The Navy was in such a hurry to get its first two Littoral Combat Ships into service that it didn’t fully test them for problems before delivery, adding almost $200 million to their cost and raising continuing questions about their ability to perform in combat, the Government Accountability Office said Thursday.
It’s GAO’s latest criticism of the troubled program, which has been plagued by performance problems since it began 10 years ago. Yet even after the first two ships began having costly issues, the Navy continued to purchase new vessels until Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in February said the Pentagon would seek a replacement. But by then the service had already contracted to build 22 more of the vessels, and Hagel said an additional 10 would be constructed in the $25 billion program.
The first two ships, USS Freedom and USS Independence, were built by different contractors to different designs. Freedom cost $631 million and Independence $704 million at the time they were built, but problems identified in sea trials caused the ships’ costs to balloon to $682.3 million and $852.6 million, respectively.
The ships were initially planned to be cheap ($220 million), light and fast vessels capable of carrying out multiple combat missions in both coastal waters and open ocean. They were designed to be automated as much as possible to limit crew size, but another GAO report published in July that studied Freedom’s performance on a deployment to Singapore found that the crew was overworked.
GAO said the Navy did not violate any regulations by accepting the two ships in deficient condition to accelerate their arrival in the fleet, and to avoid violating treaty limitations on testing weapons in the Great Lakes, where Freedom was built.
But “in prioritizing these factors, the Navy shortchanged its quality assurance processes for both ships, which has caused it to devote considerably more time and money to resolving deficiencies post-delivery than anticipated. However, because the Navy did not establish clear deadlines for resolving ship deficiencies, corrections were allowed to lag, to the point that fleet operators inherited unresolved starred deficiencies on each seaframe. Further, these deficiencies have constrained recent shipboard operations.”
