The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was believed at one time to be the Navy’s blueprint for the future. It was to be a rapid, versatile ship that could easily handle everything from clearing mined waters to employing anti-submarine tactics at just a fraction of the price of a typical warship. The LCS story, however, got a little entangled twenty years later. The ambitious and ingenious program had been expensive and with a difficult performance, which had resulted in a mixed success record for the Navy.
This program was initiated in the early 2000s when the Navy was confronting a somewhat obsolete fleet, and the retirement of a large number of ships that had been in service since the Cold War was imminent. The notion was pretty straightforward: constructing small, multifunctional combatants in a short time would be less expensive, as well as navy fleets would be freed from the task of maintaining the large vessels in high-end conflicts. It was expected that the cost of one ship would be roughly $400 million, which is about a third of what is required to build an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, was the initial target of the officials.
The innovative and outstanding feature of the LCS was its modular design. Owing to the relatively small crew numbers, ships designed as such rely heavily on automation and, above all, on the use of unmanned systems. As then-acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work observed, this was a daring departure from the long-established tradition of changes in naval tactics and a way of experimenting with modern warfare.
However, ambition far exceeded readiness. Before taking the LCS into production, the Navy went ahead with the plans without having all the details worked out, and some testing and evaluation steps had to be omitted. The first ship was commissioned in 2008, notably much earlier than usual Pentagon schedules. Bryan Clark from the Hudson Institute suggests the point that no one was daring enough to resist the changing and probably growing requirements in the process of their implementation, which was a result of the quest for innovation.
Problems didn’t have to wait much to emerge. The ship’s main feature that had been heavily played up in marketing, the mission packages, turned out to be problematic when it came to deployment, and were usually late in their arrival. Technology that was meant to assist in sonar operations only ended up failing, while other equipment used in minesweeping functioned below expected performance.
There were even hulls with cracks and transmission issues at high speeds, which could easily explain why the ship couldn’t be as agile as it was supposed to be. The specialized crews that were to be transferred from one ship to another in rotation also turned out to hurt overall effectiveness due to reduced effectiveness.
Costs escalated rapidly. The explicit plan was to keep the cost of each vessel under $250 million, but the actual cost went over $500 million per ship, not counting the mission module, which was very expensive. Initially, Congress was on board with the idea of block-buy contracts for both the Freedom and Independence-class designs; however, problems with technical and maintenance issues continued. So, by 2016, a rather serious malfunction caused a deep inspection, although at that point the program’s reputation had already been compromised to a great extent.
Meanwhile, things did not always go as per the operational plan. In reality, the LCS, designed to operate in near-shore areas, was confronted with even more dangerous situations, while a few of the ships had to be taken out of service only after less than five years, which is way below the 25 years of expected lifespan. According to the analysts’ calculations, these early takeouts turned out to be responsible for almost $7 billion in the loss of operational value without taking into account the operating costs saved through the demissions.
The decision to retire these ships ahead of schedule was, in my opinion, not only difficult to accept but also wrong in principle. The former naval officer Bryan McGrath argued that it would have been more expensive and less effective to have them fight in the advanced scenarios in the higher end of the combat spectrum. Mackenzie Eaglen, an analyst, said further that the ships could be taken out of service early without any money going down the drain since the $70 million yearly operating costs per ship made it a financially sound decision.
Indeed, the LCS program has had its share of luck as well. The minesweeping package was eventually able to attain full operational capability, thus a first in the whole world by implementing the use of robots to clear minefields safely and efficiently.
Ultimately, the story of LCS becomes the main lesson of the hindrances to military innovation. Very daring ideas have to be handled with tempered planning, thorough testing, as well as open-mindedness when it comes to adaptation, as they are faced with problems. If these protections were absent, then there is a possibility of them turning into costly cases, even if they are among the most promising programs. Therefore, the Navy may be too late to acknowledge the LCS flaws; however, the experience delivers irretrievable lessons that will have an impact on the design and operation of future vessels.