning upgraded versions of the speedy ship which can travel more than 40 knots, (46 m.p.h), and is being outfitted with a new, more lethal over-the-horizon missile system.
Lockheed Martin has just delivered to the Navy the future USS St. Louis, bringing the number of ships in the littoral fleet to 21, 10 Freedom variants and 11 Independence variants.
And while perhaps not the game-changer once envisioned, the revamped LCS variants are proving to be a serviceable, and welcome, addition to the fleet.
The USS Little Rock is on its maiden deployment to the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility, where there has been a critical shortage of ships for the counternarcotics mission.
“We have certainly ramped up our employment,” said Crites. “I mean, Detroit just got back from her deployment. We got Little Rock that’s going out. Gabrielle Giffords is operating out of Singapore.”
And with the price tag of $519.5 million for the last three ships, the LCS is about half the cost of the Navy’s new frigate, which carries a price tag of $1.1 billion.
“We don’t want to have a repeat as some of the lessons that we learned with LCS, where we got going too fast,” said Crites.
As McCain put it back in 2016, “Although the LCS may yet deliver some capability … taxpayers have paid a heavy price for these mistakes.”
