LCS - The Heavy Rotation Nightmare

ProPublica pulled the critique together

On yesterday’s Midrats, my co-host mentioned that recently in the Red Sea our Navy has seen the most littoral combat it has in a very long time, but our Littoral Combat Ships are not to be seen. Why? Simple. They cannot conduct combat on the littorals.

This AM, fellow “First LCS Critic” Chapomatic sent me a link to an article from September of last year that I think at the time I made a passing comment on over at X, but did not bring here. Well, let’s fix that.

Why do we need to periodically drag LCS out of the gimp box and hoist her up for all to behold? Simple; as an example to others. We simply cannot afford another CG(X) or DDG-1000 situation with DDG(X) or any other ship we have in the design phase. We have already lost one generation of ship design due to the Age of Transformationalism.

With the Constellation Class FFG we now have building, we are at last taking the course I first suggested in 2006 to correct the error of LCS. That is our version of FREMM that was first commissioned by the French in 2012, a dozen years ago.

LCS was not a problem with our shipbuilding industry or even our design people - though there are areas to critique there. No, this was a people problem, a mindset problem, a culture problem.

It needs to be dragged up regularly. I last did a dedicated post on it back in August 2023. It is time.

As we dive into the details remember this; since the disaster of LCS no senior personnel have yet been held to public account. We have the same acquisition system. We have the same incentives and disincentives as before. Critics of LCS were pushed over to the off-ramp; its most NORK-like advocates promoted.

There is no guarantee this won’t happen again.

Joaquin Sapien at ProPpublica and his extensive almost novella - not just an article - on LCS that even opens with a quote of the phrase that first came into the general conversation here on CDR Salamander; The Inside Story of How the Navy Spend BIllions on the “Little Crappy Ship.”

Sadly, we did not even get a mention or link - though most of the arguments are the same ones we’ve been making here and on the OB Blog since 2004 - if you spot me six months or so, two decades ago.

Some people have critiques of ProPublica, especially from the right side of the spectrum, but I’m sorry - their critique here is spot on.

It starts right in center mass;

The USS Freedom had its own special place within the armada. It was one of a new class of vessels known as littoral combat ships. The U.S. Navy had billed them as technical marvels — small, fast and light, able to combat enemies at sea, hunt mines and sink submarines.

In reality, the LCS was well on the way to becoming one of the worst boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and underperforming weapons systems. Two of the $500 million ships had suffered embarrassing breakdowns in previous months. The Freedom’s performance during the exercise, showing off its ability to destroy underwater mines, was meant to rejuvenate the ships’ record on the world stage. The ship was historically important too; it was the first LCS built, the first in the water, commissioned just eight years prior.

The summary of their findings in spot on, especially the last sentence;

Our examination revealed new details on why the LCS never delivered on its promises. Top Navy leaders repeatedly dismissed or ignored warnings about the ships’ flaws. One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more of the ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons systems failed. Staunch advocates in the Navy circumvented checks meant to ensure that ships that cost billions can do what they are supposed to do.

Both inside and outside the Navy, LCS critics warned two decades ago that 2024 would find the Little Crappy Ship roughly where it wound up;

The Navy has tried to retire many of the littoral combat ships years before they reach their expected lifespan. Ships designed to last 25 years are being mothballed after seeing less than a decade of service.

In response to questions, the Navy acknowledged the LCS was not suitable for fighting peer competitors such as China. The LCS “does not provide the lethality or survivability needed in a high-end fight.”

“The Navy needs a more ready, capable, and lethal fleet more than a bigger fleet that’s less ready, less capable, and less lethal,” the statement read, saying the money would be better spent on higher-priority alternatives.

The cost of the program has gnawed at John Pendleton, who for years was a top military analyst at the Government Accountability Office and has studied the rise and fall of the LCS as closely as anyone in Washington.

The author points right at Patient Zero:

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.

…

“This is it. Of course, this is it,” Clark remembered telling himself. “I didn’t know that they could do that.”

For Clark, the Danish demonstration crystalized his idea for a new ship that would be different from anything the Navy had done before. It would be small, relatively lightly armed and operated by about 40 sailors — far less than the average warship crew size. The weapons systems would not be permanently installed.

Instead, he envisioned a sort of Swiss army knife for the Navy. Armed with one set of weaponry, it could hunt and destroy submarines. But if the threat shifted, it could be quickly outfitted to detect and clear underwater mines or to fight other warships.

As Clark envisaged it, the new ships could be deployed in coastal, or littoral, waters, where the Navy needed to expand its presence around the world: in the Persian Gulf to participate in the war in Iraq, in the Caribbean to track down gunrunners and in Southeast Asia to help smaller allied navies. They would be one of the fastest warships in the world — able to fight near shore, outrun larger vessels or hunt down the small ones increasingly popular with foes like Iran. The ships would be built quickly, in large numbers and at low cost.

That disconnect - a desire infused with too much science fiction warping the view of science fact - enabled by a climate of fear and compliance that those who were even in the chairs in the back of the room could feel - is the warning for the present and the future.

Especially in unmanned systems and directed energy - the desire to manifest what you want by tightening the blinkers even closer to the head, stuffing more wax in the ears, firing alternative voices … it still exists.

In keeping with his business background, Clark wanted as few people on the new ships as possible. “What I really want is an unmanned ship that’s got R2-D2 in it,” he said, recalling his thinking at the time.

Doubt dogged Clark’s dream from the start. Congress agreed to begin developing the ship in 2003 — despite a House Appropriations Committee report that warned that there was “no ‘road map’ of how the Navy will achieve the system required.”

One former admiral who worked on plans for the ship said Clark’s insistence on speed — up to 45 knots, or about 50 miles per hour — created immediate problems. A ship cannot go that fast for very long without running out of gas, which meant it could never stray far from its fuel supply. Its small size — many in the Navy joked that LCS stood for Little Crappy Ship — limited the weapons it could carry.

The former admiral said he raised concerns with his superiors but wished he had been more vocal. “As a subordinate naval officer, when your boss tells you, ‘Here’s a shovel, go dig the hole,’ you go dig the hole.”

Culture. Accountability. Oversight. All were lacking.

This is Soviet level dysfunction.

Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary who became a key proponent of the ship, said many in the Navy thought the initial estimate was unrealistic. “The Navy never believed it, at least the people who had to build the ship,” he said.

And yet, it was defended. It was excused. It was allowed.

Perhaps the new CNO should have Solzhenitsyn on the reading list.

Then again, there was this player. A test case in short term thinking void of stewardship.

On a breezy Friday in March 2011, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus addressed a crowd of sharp-dressed politicians and begrimed workers gathered at a shipyard in Mobile, Alabama.

Mabus, tall and dapper, announced the names for two of the Navy’s newest littoral combat ships. One would be called the USS Jackson — a reference to the capital of his home state, Mississippi.

As he looked out at the waters of Mobile Bay, Mabus lauded the new class of ships that had emerged from Clark’s vision a decade before.

“It’s a drug runner’s worst nightmare, it’s a submarine’s worst nightmare,” he declared, speaking in his soft Southern drawl. “It’s anybody who wants to do harm to the United States of America or the United States Navy, it’s their worst nightmare.”

In fact, the LCS was on its way to becoming one of the Navy’s worst nightmares — and Mabus was its biggest cheerleader.

…

Mabus acknowledged that his support of the LCS project put him at odds with some of the Navy’s top officers and the nation’s civilian military leadership. He recalled resistance from what he dubbed the “Alumni Association,” powerful former Navy officers who he said reflexively and unfairly disliked the ship because it was so different from anything else the Navy had built. For Mabus, his key role as civilian leader of a tradition-bound military service was overcoming its hostility to change and innovation.

Chief among the old-school critics, he said, was Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona and decorated Navy veteran whose father and paternal grandfather had both been Navy admirals. He, along with Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, had emerged as skeptics of the LCS as leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Both were alarmed by the costs, which had soared to more than $750 million apiece for the initial ships.

In response to such concerns, the Navy lowered the price by pitting the two teams of contractors against each other in a bidding war. Austal and Lockheed Martin turned in two different ship designs with similar price tags. Navy leaders dithered over which to select.

In the fall of 2010, Work, the Navy undersecretary at the time, said Mabus gathered senior naval leaders together to ask a blunt question: “Do we want this ship to survive?”

When the group answered yes, Mabus proposed a politically adroit solution: The Navy would select both companies to build the new ships in two shipyards, one in Alabama and one in Wisconsin.

Remember this quote from my post in 2012? (emphasis mine)

In late 2010, when the service was pushing for the dual-block buy, one Navsea official noted in an email that a tight leash was being kept on the trial test results from the fall, saying, “The bottom line is that they didn’t like what the results said.” In other emails, Navy officials said they were told not to brief the test results, including one warning that Navy officials were apparently concerned about possible shipbuilder lawsuits.

Aviation Week sources familiar with Navy shipboard operations say it is not uncommon for service officers to tailor reports to make ships and shipboard programs appear in the best possible light. There is an understanding that officers up and down the ranks do not want bad reports, which could put a stain on their own careers. But what is uncommon, those sources say, is such a frank and harsh report as this one on the LCS-1. Censored reports are also uncommon, they say, but this is only because such negative reports are rare in the first place.

Never forget, we did not get here by accident.

One of the first critiques we had about LCS was its manning concept. It really is unforgivable and remains a stain on our Navy. As I summarized in 2018;

The design almost demands neglect. The manning concept is based on no one having time to do anything but their job and a bit of another person's job instead of sleeping. The Navy is so ossified that it cannot to this day ensure that what we know is going to be up front in the face of the world is something our friends can be proud of and our enemies see with respect.

In November 2015 we saw how that materialized;

Just a month after the USS Milwaukee stalled in Virginia, the ship it was supposed to join in the South China Sea suffered its own embarrassing breakdown.

The USS Fort Worth was nearing the end of an otherwise successful deployment. It had helped with a search-and-rescue operation following an Indonesian commercial plane crash and participated in joint exercises with several allied navies.

But the Navy had decided to frequently rotate the small LCS crews in order to reduce burnout and, in November 2015, a new, inexperienced crew took over.

Even the commanding officer, Michael Atwell, had “few opportunities to gain valuable at sea experience” before his deployment, according to a later Navy investigation.

On Jan. 5, hundreds of gallons of fuel spilled into the ship’s main machinery room. The sailors had to spray chemical foam on the fuel to prevent it from catching fire. Then, in grueling, filthy shifts, they took turns crawling into the tight compartment to clean it up with rags and pumps.

The day after the spill, the Fort Worth pulled into a port in Singapore for a week of scheduled maintenance.

There it became clear that the ship had been “ridden hard,” according to officers interviewed in the Navy investigation. Leaks had sprung out of various parts, the engines were in bad shape, the electric generators needed work and the crew was exhausted. There was “no break, no reprieve, just increasing daily tasking,” one sailor said of their time on board.

What did the Navy do?

The ship’s executive officer, the second in command, complained of a lack of support from superiors.

“We ask for help, but there isn’t enough,” he said, adding that he was told “they don’t have the bodies.”

The ship was originally supposed to leave by Jan. 12 for a “high visibility” port visit in Hong Kong. Atwell and his executive officer described a “tremendous amount of pressure” to make it happen, according to the Navy investigation.

The crew took shortcuts as it scrambled to test the engine. One of the sailors in charge of starting it skipped a routine step, failing to properly lubricate the combining gears.

“I messed up everything because I was going too fast,” the sailor later explained.

The mistake damaged the ship’s combining gear, forcing it to sit for seven months while waiting on replacement parts.

Navy leaders deemed Atwell unfit for command and removed him from his position.

Where is the accountability for those who created the underlying conditions?

Well, go visit the board of directors of “The Primes” and ask that question. That is where many of them are.

The last pull quote is long, but needed. Recalling the events of 2012, if you don’t see something almost criminal here, you are not reading it right.

In early 2012, sitting beneath the fluorescent glow of a Pentagon briefing room, Rear Adm. Sam Perez received a stern warning.

Weeks earlier, Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert had asked Perez to produce a report that would help him figure out how best to use the dozens of littoral combat ships that would be delivered to the Navy in the coming years.

The results were grim.

Discussing the details around a conference table, one fellow officer raised a finger to his own temple and mimicked a gun going off: Perez, he signaled, was about to risk career suicide.

It was a pattern with the LCS. Officers who criticized the ships faced consequences. An assignment to an undesirable post. Even dismissal.

Perez had found that the crews were too small. Some were stretched so thin that commanding officers had to spend time sweeping the decks, when they could have been studying intelligence reports and focusing on navigating the ship.

Contrary to what Clark observed in Denmark, the various weapons systems would not be easy to swap out. The Navy hadn’t factored in the weeks it could take for all the contractors, sailors and others who were needed to fly in from around the world to help outfit the vessels for different missions.

The two versions of the LCS complicated the problems. The designs were vastly different: They could exchange neither parts nor sailors. Perez and his staff worried that the ships would wind up sidelined because they lacked either equipment or trained crew members.

Comparing the LCS to the fleets of potential adversaries, Perez concluded that the vessels were only capable of fighting against lightly armed small, fast attack boats.

A fellow officer warned him that painting this kind of damning portrait for the highest ranking officer in the Navy, the chief naval officer, could hurt his career. At that point, the Navy had already committed to buying at least 20 more ships worth billions of dollars.

Perez had already shared some of his findings with Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mark Ferguson, the second highest ranking official in the Navy.

According to a former senior officer familiar with the events, Ferguson told Perez that he was looking at the vessels the wrong way. The small ship’s performance should be compared to a patrol boat.

Perez objected. Patrol boats aren’t supposed to clear mines, fight submarines or attack surface warships. They are far smaller, designed primarily for surveillance and interdiction.

The staffers worked on the comparison for about two weeks before they began “tearing each other up because we were essentially telling a lie,” according to the former officer who worked on the project. After a vote, they decided to stop comparing the LCS to a patrol boat.

Immediately after Perez delivered the report, he received a call from Bynum, a former rear admiral who at the time worked for Ferguson. Bynum told Perez to classify the report secret.

“That was absolutely my recommendation,” Bynum said in an interview with ProPublica. The report, he said, included a “host of vulnerabilities that didn’t need to be shared in the open press.”

That is what happens when you have poor Congressional oversight. Earlier in the article the rather lonely battle Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) had against LCS. He was only one man. And so, here our Navy and its Navy suffers.

Even if you are a long-standing member of the Front Porch and know the issues well, get a fresh cup of coffee and give the article a full read.

Get angry all over again and focus that anger on making sure our Navy does not allow this to happen again…again.