CNO: Navy is simplifying Littoral Combat Ship program

By Justin Doubleday / September 12, 2016 at 12:38 PM

The new changes to Littoral Combat Ship operations will simplify the much maligned program and potentially even make the ships more useful, according to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson.

“We're finding ways to simplify, I suppose, the Littoral Combat Ship program, that would allow us to at least achieve the aims of the program, maybe even improve on its usefulness, while we simplify the program as well,” Richardson said when asked about the changes at a Sept. 12 think tank event in Washington.

The sweeping changes are a result of a review directed by Richardson in February. They include a change to a “Blue/Gold” crewing model, a move away from exchangeable mission packages to a “one ship, one mission” construct, and a push to have ship crews conducting more maintenance, rather than relying on contractors.

A transcript of Richardson's full response is below:

“As with any new class of ship, the Littoral Combat Ship being one of the recent ones, you have this sort of vision for how the class will be conceptualized and built and deployed and how it will perform. And then you have the reality of how it comes to life. I think that the only mistake you can make is to be slavishly focused on your original vision, and the data from the actual deployments could teach you something.

As we deploy that ship, we're learning lessons in just about every area. The engineering, we've learned a lot about the engineering of the ship, and Adm. [Thomas] Moore, the head of Naval Sea Systems command, is responding to those with his team of engineers. We're learning lessons from a personnel standpoint and the crewing type of a rotation, and Adm. [Thomas] Rowden, as the head of the surface force, is responding to those. We're looking for continuing always to learn to see how we can get more usefulness out of this class of ship, whether that's a different form of deployment model.

And then everywhere we can in the Navy, we're really advocating for the simplest possible structure that will get the job done. So we're finding to simplify, I suppose, the Littoral Combat Ship program, that would allow us to at least achieve the aims of the program, maybe even improve on its usefulness, while we simplify the program as well. So we're really just adjusting to the data that we get, learning as we go forward and we think that in the end, we hope to have not only a more capable Littoral Combat Ship contributing to the larger fleet, but also a simpler concept to operating it.”

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