LCS Love

At the Navy League's annual SeaAirSpace symposium last week, Navy Under Secretary Bob Work delivered a passionate defense of the Littoral Combat Ship, pushing back against critics who doubt the effectiveness of the ship and the wisdom of buying 55 of them. As Inside the Navy reports this morning:

"People who don't get the LCS don't understand what design we're going for," Work said April 18 during a panel on budget challenges. "We have to prove the LCS is a good platform. I know there are a lot of skeptics. But this ship is the right ship at the right time for the right fleet design, and this will be the best United States Navy battle force that history has ever seen."

Work said the critics are mistaken for comparing the fleet size of today with the fleet size in years past, saying that the "only question you ask yourself is, 'How many ships do we need to implement the national strategy of today?'"

He said the 600-ship Navy concept of the 1980s called for 138 anti-submarine warfare ships, and today's ASW threat "isn't as bad" as during that era, "so we have replaced those 138 ASW ships with 55 multipurpose vessels called the LCS." The 138 ships of a 1980s Navy would be able to provide 34 ships forward on a day-to-day basis, whereas 55 LCSs will be able to push 27 forward at any given time, Work added.

Navy acquisition chief Sean Stackley gave a brief update of the LCS program during a Senate Armed Services seapower subcommittee hearing last week:

The history of the startup of this program is well known. I'm not going to re-plow that turf there. However, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, we have the first follow-on ships that -- one near complete; the LCS-3 up north is complete and her builder's trial is getting ready for acceptance trial to be delivered this spring. Near textbook -- it's going extremely well in terms of schedule, in terms of being on target, in terms of quality of construction. That's the result of not just plowing in the lessons learned from the lead ship, but the significant investment that was made by that shipyard to support this construction program. Separate but very similar on the Gulf Coast: Austal, which is nine to 12 months removed from the construction up north simply by the sequencing of the contracts -- again, plowing the lessons learned, investing in the facilities, accomplishing the training that needs to be accomplished for the workforce, cleaning up the design, and we're seeing the same rate of improvement on the Gulf Coast.

So both construction efforts north and south are quickly capturing lessons learned from the lead ships, making the investments necessary and on the production ramp that we need to see to support the 55-ship program. That's the construction side.

So we see stability. We see steady improvement. We see good cost returns on the front end of this dual-block buy strategy.

Now we have to be talking about mission packages. The mission package development efforts we have today, three-plus mission packages in development: mine countermeasures, anti-surface warfare and anti- submarine warfare. As well, we have a search and seize small module that we've put to work. These are developing -- they're conducting development testing to support their initial operational capability milestones in 2014 through 2016 time frame.

This spring, for example, we conducted the first shipboard demonstration of the mine countermeasure mission package onboard the Independence, working down at the Navy's warfare center in Panama City. It's the first time we brought all the elements that make up the first increment of the MCM package to the ship, operated with sailors. We learned some things, but we also demonstrated the ability to conduct these mission scenarios using the unmanned and remote operated vehicles that make up a large part of the LCS mission package.

So the development testing for the mission packages, in that case MCM separately, the antisurface warfare mission package, testing in effect -- we'll be outfitting the LCS 1 with the first increment of the anti-surface warfare mission package when it deploys next year to Singapore and then development of the ASW mission package all moving forward. So that effort lags the construction time frame by deliberation, so that the ships and mission packages are all IOC'ing in the middle of this decade.

The third important piece is fleet introduction. So we have one lead ship on the West Coast, LCS 1 and LCS 2 right now making its way to her home port in San Diego. So we're on the front end of fleet introduction at the same time. And as with any new ship class, we learn a lot. We also train up a sailor force that becomes proficient in this ship class.

So we're on the front end of this program. I don't spend too much time studying the reports that come from the press, other than to be aware of what information is out there and try to correct any misperceptions. But she's going well. We're learning a lot. We look forward to deploying LCS-1 next year and we've got a lot of work that we have to do to make sure that when she deploys, she is well supported and succeeds in all the mission areas that we assign to her.

When asked whether he saw any cost or technical problems of concern, Stackley responded: "I see cost under control. I think I've addressed that fairly well."