U.S. Navy's LCS problem

The real U.S. Navy knows that the Littoral Combat Ship is failure.

How to deal with that failure in the coming budget battles is yet to be seen.

“Just because you can put it on a slide, doesn’t mean the physics will cooperate.”

Trying to fix a bad idea

Update on Littoral Combat Ship manning...

Yes ... decades of modern manning requirements told us the number was wrong from the beginning, but happy talk & toxic command climates - standard gruel of the transformationalists - killed any of this while the program was still early enough to make it beck.

LCS LOL of the year

A find from CDR Salamander. Over to you sir.

"Decommissioning of the remaining 26 FFGs is scheduled to occur prior to FY 2019. The LCS will replace the capacity and capability of the FFG 7-class."

Un-freakin' real. In the future, joint operational commanders will look up at the board, see an LCS and know it brings little or no value and keep it out of the way so it doesn't get itself hurt, or put an operation at risk. Unless that operation is so permissive-threat that it doesn't matter.

U.S. Navy's opinion of LCS value appears misleading

The program for government oversight (POGO), has obtained U.S. Navy documents that show all is not well with the Lockheed Martin variant of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) also known as LCS-1 or Freedom-class LCS.

I know what you may be thinking. This is not news. Most reasonable people know that the LCS is faulty and has no place in the Navy mission.

Some of the problems noted by POGO have been reported in the past. Of special interest though is this letter (backed up by this issues brief showing design problems) from the project manager which gives the impression that the Navy will have to lower expectations when operating the LCS-1 to make up for poor contractor performance.

Seems to be a lot of that behaviour going around lately; and not just with Navy ships.

The LCS is a waste of money. The LCS is not survivable against any threat. The U.S. Navy appears to be misleading our elected officials about the value of Littoral Combat Gyp.

Putting some clarity on the LCS nonsense

As any sane person knows, the waste that is the Littoral Combat Ship has a certain bad smell.

I will let CDR Salamander take it from here:

Just for fun, because I know the Church of the LCS can't stand them - let us look at the FFG-7 class of ships. There were, shocker, 55 of them built in the United States.


Would those who came before us have let FFG-7 (USS OHP actual commissioned in 1977) through FFG-31 (USS STARK commissioned in 1982) be bought and paid for without even knowing SM-1, Harpoon, MK-46, SLQ-32, or helicopters could even work? Wait .... oh that's right; they actually built ships based on sound practices with weapons systems that were known to work before putting them on a new class of warship. BTW, when did we decide that hope was a plan? I think I slept through that class; my bust.

Anything hinting at useful for LM's LCS doesn't happen until FMS

It looks like in order to get anything useful out of the faulty Littoral Combat Ship program you have to take a look at Lockheed Martin's FMS marketing of the "Surface Combat Ship".

Take a look at the entire video.

Australian media continues to fail when reporting military matters

I seriously feel sorry for this person's lack of ability to perform any kind of military reporting. Not much of what is stated here is true.

Compare what was reported, to the opposite from this subject matter expert.

Copy-pasting industry and government propaganda is not reporting.

H/T-CDR Salamander

When marketing fails

A rerun to remind us that outrageous marketing claims have no place when trying to figure out faulty weapons systems.

Maybe a K-car-like frigate will save the Navy?

Comparing ships to cars...It is unfortunate that the disaster known as the Littoral Combat Ship will never be as great as the utility of the underwhelming and low quality K-Car.

After reading this excellent overview of the Littoral Combat Ship debacle by David Axe, well, maybe the Navy can get a bailout from D.C. and come up with the K-car of Navy ships; a no-frills reliable frigate? That is if the debt allows us to have anything more than the Coast Guard.

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GD-Austal variant of Littoral Combat Ship battling massive corrosion

If you thought the issues with the Lockheed Martin variant of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) were ugly, ponder the following. According to this post from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), Bloomberg news will report that the General Dynamics-Austal variant of the LCS has suffered massive corrosion problems.

The “aggressive” corrosion was found in the propulsion areas of USS Independence. To permanently repair the corrosion the ship will have to be dry-docked and have its’ water-jet propulsion system removed, according to a written statement the Navy provided to Congressional appropriations committees and Bloomberg News.

This is simply phenomenal considering that the ship completed its maiden voyage in April 2010, just fourteen months ago. This is, however, inline with the LCS programs’ history of problems and comes on the heels of major cost overruns, which we documented just two weeks ago. This will likely add to development costs that have already increased 287 percent from baseline estimates, and may add to annual operating costs, already over $36 million per ship, if such aggressive corrosion cannot be prevented.

The LCS program is a complete waste. And great work to the Navy for selecting both vendors in a competitive bid. Lunacy.

The LCS won’t be able to fight its way out of a paper bag and will end up getting a lot of sailors killed.

And yes Mr. Work, the Navy does need a new frigate. One that is not gold-plated, doesn’t burn much fuel and is simple as part of its core design. The wasteful and useless LCS is occupying shipbuilding skills that could be put to better use making warships we actually need.

We have admirals with very poor vision of what a Navy should be. That and we need to cut the budget. Cancelling the LCS program should be an easy decision.

Over to you; LCS cheerleaders.

Now you can visualize the poor quality of the Littoral Combat Ship

I read Cdr Salamander’s post before looking at the photo. I thought, while reading, “well he knows this stuff, maybe it is some minor detail that only subject matter experts could pick out.”

Go to his post and look at the high-res photo.

We spend more and more insane billions on the Navy. What do we get? Well, I don’t think we are getting quality.

On another note, this from insidedefense.com (subscription).

Pentagon Waives Testing Requirement For Navy's Littoral Combat Ship

The Pentagon has waived the statutory requirement for full-up, system-level survivability testing of the Littoral Combat Ship because it would be "unreasonably expensive" and "impractical," a decision blessed by the Defense Department's top weapons tester, DOD officials say.