8 Things You Need to Know About the Navy’s Failed Multibillion-Dollar Littoral Combat Ship Program

on today's episode of what's going on with shipping propublica has published the inside story of how the Navy spent billions on the little curtain Little Ships hi I'm your host Salma cogliano so yeah propublica went full bore in calling the littoral combat ships the little crappy ships a nickname that many of on the waterfronts of U.S Navy bases have for the littoral combat ships this is a program that has gotten a lot of attention over the past two decades and while what's going on with shipping tends to focus on commercial shipping I think this is really reflective too of shipbuilding issues within the United States that impact not just the US Navy but also commercial shipbuilding and more importantly the ability of the US Navy to be out there on the waterfront ensuring the safe movement of goods around the world if you're new to the channel hey take a moment subscribe to the channel and hit the Bell so you'll be alerted about new videos as they come out all right let's go ahead and look into some little crappy ships so before we even start let's talk about my pet peeve with littoral combat ships first up the designation littoral combat ships these were a class of ships along with cgx and DDX were going to be developed at the beginning of the 21st century they're going to be a next generation of vessels post Cold War looking forward to the 21st century and littoral combat ship was just the concept name for them it was not supposed to be their whole designation they are known as LCS they're a designated LCS 1 through 30 something and they never should have been this they should have been a frigate they should have been a Corvette they should have been a patrol whatever something calling them lcs's is just a thing the Navy has started to do with things it's like designating Sea Wolf uh submarines SSN 21 they were the 21st century submarines being built and instead they gave them the hull numbers SSN 21 22 23 calling these things LCS is like designing you know uh you know big honking ship and then calling it BHS one and two and three it's it's stupid I I don't know why the Navy did it and you would think this is the worst thing they would have done but that's not it either the two ships are from two classes there's the freedom class the model hole on the left and then the independence class the trimaran on the right and I have never seen proof of this but I am almost a hundred percent sure that the derivation of these names come from One Source freedom is not a name that's been used very much in the history of the US Navy Independence has the the last Independence was a aircraft carrier a uh a forestall-class aircraft carried before it there was a light aircraft carrier class named for it but I'm pretty sure that these things come from the movie Armageddon because that was the name of the two space shuttles that were used uh Armageddon comes out in the late 1990s and then this class is developed in the early 2000s I am almost 100 sure somebody sat there and said let's name them after freedom and Independence gotta love the US Navy all right this is in truth all part of a larger plan by the U.S Navy to develop what was then conceived as a 355 ship Force goal 355 ships were nowhere near that we're under 300 ships now but these lcs's were part of this and they were going to be part of the 52 ships that made up what was called the small surface combatants we were getting rid of the frigates the old Oliver has Perry frigates we're going away we're phasing out the minesweepers that we had the mcm's and the mhcs and the idea was you're going to build 52 littoral combat ships and these vessels would provide a multi-mission role that we're going to discuss this is from the Congressional research study that was done on the Navy littoral combat ships these are updated periodically this is on backgrounds and issues for congress they talk about the issue about the 355 ship Force call but then they say this the ls LCS is a relatively inexpensive surface combatant we're going to talk about that in a second the uh with modular Mission packages the LCS program included two different very uh two very different LCS designs LCS won the freedom and lcs2 the independence built at different yards lcs1 is built up in marionetta Wisconsin with uh Marinette marine and Lockheed and lcs2 is built down at austal USA in Mobile Alabama the LCS program has been controversial over the years due to the Past growth design and construction issues with the first LCS concerns over survivability concerns over whether lcs's are sufficiently armed it would be able to perform their stated missions effectively and concerns over the develo element and testing of the modular Mission packages for lcs's the Navy's execution of the program has been a matter of congressional oversight attention for several years this has led to a GAO report that is very similar to that that the LCS has not demonstrated the operational capabilities it needs operational testing has been found several significant challenges including the ship's ability to defend itself if attacked the Navy is behind in developing the mission modules GAO found the lcs's frequently encountered challenges during deployments that's being very nice the Navy has begun to take steps to address some of these issues but it does not have a comprehensive plan to address it and without that comprehensive plan there's concerned about future deployments this in turn has led propublica to put this piece together and I read through the full propublica piece if I have a criticism of it right off the bat I will tell you is that it's dated there's there's newer information out there than what's in this this thing just came out on September 7th 2023 but it is not a full kind of iteration of all the problems it is a typical propublica piece uh very well done they always have these snazzy little Graphics here with it I do like the fact that when you phase out from the LCS what you see is a Ticonderoga class cruiser and spruance class destroyers that are nowhere around anymore but they're all kind of rusty which has been a big issue with the Navy but then it goes into the full piece here and it has a couple of key takeaways right right here one Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more littoral combat ships even as they broke down at Sea in their weapon systems failed the Navy wound up with more ships than it wanted an estimated lifetime cost more than 100 billion or more the Navy's hasted delivery ships took precedent over combat ability without functioning weapon systems the vessels are like quote box floating in the ocean one former officer said third Sailors and officers complain they spent more time fixing the ships than sailing them we're going to talk about that top Navy commanders Place pressure on subordinates to sail the ships even when the crews and vessels were not fully prepared to go to Sea finally several major breakdowns in 2016 exposed the limits of the ships and their Crews each adding fresh embarrassment to a program meant to propel the Navy into a more advanced technologically advanced future I'm not going to go through the full propublica piece because it's massive instead I want to look at another piece they put out that looks and highlights and eight things you need to take or need to know about the Navy's failed multi-billion dollar littoral combat ship program so item number one Navy officials vastly underestimated the cost to build the ships in estimates provided to Congress the original price tag more than doubled the concept of LCS was we're going to build a ship that's going to operate in the littorals close to the shore they're not going to be front line units they're not going to go toe-to-toe against enemy destroyers and and you know basically be front line units but they're going to perform the missions that are kind of secondary they're they're kind of the the Cerritos of the U.S Fleet you know they're not supposed to be the front line they're not the Starship Enterprise but instead they're the the kind of the secondary vessel the problem is the cost went through the roof there was supposed to be about 220 million a piece they're now costing over half a billion a piece and not only that the ships provide a lot but to get what they provide you lose a lot and what do I mean by that so these ships are extremely fast you're talking about over 40 knots most ships Navy vessels will hit maybe about 30 35 knots that tends to be the limit where it goes these ships push well beyond that and understand on any vessel you can get three things whether you're a warship or a commercial Vessel number one speed the more speed you want the more you lose if you if you imagine a ship is like a pie graph these are the three areas you have so number one is speed the faster you go that takes up room that can be used by other things so you need a bigger plant you need more engine space you need more horsepower more battery more everything this is going to take up a huge amount of room second range these ships do not have huge range but they do consume so much fuel that fuel is a major component of these vessels because you're going so fast you need a lot of fuel on these vessels but you don't have long range so food I mean Fuel and and power eat up a lot of the spaces and then what you have left is really room for weapon space or Cargo in the case of a cargo ship in this case it's weapon space and these ships are really short on weapon space they don't have a lot on weapons and the weapons they do have have a fatal flaw as you're going to find out so all of these contribute to this concept right here or the vessel costing much more with them plus the propulsion systems are a problem unto itself which we'll discuss so number two the ships were supposed to be equipped with interchangeable weapon systems to allow them to fight hunt submarines and detect mines and navy failed to make this happen so as in the story they talk about the fact that one of the chief of Naval operations went and goes witnessed the Danish Navy with what's called Stand Flex the the Danish Navy developed a system which is modular that you can plug and play these modules into their ships and the U.S Navy love those they thought that this is a great way we can turn ships into surface-to-surface vessels they can fight other ships on the high seas or they can be used to anti-submarine to hunt submarines or they can be used to hunt mines and the idea is you plug and play you pull these modules off you drop them in and boom you're set and go problem is it never work that way and more importantly the Navy never designed the modules first they designed the ships first and then the modules came second they never took the time to design the modules necessary and you know put them on a test vessel of some kind run them out there to make sure that it worked the way they wanted so for example the anti-submarine weapons don't work at all on this ship they've actually decided not to fit any anti-submarine Warfare because this towed sonar system that was going to be pulled behind the vessel doesn't work very good because the ships generate so much noise and so much wake that it disrupts the uh the ability of the towed array to hear that and really the only thing that's been working so far on these vessels which took a long time to get in is the surface Warfare the extra guns the Mind system is still in development which is critical because the the US Navy has been phasing out its minesweepers we're at a point in the US Navy where we're in a critical shortfall in mind detection and mine hunting gear and they have not yet fielded the First full complement of mine lcs's this is a massive problem for the US Navy because mines are what kill ships if you look at post World War II to today what has sunk most U.S Navy vessels in that period is mines third scores of sailors and officers spent more time trying to fix the ships than sailing them oh one of the selling points of LCS was they're gonna have a small crew 40 people I don't know if you've ever been on a U.S Navy ship before but the one thing that is characteristic of a US Navy ship is there's a buttload of people on these ships I worked in the commercial side I worked for military sea lift command I've worked with commercial ships you open a bridge of a commercial ship or an MSC ship yeah there's people up there you know maybe two three maybe a lot on an MSC ship during an underway replenishment you go into U.S Navy bridge I have no idea who the 20 people are up on that bridge and what they're doing but it's a lot of people and you're talking about getting out of the mindset of operating with scores of people to a crew of about 40. now you're looking at operating about 75 so so one of the things they had to do is put more people on these vessels because they realized they didn't have enough people on board which meant their birthing and habitability was not well planned and so now you've got to share facilities you've got a hot bunk and get more people together add to it a lot of the equipment that's on the ship can only be repaired by the contractors because the contractors have proprietary software and material on it which they will not share with the Navy so if a diesel generator goes out if a crane goes out you need to get a Contractor on board to do it you get actually periods of time where these uh LCS Crews were trying to fix the vessels but there was only so much they can do because they weren't allowed to touch some of the equipment for the Navy relied so heavily on contractors for maintenance repair that Sailors and officers were unable to fix their own ships is the the inverse of the story by the way one time you have you're the one aspect you have this where the sailors are trying to fix the ships uh they spend more time doing it the other time they can't touch the equipment so they're trying to fix what they can fix they don't have enough people to do that and then the stuff they need to get fixed to be underway they can't touch because they have to wait for a contractor to come on board and so LCS creates this weird environment where Sailors cannot do their jobs that they typically have done in the past you've got to rely on contractors and that costs a lot of money and money that was not appropriately planned for it just ruins the reliability of the vessel and the ability to deploy it fifth a string of high profile breakdowns at Sea beginning in late 2015 laid bare the limits of the ships and the crew one of the things this piece does extremely well but nowhere near enough in my opinion is talk about the incidence of these ships breaking down and they don't go in enough detail about it I would argue so one of the big things on the freedom class the monohull was What's called the combining gear so to get to that high speed they did both ships used different systems the monohull the freedom class operates on the diesel engines and then to get the really high speed you combine in gas turbines and what you have to do is take all that power from those engines combine it together into water thrust coming out of jets out of the back the independence class does it differently by each engine Diesel and gas turbine hooked to different Jets so basically each engine is is kind of slaved into a different jet the freedom combines it all together and the problem with that combining gear was initially there was poor maintenance done on it the engineering Crews were not well trained on it then when they went into full production they shifted the manufacturer of the combining gear and that combining gear was found to have a fault in it and began to break apart now there's a fix to to repair them however with the US Navy has begun to do is just retire the ships before they're even fixed but they talk about this in the piece the fact that these engines began to suffer breakdowns along the way the other piece they didn't talk about is the independence class which is a aluminum trimaran you have to be careful about where you sell that ship in terms of sea State uh you know if you're a U.S Navy ship driver you're used to putting the Hammers down and barreling through an ocean and not worried about it in an aluminum Hull vessel you do that you're going to crack the vessel and that's what's happened with the independence class matter of fact we see that with Docking issues early on in Mayport there was an issue in the Panama Canal because the other problem you have with these ships is their their water jet propelled they're not propellers they're water jets so imagine a jet ski if you've ever been on a jet ski and you take your you know hand off the throttle you have no control over the jet ski anymore that's the same thing with these vessels when you have jet propulsion and you take the power off the Jets you're going to go wherever that ship wants to go and in the case of several vessels they went into the side of the Panama Canal and damaged the aluminum's superstructure you also had a vessel like the Little Rock which they don't talk about in the piece got stuck up on the Great Lakes for a winter because it was a late commissioning it was over in Buffalo where the cruiser Little Rock was the ship was delayed getting out of Buffalo and it got iced in and trapped in the Great Lakes for an entire winter and again that story was not conveyed and I think it's such a perfect one on the lcs's six top Navy commanders pressured subordinates to sail even when the crews and ships were not fully prepared to go to seat man one of the things they do really well in this is talk about when lcs's were deployed out to the fleet for Rim pack exercises out to Singapore how the commanders were really pushing the poor Crews to get vessels out even though they sat there and said we can't go we've got water in in the engines we've got breakdowns this is unsafe and yet they did it and in some cases catastrophically damaged engines to the point where ships had to be towed back had engines had to be rebuilt it was just a cluster I don't know why they barreled so fast into this the whole concept by the way was to build two ships from the two different construction areas one from the freedom class up in Marinette and then the independence class down in alstall and they were going to build them and kind of compete them against each other they're actually going to build two of each and compete them against each other well they initially build the freedom and Independence then they canceled the third and fourth one the Coronado and the Fort Worth then they re-authorized them again those four ships were going to be test ships they were going to be the ones they test everything on they were not going to be the full combat versions but then out of those four they were going to decide which one to build either the the monohull freedom class or the trimaran independence class and instead they decide to build both which is I I don't know how to say it Beyond moronic it really is because you're building two distinctly different classes of vessels that are not compatible at all together use different equipment different Machinery that they're just completely different and if you have problem with one class you can't really replace them and they're designed for different operational environments the US should have chose one class and gone with it but instead they went with both now they did it because they wanted to get chips out in the fleet faster there's political pressure to do this it makes more congressmen and Congress and Senators happy because you're building both in Alabama and in Wisconsin but in truth it was a disaster from the beginning and every time anybody said let's take a moment and pause here nobody did and instead they kept on trucking that's probably the worst part of this program seven one Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more of the ships even as they broke down at Sea and their weapon systems failed the Navy wound up with more ships than it wanted at an estimated lifetime cost about 100 billion 35 literal combat ships have been built initially there's going to be 52 then they were down to 20 then they went up to 32 and then they added three more on top of the 32 for a total of 35 to keep Austin shipbuilding up and running until it could get the contract for the second Freedom class excuse me the second consolation class frigates which they haven't gotten because Austell is in a disastrous position right now because of its management and what you see here all the time is the leadership of the Navy both civilian Secretary of the Navy and Admirals not making good decisions uh he talked about here former Navy secretary Ray mabis said the Navy took the break down seriously but it did not seem from what we were looking at that it was a systematic problem I don't know how Ray maybe says that with an honest face he's one of the longest-serving Navy secretaries in history and yet he watched these ships fail repeatedly over and over again and what gets me is they were not listening to the crews and the people on scene who were on board the vessel you know young Navy Lieutenant commanders were you know getting command for the first time are going to do whatever they have to do to succeed because if you fail at your your command you're never going to become an admiral and they put these men and women in positions of failure every time and then they're shocked shocked I tell you that these things fail I don't understand this whole program and then eight lawmakers with shipyards districts played a key role in expanding the program and protecting it from scrutiny one of the guys who came out violently against this program was was former Senator John McCain who ran for president and died he and his staff were completely against this he said that he knew that this was a boondoggle that was happening and tried to kill the program on multiple times but senators and congressmen from those areas repeatedly would counter him on it and you know the argument was the Navy validated the concept they kept saying that we need these ships for this Mission we need 32 ships we need 32 ships yet what we're seeing right now is the Navy's retiring these vessels ships are being towed out away from the dock right now without ever having had much service life is it an August 15th Story by Mike Schuller over G Captain U.S Navy to commission's five-year-old littoral combat ship USS Sioux City this is LCS 11. this is one of of the freedom class vessels I understand the city of Sioux City these ships were named largely for smaller towns and communities and so it was a big event when the Navy decides to name a vessel for these areas so Coronado Fort Worth all these little towns got these ships and and when Sioux City was commissioned this Sioux City Iowa went full out you know they had huge events it cost the city lots of money to sponsor these events and now you're decommissioning the ship after five years the city of Sioux City is talking about suing the US Navy uh for to recouping their losses over this because these ships are being taken out and let's be clear there were moments moments in this program inflection moments Bob work who was a former Secretary of the Navy uh wrote a piece about this talked about all the failures of the program where the senior Navy leadership both Secretary of the Navy chief of Naval operations the head of Naval sea systems command the head of surface Warfare for the U.S Navy all should have sat there and said this is not working the amount of plans that came out you know there were going to be three crews for every two ships and then a deployment or we're gonna have the blue and gold system of two Crews on a vessel uh you name it every time you turned around there were some new LCS plan to come out and understand the first ship was launched in 2008 and we still still just have one Mission set modules for surface combat we've lost the anti-submarine one the anti-mind one is just coming online now but the the idea that you've been building if you've run through the program you've built all 35 ships now and you are retiring them and you still don't have the mission modules is insane it's insane it's the reason why these ships got the nickname not littoral combat ships but little crappy ships now let me be clear I am not an enemy of the literal combat ships I oppose the US Navy decommissioning these I think you fix them and you make them work a hull is a Hull and there's a lot of systems you can do you can make them into drone carriers you can make them into expeditionary Warfare vessels by putting Marines on board uh you make the mission modules work uh you can still get 20 years out of these ships but the idea that the Navy is Towing these off into Reserve decommission yards is is Criminal am I my opinion and let me be clear that a lot of people have written about this over the years if you ever listen to the podcast mid-rats with Commander salamander in Eagle One they have talked about this for a long time just go through U.S naval Institute proceedings and all the big journals simsac you name them they have been articles written about lcs's since the very beginning and the criticality of it the problem was the envisionment that Dom Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense back in the 2000s had was that post-cold war it's the end of History there's going to be no more peer-to-peer pressure peer-to-peer conflict we're going to be in this great world and what we'll need is small little vessels to patrol the world's oceans which is great this is exactly what you kind of do need you know you need offshore Patrol vessels offshore uh type type vessels but these vessels weren't built to that instead they were built to be this gee whiz we're going to make this the Swiss army knife of vessels and we're not going to build one class we're going to build two classes and they're going to be super fast because speed is better than armor and defense which the British learned in the first world war when you name a ship the Invincible and it sunk It's not a good sign this is a flawed concept from the very beginning if these were 30 knot vessels with long endurance they were able to sit on station be self-sustaining in terms of Maintenance and Repair then you would have a vessel that you can send out there like an offshore Patrol cutter or an offshore Patrol vessel and leave them on station that's what the U.S needed in this a vessel like that look at the British and the river class look at the offshore Patrol vessels that the U.S Coast Guard is looking to build right now or the National Security Cutters the US Navy is building right now that's what you needed you needed a ship with redundancy in in propulsion with good range with fuel efficiency so that can cruise at low speeds and stay on station for long times for Point defense and can show the flag these are not designed to go toe-to-toe against Russian and Chinese guided missile destroyers these were designed for a much different Mission and I think we're forgetting that when it comes to it we're focusing on the negative of the lcs's and just did for nearly 30 minutes but there's still a platform that can be used the U.S Navy has done this time and time again with platforms we build 200 something four stack destroyers in World War one and then we repurpose them into seaplane tenders and and and and amphibious assault ships you name it same thing with lsts after World War II we turn them into all these different various things you could do the same thing with the lcs's you just got to have the vision the imagination to do it and more importantly the commitment to do it but again I just don't think we tend to have that right now instead what we're doing is we're phasing out lcs's we're building frigates now up in marionette uh the constellation class but even them they're built to a Italian French design the frem frigate but they're not going to be in service until 2030. and it's only 20 23. and it's just hard to figure out how the US Navy goes before Congress screams that we need ships there are threats out there we need to counter while at the same time you're towing away ships that are five years old and scrapping them I just don't understand it I hope you enjoyed today's episode I I don't join today's episode it's terrible I don't like talking bad about the Navy believe me I don't at all but it bothers me that this happens if you enjoyed today's episode take a moment subscribe to the channel hit the Bell so if you learned about new videos as they come out leave a comment share it across social media give it a thumbs up and if you can support the page how do you do that well you can hit that super thanks button down below or go over to patreon and become a monthly or yearly subscriber or if you'd like you can buy yourself an LCS you can help the US government out and take an LCS off their hands I'm sure they'll sell you one they have a whole batch fairly new almost never been used very low C miles until our next episode

Channel: What is Going on With Shipping?

Views: 121,944

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Id: -5TuEKg48jY

Length: 29min 6sec (1746 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 09 2023