Littoral Combat Ship: Don't Learn the Wrong Lessons

James Hasik

Security,

Military modularity done right is too valuable to forgo.

Last week was Nordic Week in Washington DC, with a combined state visit by leaders from Finland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Denmark. This week was Sea-Air-Space, the annual confabulation of the Navy League at National Harbor, Maryland. So there’s no better time to discuss the Royal Danish Navy—or better yet, to criticize a criticism about the US Navy, taken too far. On Defense One this week, longtime think-tanker Lawrence Korb wrote about the “The Lessons of the Littoral Combat Ship” (LCS). The lessons are legion, no doubt, but it’s important not to learn the wrong lessons, drawing a general rule about modularity from the mismanagement of a specific program.

In the early 2000s, the US Navy sought a frigate-sized, shallow-draft ship to undertake a broad range of missions in foreign littoral waters. Two multinational teams—Lockheed Martin and Finmeccanica, and General Dynamics and Austal—won contracts to design and build the Freedom and Independence classes of warships. The Navy frankly oversold the cost at which the ships could be built, and then added cost by greatly altering the design requirements during the process. This was substantially to make them tougher for real combat, but even today, the GAO still doesn’t think that the survivability of the ships can be much improved. Sound quieting of the massive engines, essential for undersea warfare, seems to have been at best an afterthought. In his essay, Korb outlines more problems, but with this one I take exception:

"The second major mistake was assuming that a ship could not only be a minesweeper, but also have anti-submarine warfare, surface combat, and amphibious capabilities. How? The Navy would develop modules that could be placed on the ships rapidly. But rather than being able to rotate the plug-and-fight mission packages in days, it often took weeks or months. By 2012, the Navy admitted that modular changes would be a rare occurrence."