![]() ![]() The breach refers to legislation that requires the Pentagon to notify Congress when a program’s cost estimates shoot higher than the predetermined baselines.Ĭanceling the submarine hunting module led to increased costs across the remaining two modules, making the overall cost skyrocket. In May, the program suffered a Nunn-McCurdy breach when its anti-submarine module was canceled in the fiscal 2023 budget submission. “LCS has military value,” the report insists, while acknowledging that “it has less military value than other platforms if employed in a high-end fight with China, in the Pacific.” ![]() China has since emerged as a naval superpower, and Russia has managed to rebuild parts of its navy, in particular its submarine fleet. The program has been hanging around so long that the world in which it was conceived - a focus on counterterrorism in the Middle East with no major competitor in the open ocean - is now gone. The issues the ship has faced - cracked hulls, broken equipment and technologies that simply didn’t work - follow from the Navy’s original demands for a cheap, technologically advanced ship built quickly without much testing or analysis. “The Navy got that ship, it’s just all of the other things that would make the ship operate in the fleet were never really worked out, so it just had problem after problem after problem.” 2 civilian in the Obama administration, where he oversaw the department’s most ambitious modernization programs, including the LCS. “The Navy got the ship it asked for,” said Bob Work, the Pentagon’s No. ![]() In the end, the shipbuilders followed the Navy’s demands for a new design that was revolutionary, not evolutionary, following the dictates of Rumsfeld who wanted a slew of new, untested technologies to be installed on the LCS. The industry agreed to all of the Navy’s vague plans for the ship, and never said, “We’re not going to do this, we’re not going to sign up to do this because in the end you’re gonna blame us. We won’t do it,’” said Bryan Clark, a retired naval officer and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “The vendors didn’t stand up and say, ‘We can’t do it. The issues with the LCS started at its inception, when the Navy moved so fast that it didn’t do detailed planning on what the ships should be, or how they would be employed, until after Congress began appropriating money. It is difficult to add up all the money the Navy has spent on the LCS program, but the current ships are coming in at close to half a billion dollars each, almost double the early promises that pegged the ships at about $250 million apiece. “The only winners have been the contractors on which the Navy relies for sustaining these ships.” “We have spent billions of dollars on this fleet when they have no capability to help us deal with what our largest threat is, which is that of China and Russia,” she said. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing last month, while displaying a poster depicting the LCS as lemons. We have a fleet of lemon LCS ships,” Rep. There is still plenty of anger on Capitol Hill over a program that promised so much and has delivered so little. Those surviving ships will include six Freedom-class hulls built by Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Wisconsin that will feature the surface warfare package, and 15 Independence-class ships built by Austal USA in Alabama equipped with the mine countermeasures technologies - a technology that has yet to deploy. The Navy wants to keep just 21 littoral combat ships overall, a far cry from the 50-plus ships it planned in the early 2000s. They were meant to be cheap - and have a small crew.Īfter a series of design failures, cost overruns and mission changes, now the Navy is saying that the scaled-down ambitions for the program are beginning to be met, albeit years late.Ī look at the numbers shows that while the two mission packages appear to work, only the surface warfare module has actually deployed, while the minehunting module is still a work in progress but appears functional. The two classes of littoral combat ships, as envisioned 20 years ago, were meant to be lightly armed, shore-hugging vessels built to carry “plug-and-play” modules that could be swapped out for various missions, such as hunting mines and fighting off small boats. “At issue is the warfighting contribution those capabilities will provide in a changed strategic environment.” “The LCS is on trend to meet design requirements for the and missions as they were established ~20 years ago,” the report states. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |