The LCS Debacle
Why the US Navy's Littoral Combat Ship was such a flop
It seemed like the best of times.
The Cold War was over; the Soviet Union had collapsed and with it the rationale for a large American military presence in Western Europe. People assumed that the principles governing US foreign and defense policy since the late 1940s had become obsolete. With the tempting sweets of a “peace dividend” in prospect, this was an assumption all the easier to embrace. America’s primary military rival was no more; surely defense spending could be cut, with the funds thus freed allocated to other priorities. It was, in a turn of phrase that later became notorious, “the end of history.”
There was of course some truth in that comforting assumption: Changing times certainly demand fresh thinking. But with hindsight we can see that the early post-Cold War period was, for America, a dangerous passage of history. Self-confidence, amounting occasionally to hubris, blinded the country’s political and military leaders to some enduring realities of geopolitics. An apogee of sorts was reached in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine. On that occasion President Barack Obama tut-tutted like some professor of peace studies, scolding V. Putin for such an impermissible breach of international norms. Didn’t the Russian despot realize that in the twenty-first century, such things simply weren’t done?
Besides making an American president sound foolish, the prevailing climate of illusion had serious adverse consequences for US defense policy. It was a time of faulty assumptions about basic strategy and force levels—as well illustrated by the dismal saga of the US Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship program.
The end of the USSR entailed the demise of Russian naval power. Beset as it was by economic crisis and political instability, the Russian Federation was unable to maintain in being the defunct superpower’s impressive fleet. Some of its warships were taken over by the various successor states and most of those remaining in Russian hands were laid up and left to deteriorate. To the leaders of the US Navy, it appeared that future naval conflict would take place not on the high seas but in restricted waters and coastal areas—the littorals—against relatively unsophisticated adversaries. The Navy, therefore, had to be rebalanced: fewer sophisticated (and expensive) guided missile cruisers, destroyers and frigates, more small (and much less expensive) surface combatants. This was the line of thinking that led to the development of the Littoral Combat Ship or LCS.
In principle there was nothing wrong with the LCS concept. A case could certainly be made for a small and relatively inexpensive surface combatant, somewhat comparable to the corvettes in service with other navies, for instance the Royal Swedish Navy’s Visby class. As the concept was refined, the LCS was projected to be a cost-effective multi-mission warship able to accommodate swappable modular combat systems in addition to its basic armament. It could thus be configured as needed for surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare (ASW), mine clearance and other missions.
The LCS was first conceived as a low-cost, expendable warship that could be abandoned if necessary after suffering significant battle damage. But for various reasons—how to explain it to the crews, for instance—that idea was rejected, and as development proceeded both the size and the cost of the LCS increased. To keep crew size down, systems were extensively—and expensively—automated. A maximum speed of 40 knots and the ability to embark a helicopter were specified, and the ship was to be large enough to cross the Pacific Ocean on its own. The LCS mission profile was expanded to encompass surface warfare; ASW and mine hunting; intelligence and reconnaissance; special forces deployment; and drug interdiction and anti-piracy patrols. The estimated price tag per hull grew to $360 million, exclusive of the modular combat systems that would be procured separately.
The Navy had hoped to embody all these capabilities in a single design. But “mission creep” made this appear impossible, and there was the additional consideration that operations in the Pacific area might demand capabilities rather different from those needed in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Mediterranean areas. Two designs had been under consideration and for purposes of testing and evaluation, it was decided to order two of each type. The Freedom class, designed by a Lockheed Martin consortium and built by Marinette Marine, has a conventional steel hull; the Independence class, designed by General Dynamics and built by Austal USA, has an all-aluminum trimaran hull. In 2010 Congress authorized construction of ten additional ships of each class. It was anticipated that lessons learned from the operation of the first four ships would be incorporated into those still under construction.
By this time, however, it was becoming uncomfortably clear that the LCS embodied some serious flaws. Both classes had grown to the approximate size of a World War II destroyer escort—with no corresponding increase in combat power. Their 57mm main gun came in for special criticism, being considered inadequate for such large ships. Senior commanders afloat opined that the LCS lacked adequate active and passive defenses against such threats as fast attack craft armed with anti-ship missiles.
More problems soon cropped up. The first four ships in service were found to be overweight and lacking in endurance. Cracks in the lightweight aluminum hulls of the Independence-class vessels caused concern, as did engineering and propulsion problems in the Freedom-class ships. Contractor-based maintenance support proved problematical, especially for forward deployed ships. Nor did the mission module concept live up to expectations, it being found that in many cases weeks or months were required to swap out the modules. Ultimately the whole scheme was abandoned, and the ships of both classes were permanently configured with one of the three modules.
Since the LCS was replacing the Navy’s Oliver Hazard Perry guided missile frigates, all these problems were worrying in the extreme. The initial plan was to procure 52 LCS, enabling the Navy to keep some 300+ surface combatants in active commission. But as problems and complaints piled up, this plan seemed increasingly dubious. It was not a good sign when the Navy decided in 2020 to decommission the first two ships of each class, arguing that the cost of repairing and upgrading them would be excessive. Three have been mothballed so far and the fourth will join them soon. On average, they were in service for ten years, as against their forecasted twenty-five year lifespan.
The ships still in commission, thirty-one in number, remain plagued by hull defects and engineering problems. It seems unlikely that they’ll ever serve in their intended role, though some may find a niche as patrol vessels. But in the large, the LCS program has been an epic failure.
So what happened?
There were two reasons for this costly debacle: one strategic and the other technical. At the time the LCS was conceived, the Navy had no blue-water “peer competitor.” The 9/11 terrorist strikes and their aftermath reinforced a preexisting belief that future naval combat would take place in littoral waters, not on the high seas. Thus in terms of naval strategy, the LCS was a warship designed for a limited war scenario that soon became obsolete. Twenty years on, the Navy has acquired an increasingly formidable blue-water adversary: the PLA Navy of the People’s Republic of China. The resulting strategic calculus refutes the basic LCS concept.
Still, the LCS might have proved useful for certain missions, particularly in the Persian Gulf. Unfortunately, however, the ships are plagued by design flaws that severely limit their effectiveness. The hull cracking experienced by the first two Independence-class ships is now affecting their sister ships, while the whole Freedom class continues to be plagued by engineering and propulsion problems. Nor have the longstanding concerns about low combat capability relative to LCS size been mitigated.
On the technical side, the LCS fell victim to “design creep”: The original concept of a cheap and simple warship got buried under an avalanche of innovative ideas. Excess innovation can be perilous where warship design is concerned, and in the case of the LCS it was a recipe for disaster. For instance, though the all-aluminum trimaran hull of the Independence class embodied many advantages in theory, in practice it proved less than robust. The swappable mission modules, attractive in theory, were also a disappointment. To achieve maximum operational availability a “Blue/Gold” system similar to that for submarines was adopted, with each LCS having two crews assigned. But this turned out to require senior enlisted personnel in such numbers that shortages of these key people began to be felt throughout the fleet.
It now seems likely that the Navy will discard its remaining Littoral Combat Ships as quickly as possible. In 2020 Congress authorized the first three units of the FFG(X) program, guided missile frigates both larger and significantly more capable than the LCS. Some twenty of these frigates, designated as the Constellation class, are projected and as they enter service the LCS force will be progressively drawn down. But for now, approximately one-sixth of the US Navy’s surface combatants will be ships of doubtful utility in a major conflict. Not only does this leave a hole in America’s defenses—it’s an embarrassing failure for a country that constructed and deployed a Navy of awesome power, second to none, between 1941 and 1945.
Examples of mission creep and overloading a design abound. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has flirted with this problem. Back in the 1960s, there was the F-111, which was supposed to serve a variety of both land-based and carrier-based roles. It turned out to be a white elephant.