Navy's Littoral Combat Ship: "Big Bucks, Little Bang"

By BEN FREEMAN

The Navy’s newest ship, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), is woefully inferior to comparable ships, according to an article written by John Sayen for Time magazine’s Battleland blog.

Sayen, a Marine Corps veteran who has written extensively on the military, says that the LCS “cannot match the combat power of similar sized foreign warships costing only a fraction as much.” Even with its mission modules, which won’t be fully finished or tested for years, it compares poorly with similar ships in foreign navies. Sayen provides several examples (excerpted below with permission of Time):

The new Russian Steregushchy-class frigate, for example, is (at 2,200 tons) about 30% smaller than an LCS and cost only 20-25% as much. Yet, it carries a 100mm automatic gun, 14.5-mm machineguns, close-in defense “Gatling gun” systems (AK-630), medium range surface to air missiles (S400 series), SS-N-25 anti-ship missiles (sub-sonic and shorter ranged than the US Harpoon but far more capable than the Griffin), 533-mm (21”) torpedoes, 324mm anti-submarine torpedoes and a helicopter. The ship is not only in production for the Russian Navy but also for the navies of Algeria and Indonesia. A version is also being built for China.

The Swedish Visby-class corvette was one of the models on which LCS was based. It carries the same 57mm gun plus antisubmarine rockets and torpedoes, anti-ship missiles, a radar-deflecting hull, and a helicopter pad (but no hangar, apparently). It can also reach 35 knots but it is only a fifth as large.

The Chinese have more than 80 Houbei-class fast-attack boats in service. Each costs only $40 million to build and displaces only 220 tons (one-fifteenth as much as an LCS). Yet they carry C-801 series anti-ship missiles that greatly outrange any weapon the LCS has.

About the only threat the LCS might handle is the “swarms” of Iranian machinegun and RPG-carrying speedboats in the Persian Gulf. Apart from the fact that the Iranian crisis will have been resolved for better or worse before most of the LCS fleet can be built, these Iranian small craft lack weapons big enough to menace any serious warship.

In short, the LCS costs more, yet brings less firepower to battle than comparable ships that aren’t riddled with cracks, corrosion, and failed equipment. Sayen makes the critical point that, even if you believe the Navy should be doing the missions the LCS was designed for, they can still be done at a fraction of the cost.

In this fiscal climate, the Pentagon can’t afford to keep throwing more bucks after less bang.

Read Sayen’s full article on Battleland.

Ben Freeman is an investigator with the Project On Government Oversight.

Follow @BenFreemanDC

Comments

[Dfens]

If you are happy living in a country that can only make this happen with computer animation 70 years after this this ship was kicking ass and taking names in WW2, then, by all means, thank a defense contractor.

[Dfens]

I remember when they interviewed the captain of the Mighty Mo' before it was to sail up the Straights of Hormuz. He said that he wasn't entirely unconcerned about the off chance his ship might get hit by an Exocet. After all, it would probably mess up the paint near where it hit and they'd need to put a crew over the side to touch it up. It's not like they were going to sail into port with a soot mark on one side of the ship. It was a matter of pride.

Damn I miss those days! There's nothing that says, "mine's bigger" than big ass battleship sporting 12 16" guns sailing a few miles off the shore of your enemy. You want a piece of this? Well whatcha waiting for?

[pat b]

DARPA has a program called TEMP (Temporary Employment of Maritime Platforms),
the idea being to use container ships with modular weapons systems in cargo containers.

It seemed promising. Very low cost, All hit, no ability to take a punch, except container boats are big enough, that many systems won't cripple them despite poking holes in them.

During the Iraq/Iran tanker war, the Iraqis were shooting exocet ship killers into loaded oil tankers with little effect. One into the midsection of HMS sheffield sent her to the bottom.

what ever happened to that program.

[Dfens]

Was our Navy better when it had 600 US Navy designed ships, or is it better now? The US Navy designedIowa class battleship cost $100 million per ship to build in 1943. They were designed in months, not years, by engineers using pencil on paper drawings and slide rules instead of computers. In today's dollars that would amount to $1.3 billion. Today's Little Crappy Ships being designed by our usual complement of fine upstanding defense contractor corporations whose stock is traded on the international market are years behind schedule, cost $3.8 billion to design and cost $1.8 billion each to build. Which would you rather have? How long are you going to let these contractors waste your money? Hell, the US Navy pays them more to screw up and drag out the design of these ships than it does if they were to come up with a good design on time and on budget. Is that what passes for being a good steward with your money? How long are you going to get screwed before you say "enough"?

[Henry J Cobb]

Numbers of ships is not the issue here. It's getting the mission done. The role of the LCS is to stand off and apply unmanned craft to hunt down threats.

The USS Makin Island cost less than four LCS (at their new inflated prices) and yet has over eight times as much carrying capacity, in addition to all of those Marines of course. (And it's better defended than either LCS of course.)

[Mustaffa 68]

Would Mr. or Ms. Defens be so kind as to prove his allegations of bribery, etc.? For those who know, the debacle that is US naval shipbuilding has been decades in the making and is the product not of financial greed, but rather colossal incompetence by admirals, career civil servants, generations of politically appointed overseers, a negligent Congress, and the usual level of incompetence and laziness one finds in the noncompetitive parts of the MIC, e.g., shipbuilding. SUPSHIPS and the Naval Sea Systems Command would be incapable of marshaling the brainpower to do most of the tasks Mr. or Ms. Defens would like them to do. Maybe in WWII, but not much recently. Perhaps Mr. of Ms. Defens' company has something to do with this rip off of the American taxpayer. Is Defens man or woman enough to become a whistleblower? Patriotic enough?

[Dfens]

When the Navy designed its own ships, it had over 600 in the fleet. Now that they use defense contractors to do the design work, they can't keep 280 small, almost defenseless ships afloat. How much longer is the US taxpayer going to put up with the outsourcing of jobs that have been proven beyond any doubt were better performed by government employees instead of defense contractors? Let the defense contractors supply the hourly labor to build the ships, but the brain work associated with design and development needs to stay in-house with the US Navy. The number of bribes and kick-backs it took to get the entire command structure of the Navy to accept the current outsourced development approach must be staggering. Or was it 30 pieces of silver, the customary rate for selling one's soul?