Inside story of the Navy Littoral Combat Ship

I will freely admit, after years of denigrating what I thought of as a bloated ineffective program, that the parent article took me by surprise. Bluntly, I thought the LCS was a POS. Turns out I was wrong… it’s far worse.  I only have space for a few quotes from a lengthy article, so I compressed them a bit – I would recommend reading the whole thing.   All from Military.com

Each ship ultimately cost more than twice the original estimate. Worse, they were hobbled by an array of mechanical failures and were never able to carry out the missions envisaged by their champions.

Chief among the champions was evidently Obama’s SecNav, Ray Mabus. But for the ships themselves:

Former Lt. Renaldo Rodgers remembered laboring in San Diego from sunrise to sunset for months to ready the Freedom for a 2012 trial mission to San Francisco, only to have the ship break down during pretrial tests.

The lifetime cost of the LCS class may reach $100 billion or more.

“In the end,” he (John Pendleton of the GAO – ed.) said, “the taxpayers get fewer than 30 limited-survivability, single-mission ships.”

The original idea was a fast, relatively shallow-draft ship with interchangeable mission kits – 50 mph, able to interchange a gun turret with an anti-sub warfare (ASW) or minesweeping kit, easy interchangeability of components and crew.

In 2002, Adm. Vernon Clark stared down from the deck of a Danish warship at a pier in Denmark and watched a demonstration that would shape the future of the U.S. Navy.

A large deck gun sat below. On the orders of a Danish navy official, a crane hoisted it off the pier and installed it on the ship. Within 40 minutes, sailors were rotating the weapon to prepare it for operation.

Clark thought we needed a system like that (which we never achieved.) What we got were two separate platforms. One single hull ship, one trimaran, both from different builders, so different that their crews and components required totally different training. But by being built in two yards, spreading the jobs through two sets of politico’s realms to ensure political support.

In response to the Navy’s goals, the contractors both based their original ship designs partly on high-speed ferries for cars or passengers, an unusual choice for a vessel meant for war not transportation.

Costs began to rise dramatically. The ships were originally supposed to cost no more than $220 million dollars each, which had helped sell them to Congress in the first place. But the final price tag rose to about $500 million each.

Then we read of the initial success – or lack thereof:

On the morning of Nov. 23, 2015, the USS Milwaukee set out across the frigid waters of the Great Lakes for its maiden voyage.

The Navy planned to sail the Milwaukee from the shipyard on the shores of Lake Michigan in Marinette, Wisconsin, to its new home port of San Diego. From there, it would eventually join its sister ship, the USS Fort Worth, in helping to counter the Chinese navy’s expanding presence in the Western Pacific.

On Dec. 11, about three weeks into the two-month journey, a software failure severely damaged the Milwaukee’s combining gear — a complex mechanism that connects the ship’s diesel engines and its gas turbines to the propulsion shafts, producing the power necessary for it to reach top speeds.

A Navy salvage ship had to tow it some 40 miles for repairs at a base near Norfolk, Virginia. The ship hadn’t made it halfway down the East Coast — let alone to the South China Sea — before breaking down.

The article goes on to describe the multitude of engine problems, yet political boosting by Mabus and lawmakers from both parties.

Read the article – it’ll make you long for the good old days under totalitarian regimes when politicians and contractors who failed were summarily shot.

 

Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Navy, Politics