CDR Salamander

As part of the FY 2023 submission, the Pentagon proposed cutting warships from the Navy’s battleforce – including six cruisers, four Whidbey Island/Harper’s Ferry-class amphibious Dock Landing Ships, nine Littoral Combat Ships as well as Montford Point and John Glenn.

The youngest ship on the list, USS St. Louis (LCS-19), commissioned in 2020.

Years before LCS hull-1 was commissioned, we tried to warn the Navy what they were setting us up for. Long time members of The Front Porch know the story well, new folks can click the LCS-tab to catch up on a couple of decades of discussion.

I'm not sure even in our darkest moments we saw it coming to this much ruin...but perhaps we were optimists.

Imagine being one of the Sailors assigned to the St. Louis. "So, what did you do in the Navy?"

...and yet - where is our accountability for such a potlatchish waste of institutional capital and taxpayer money?

The above is clearly a generational failure by The Potomac Flotilla, and in an article by our friend Jerry Hendrix over at NRO, we have another example where The Potomac Flotilla has intentionally steered our Navy in to shoal water with barely a whistle, 

On Tuesday, the conservative Heritage Foundation released its annual “Index of U.S. Military Strength.” For the first time in the near-decade-long history of the index, it rated the U.S. military as “weak.” Implicitly criticizing multiple administrations, Heritage’s analysts charged that U.S. military forces are under-strength, under-trained, and under-funded, and thus are not ready to meet the current challenges of great-power competition. Heritage highlighted in particular the small size and poor material condition of the U.S. Navy and Air Force, which will be critical in facing a potential conflict in the Asia–Pacific region.

None of these failures are the fault of the Sailors and company and field grade officers in the Fleet - the ones our Navy has no problem holding to very public account for their failures - but of the senior uniformed and civilian leaders spanning multiple administrations ... and yet - who is being held to account?

Combine this with the fact that we tried to tie the loss of a multi-billion dollar large-deck amphib around the neck of an undesignated Seaman only to have him found not guilty after two years ... with still no one of note held to account but scapegoats ... where do the American people have to go in order to have their military leadership held to account?

Where? When? Who?

This should not be how any of this works.

Slightly flenching with memory, but always hoping that this time - this time - things will be different.

There is good reason for scepticism and concern. Firstly, we know the mindset and process that begat LCS and DDG-1000. We know that there wasn't really any accountability to "the system" for this. A system that has remained unchanged. 

The only thing that was considered satisfactory from that era was LPD-17 - a program that had enough money thrown at it so this Tiffany amphib could be a functional class of warships. FORD is, well, you know that drill.

So, we lost a generation of warships due to smart people in hard jobs who couldn't stop getting high off their own .... arrogance in thinking that they knew better than generations of successful warship development that came before them.

On the smaller warship side of the equation, when even its greatest advocates had to admit the comical failure of LCS, we decided to go down a path originally suggested here 14-years ago: stop building them and build an existing EuroFrigate until we can design one ourselves.

That's the patch for LCS. Like you, I have heard rumors of rumors of issues that we are messing with a successful design attempting to make it an unsuccessful design under a cloud of Good Idea Fairies, but hull-1 is under construction and we shall see. Putting a 57mm on a warship designed for 127mm or at a minimum 76mm was a bad enough tell of the corruption in our system (got to give LCS mod a chance for FFG(X) dontchaknow), but you have to work with the system you have.

Of course, on the larger surface ship part of the fleet, we just plain blew ourselves up. In spite of the clear lessons even early on about LCS and DDG-1000, our leadership sailed CG(X) in to unbuildablestan. That book is still unwritten, but when it is, it will reinforce your worst assumptions.

People, programs, and systems failed again with no accountability. 

See a pattern?

Without a cruiser program displacing water and ZUMWALT being a white elephant, what is a navy to do? Well, we ran our TICO until they coughed across the decommissioning line and decided to restart a Cold War era Arleigh Burke in to a Flight III because we had no choice.

We still don't have a replacement for the TICO CGs, but we do have a program to replace the Arleigh Burke DDGs (which the green eyeshade efficiency cult that created the mess we are in writ large want to be a replacement for DDG and the rapidly disappearing CG).

Yes, that should set off alarm bells. 

As a closet optimist, I was hoping that - and yes hope is not a plan but no one will let me fire people and Congress won't change the rules - the last two decades would humble our Navy in to not letting requirements get out of control, would keep the Good Idea Fairies from every underemployed office hovering around her, and blowtorch anyone who still has a transformationalist mindset. Alas, there are concerns.

It is very simple what the US Navy needs; hulls displacing water. As smarter generations did before with the SPRUANCE DD etc; you can design white space to grow in to as expected systems mature...but you let them mature. Don't believe the hype and the promises of happy-talking defense industry types - it is hard enough to build a new hull and engineering plant in itself - you must minimized overall risk by at least starting with know systems, weapons, and manning concepts that will ride in that hull.

We are already late and the lack of urgency is almost criminal. This isn't 1998-2002 anymore.

It is with that background that this report starts out sounding promising;

The first design contracts were awarded this summer to General Dynamics’ Bath Iron Works in Maine and Huntington Ingalls Industries in Mississippi for a large surface warship that would eventually follow production of the ubiquitous Burke destroyers.

All of that warfighting gear won't come cheap. The average cost of each new vessel, dubbed DDG(X), is projected to be a third more expensive than Burkes, the latest of which cost of about $2.2 billion apiece, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The Navy has vowed that it won’t repeat recent shipbuilding debacles when it rushed production and crammed too much new tech into ships, leading to delays and added expense with littoral combat ships, stealthy Zumwalt-class destroyers, and the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier.

“Rather than tying the success of DDG(X) to developmental technology, we’re using known, mature technologies on a flexible platform that can be upgraded for decades to come, as the technology of tomorrow is matured and demonstrated,” said Jamie Koehler, a Navy spokesperson.

...but there is a shadow;

Matt Caris, an analyst with Avascent, said the Navy is going to great lengths to prevent spending from getting out of control, from its view on mature technology and overall acquisition process to timetable. The first in the class of ship wouldn’t be commissioned until the mid-2030s.

“The Navy is trying to thread the needle with some potentially revolutionary capabilities in as low risk and evolutionary process as possible,” he said.

Others worry that the cost will become a drain on the rest of the fleet.

It’s possible that the Navy could afford only one of the ships per year, compared to current destroyer build rates of two to three per year, shrinking the size of the fleet over time, Clark said.

“They want to pile every mission on the the DDG(X) to make it sort of death star. They’re putting all their eggs in one basket financially,” he said.

The new destroyer represents the high end of the Navy’s aspirations.

To be frank, if anyone is using the word "revolutionary" in 2022 about such a critical warship, they should be reassigned to, oh I don't know, Thule.

This is the big danger though. I'll repeat it in case it didn't jump out at you the first time;

“They want to pile every mission on the the DDG(X) to make it sort of death star. They’re putting all their eggs in one basket financially,” he said.

The "they" there are the Good Idea Fairies, the agenda pimps, the transformationalists - the arrogant.

There is a battle right now with those who are correct in not rushing "revolutionary" and those who are convinced of their own perfection.

The time to fight and win that battle is right now before it is too late. 

This is what happens when you lack accountability for LCS and DDG-1000.

If like me you lack access to a lever of power, pray or support those who do. If you are someone who has access to a lever of power, now is the time to act. I have sat over adult beverages with those who regret their role in CG(X) enough - in a few years I want to raise glasses in support of a great new class of warships ... not have a somber table of regret.

PS: we still need a cruiser. Maybe we can build what the Japanese are pondering.

The Navy wants to shed 39 ships in Fiscal Year 2023, with the first ship set to depart on Halloween.

The list, which includes five guided-missile cruisers 

Armed neutrality is a good thing - it keeps an enemy at bay.

Being hostile while you are actively disarming yourself? That is begging for a whoop'n.

Inaction. Inattention. Slavish devotion to process. Entitlement. Distracted leadership.

That is how we got here – a destination we slid to this century on a carpet of happy-talk, half-truths, and aspirational time-buying.

First, let’s start with a statement that I could have made myself. Via David Sharp at AP;

Adm. Mike Gilday, chief of naval operations, defended the proposal that emphasizes long-range weapons and modern warships, while shedding other ships ill equipped to face current threats.

“We need a ready, capable, lethal force more than we need a bigger force that’s less ready, less lethal, and less capable,” he said Monday at the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space symposium in Maryland.

I would always want three effective warships as opposed to five worn out, worm-ridden with unpublished CASREPS, partially manned and maintained Command at Sea billets … but it didn’t have to be this way; this was a choice.

Anyway, this is just another way to say, "Divest to Invest" which is a kinder-gentler version of "Do More With Less" etc that we've all seen before.

We should have five warships - and need eight - but we don’t – and we are barely through the first 5th of The Terrible 20s. We did not get here by accident or by the action of external forces - but by decisions the Navy made.

No one is allowed to be surprised.

We are a dozen years past the announcement of “The Terrible 20s.” So the structural challenges of this decade were known a few PCS cycles before they began to manifest themselves in spades. 

Generations of leadership have been happy to let their Sailors be worked down to the bone in undermanned, rusty, poorly maintained ships on extended deployments with ships only partially mission capable. Little effort was made to promote either a replacement for Goldwater-Nichols, or push back against the Ottoman-effective “Joint” requirements. Less effort was made to bring the critical importance of sea power has in enabling the standard of living and place in the world of the American people enjoy to the ears of the American people.

We lost an entire generation of naval developments with programs like CG(X) that failed to launch, programs like DDG-1000 that failed to transition, and programs like LCS who exist only to mock our claim to be the world’s premier naval power. In some areas, we aren’t even that anymore. 

No. As we covered last month, the Navalist institutions have failed their moment and we are drifting rudderless into a minefield while those with the charter to provide and maintain a navy remain at their cocktail parties reminding each other how wonderful and influential they are in a potlatchesque onomastic orgy of feather-nesting – the future be damned.

We have wallowed in failure so long, we have forgotten how we got there.

How about a little Front Porch unintended call-out?

Some detractors proclaimed littoral combat ships to be the Navy’s “Little Crappy Ship,” but that’s not fair, said defense analyst Loren Thompson.

“It’s not a little crappy ship. It does what it was supposed to do. What it was supposed to do isn’t enough for the kind of threats that we face today,” said Thompson, from the Lexington Institute.

In the Navy’s defense, threats shifted swiftly from the Cold War to the war on terror to the current Great Power Competition in which Russia and China are asserting themselves, he said.

If you have to bring out Loren to defend you, you've lost the LCS argument. I mean, really people. As was even mentioned early on in the AP article, LCS was designed for a post-Cold War threat. This reads as satire, but it is serious as people think it is informed, objective opinion quoted in the article.

It isn't.

If we can't speak truth, we sail in a sea of lies and feast on a layer of error on top of error.

Enough of that rant, I am probably losing you ... let us behold the spawn of The Terrible 20s.

There are three stories here, all different, and all damning to the leadership of our Navy the last quarter century … but mostly the leadership of the first decade of this century. They begat the child the present leadership is having to raise – and still tell us what a great baby-daddy they are.

First let’s look at the list from NAVADMIN 181/22.

The three stories are the neglected unsexy but important, the worn out, and the snake-bit. 

1. The Unsexy but Important: The USNS ships range from 8 (Glenn) to 50 (Gordon/Gilliland) years old with an average of 36.2 years. Most should have been replaced years ago, but ... well ... you know. As a side note, if anyone knows the background on the T-ESD going away so young, let us know in the comments. I can't find anything.

2. Worn out: The SSN were both ~36-yrs old, the CG averaged 35 years old, and the LSD 33 years old. The way we use our fleet units, if after 30-yrs you can't replace them 1-for-1 then that is your fault. The PC's are 28 years old on average ... way beyond what those wee ships should be. Is the CNO right about these? Sure ... but don't say, "... less ready, less lethal, and less capable." - just be honest and say, "...worn out, unrepairable, and too dangerous to ask Sailors to go to war in." Be clear and direct. Be at least as blunt as we were defending the writings of Kendi.

3. Snake-bit: the Little Crappy Ship is little, crappy, and should probably be called a hulk. Average age here is 4.7 years, the youngest just 2 years. No one has been held to account. No one. If you are new to the LCS debacle or think the Front Porch is taking too much credit, well...here is almost 2-decades of commentary on LCS. We were right from the start. Something useful is being made with the Independence Class with more money and fewer expectations, but what an opportunity cost this misadventure has consumed.

In what has been a bad decade for the US Navy’s relationship with Congress – and an exceptionally bad year when our senior leadership expended what was left of institutional good will defending racial essentialism – it appears that the powers that be insist it wants to pick a fight with the organization that feeds them. That is just picking a fight. I'm all about picking fights, but this isn't the right one.

U.S. Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Virginia, was more blunt, tweeting that it “sucks” to be decommissioning so many ships, especially newer ones.

“The Navy owes a public apology to American taxpayers for wasting tens of billions of dollars on ships they now say serve no purpose,” she said.

Rep. Lauria (D-VA), the surface-nuke that she is – knows what time it is – and can mock the lame and weak as only a surface nuke can.

So, add this to your folder of affirmative failures of vision and verve. 

U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Virginia, suggested the ship cuts were “grossly irresponsible” when the U.S. Navy has dipped from 318 ships to 297, while the Chinese fleet has grown from 210 to 360 ships over the past two decades.

Milley said it's important to focus on the Navy's capabilities rather than the size of its fleet.

“I would bias towards capability rather than just sheer numbers,” he said.

Milley doesn't know the difference between a MK-41 and a SeaRAM. 

What happened to "distributed lethality?" Nothing to the concept, it just seems that our leadership lacks the ability to have a sustained baseline strategy that lasts longer than a FITREP cycle and instead invents new buzzwords to chase around like a catnip addled kitty after a laser pointer. That and it is shamed by the empty piers LCS, DDG-1000, and CG(X) begat our already cursed decade of decline.

The 2020s were going to be hard whatever we did, but by our collective action, we have made it worse. The US Navy has earned a long, painful, and distinguished period of oversight from Congress that will hopefully result in a wholesale rebuild of our shipbuilding people, process, and procedures. 

If not, well ... the US Navy and the nation it serves had a good century in the sun. A hoot while it lasted. 

What follows will not be a hoot.

Last Wednesday I had a few observations on Jerry Hendrix's latest article over at National Review, “The Navy’s Littoral Hubris.”

Yesterday in comments, a man familiar to readers here, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, weighed in with some counterpoints that I feel need to be brought above the fold for your consideration.

With his permission, I've copied his comments in full.

There are the bones of one hell of a book here in six short paragraphs.  

Bob, over to you;

As he always does, my good friend Jerry writes a compelling, well written post. However, I think he misses an important point. The problems the Navy has faced has less to do about technological hubris and more with incompetence in developing cost-informed requirements and executable support processes.

Let's start with the Ford CVN. Back in the day-- around the time of the 1993 Bottom Up Review, long before the word transformation had found its way into Pentagon thinking--the Navy and Air Force were competing for the "rapid halt" mission. The thinking went that the enemy could launch an invasion of allied territory at a time of their own choosing. The job of the Joint Force was to halt the invasion as quickly as possible through intense guided munitions bombardment. The Air Force argued the best way to do this was using bombers and regionally based aircraft, which enjoyed a big advantage in sortie rates from land bases. The Navy was intent on proving they could match sortie generation rates from forward deployed carriers. To do that, they needed a new electromagnetic catapult system; an electromagnetic arresting system; new high speed low drag elevators, etc etc etc. They called for these new capabilities with no clear understanding of the cost to get them, or a sensible land-based prototyping and testing approach to work out the bugs before shipboard integration. It is true that OSD demanded that all the new technologies be incorporated into the first ship of class of the new CVNX (later Ford), rather than inserting them over the first three hulls. That caused a technology integration overload. But the original sin was setting new requirements with no clue how much it might cost to get them.

Then came the DD-21, aka DD(X), aka DDG-1000. The surface community knew that the 31-ship Spruance class was going to start decommissioning starting in 2005 (that was the plan, anyway). The community needed a plan to replace them. The community was also tired of taking a back seat behind the carrier and sub forces, a circumstance they were force to tolerate throughout the long Cold War. And it wanted to get in on the rapid halt mission. The arsenal ship was a conceptual start point. But the surface community wanted something even more exotic. So they called for a stealthy surface ship with deep magazines--missiles, or guns, or both. OSD was not the one pushing the stealth design. That was all Navy. And, in the end, the Navy designed a 15,000-ton battle cruiser with a hull that was literally too expensive to produce. The ship suffered the same technological overload at the Ford class, but the over-spec-ing of the ship was all Navy, not OSD. Again, these were sins of the Navy.

The LCS is a more complicated story. OSD told the Navy that OSD would not support their DD(X) unless there was a smaller combatant in the Navy's battle force. The Navy decided to get out of the frigate business during the 1997 QDR--again, a Navy decision. This meant the smallest surface combatant in the 21st century fleet would have a full load displacement of nearly 9,000 tons (DDG-51 Flt I). OSD didn't think the Navy could afford to build and maintain such a fleet. They were, of course, spot on...see fleet of today. The ONLY requirement OSD levied on the LCS program was that the Navy needed to be able to build three of the ships for the same cost as a DDG-51. And guess what? The Navy hit that mark. We just forget about it--and how important a metric it was.

Cost aside, the crewing, training, maintenance and deployment process decisions were all the Navy's to make. But every choice ultimately proved to be beyond the ability of the surface community to execute them. This was a case of process, not technological, overload. It appears the surface community may be finally figuring things out on the ship. But no objective review of the LCS fleet transition plan would conclude anything other than it was abysmally bungled.

The reason I think we have to remember these vignettes is we need to ask ourselves if we are about ready to repeat the process. IT DOES NOT MATTER THAT THE NAVY CHOSE A PROVEN DESIGN FOR FFGX. The Navy is cramming as many requirements and capabilities into the FFGX hull as they can. Eric Lab at CBO is convinced the Navy has once again overspec'd the ship and underestimated the costs to build it. I hope he is wrong. But if we can't build a minimum of two FFGXs for the cost of a DDG FltIII, it is not clear it is worth the cost, or the smaller fleet it will inevitably lead to.

Robert O. Work spent 27 years on active duty as a Marine artillery and MAGTF officer. He is a former Undersecretary of the Navy and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for a New American Security. He served as the Deputy Secretary of Defense alongside three Secretaries of Defense spanning both the Obama and Trump administrations.

Why must we continue to remind everyone who will listen of the failures of the Age of Transformationalism™? Simple; we cannot afford another generation of programs lost to arrogance, ignorance, and toxic command climates that leave bad ideas and ahistorical program assumptions go unchallenged.

Futurism, offset promises, overmatch assumptions, risk devaluation, divest-to-invest – these are all attractive ideas that brief well. They seem to promise to solve so many hard problems. They offer more for less.

They seem to allow an easy path; a way to avoid hard work and compromise … and to accrue to their advocates accolades as the “it guy/gal” who has all the vision and provides all the comfortable answers.

This is an ongoing fight. The Transformationalists won the bureaucratic war two decades ago with disastrous consequences to our Navy. The second and third order effects continue to haunt us as we approach the middle of the third decade of the 21st Century and by many measures the US Navy is now the world’s 2nd largest navy as a result.

We did this to ourselves.

To fix this we need to take affirmative action to grow our fleet. How we find the money to do that is for Congress to figure out, but grow it we must. To do that we need to understand, acknowledge, and study how we got here.

Over at National Review, our friend Jerry Hendrix has a must-read article that puts where we are in context and reminds people something we will have to repeat over and over this decade – we did this to ourselves. It is perfectly titled, “The Navy’s Littoral Hubris.”

The apparent operational successes in Operation Desert Storm (1990–91) and later during the breakup of Yugoslavia (1995–2000) convinced Navy and Department of Defense leaders that future operations would occur largely in permissive environments and against low-end small-state or non-state actors. Based upon these assumptions, they set about to design a Navy optimized to operate in littoral environments. The resulting ships, the Ford-class aircraft carrier, the Zumwalt-class destroyer, and the Littoral Combat Ship, were the products of these assumptions.

Each of these ships came with an additional fault hidden in its initial design: a hubristic belief that the moment had arrived when the United States could execute a significant technological “leap ahead” in ship design on par with the development of the HMS Dreadnought in 1905, a battleship that, according to legend, rendered all other existing designs obsolete with its launching.

The Ford-class carrier, which was optimized for increased sortie generation based upon a concept in which it would conduct high-tempo flight operations near the shores where the targets of its aircraft were, was designed with five major revolutionary changes. 

...

The USS Ford, which cost nearly $15 billion, was commissioned in 2017 but, because of problems with each of its new subsystems, has yet to deploy operationally overseas.

The Zumwalt-class “land-attack destroyer” was conceived with a unique mission and a set of technical challenges of its own. 

...

Currently the plan is to remove the gun mounts and use the space to carry the Navy’s new Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles. When escalating costs and technological challenges, along with a changing security environment, rendered the ship’s “land -attack” mission moot, the decision was made to truncate the class, with only three of the originally planned 32 ships being built. This leads us to the final innovative component of the “21st century” ships (the cruiser version of the “family” was canceled before construction of the first ship began): the two Littoral Combat Ship designs.

The LCS class of ship was to be small, fast, highly maneuverable, and, most important, inexpensive when compared with the multibillion -dollar-per-hull destroyers and cruisers that made up the remainder of the Navy’s surface force. 

...

Almost immediately, problems began to accumulate. ... The Navy’s leadership, which had conceived the LCS in an era when management theory dominated councils of power, made the decision to continue building the ships and send them to sea, charging young commanders and their crews to figure out how to make them work. Unfortunately, no amount of management, or leadership, for that matter, could overcome the flaws hidden within each design.

Congenital flaws began to emerge as each class became operational, resulting in their being referred to as “Little Crappy Ships” in navalist blogs and even professional literature. These inherent flaws immediately began to directly degrade the ships’ operational readiness. 

...

These two ship classes, designed for 25-year service lives, are being recommended by the Navy’s uniformed leadership for retirement a bare ten years after their commissionings.

Here is where this horrid two decades of delusion bears its fruit;

The loss of these ships would drop the Navy’s battleforce from the 298 ships it has today down to somewhere in the 270-ship range for some time to come. ... Congress has passed a law requiring the Navy to achieve a battleforce size of 355 ships, a goal that seems more unreachable with each passing year. 

Regulars on the Front Porch remember that we made this recommendation first in 2007 - 15 years ago;

In 2020 the Navy announced that it had selected the European multi-mission-frigate design, which is currently operated by four other nations, for modification and construction in the United States. Currently ten ships are planned, but there are clear indications that the number of Constellation-class frigates (as the category has been named) will grow considerably.

As a matter of fact, let's look back at how I started that October of 2007 post. 

Let me beat that drum a little harder - license build a EuroFrigate NOW!!! Do it while we still have time - time to keep the Fleet numbers treading water and have enough shipyards open.

A revolutionary project on PPT is just that - on PPT. An evolutionary project (see pre-WWII Cruiser development and the history of Carrier development as an example) results in ships pier-side and ships underway. Good officers have bought the line over this decade that LCS with all its toys will let them cover 10x more water than the old Spru-cans did - and do it better? ADS was to be one of the keys in doing this.

We have put all our eggs in that gilded crap-basket of an LCS - thanks to Sid, we have the proof much of the oversold ASW capability increase portion has gone poof. With ADS gone we now have, well, an poorly configured, expensive, undermanned Corvette.

There it is. We were not alone ... but there is it.

Back to Jerry's NR article. He ends with about a perfect note.

While it would be good to find ways to extend the lives of and make operational the LCS platforms that have been built over the past two decades, the Navy’s new frigates, along with the advanced Virginia-class fast attack submarines, will represent the modern balanced fleet that will give national policy-makers the confidence to maintain American interests in both peace and war. The previously conceived “21st-century family of ships,” expected to include the Littoral Combat Ships, will soon be forgotten artifacts of a hubristic past.

Indeed.

If you find people who are new to the maritime side of the natsec community or are not up to speed with how we got there, get Jerry’s article in front of their eyes. It is a superb 1-stop summary.

Half of the Navy’s littoral combat ship fleet is suffering from structural defects that have led to hull cracks on several vessels, limiting the speed and sea states in which some ships can operate, according to internal records obtained by Navy Times and confirmed by sea service officials.

...

documents obtained by Navy Times warn that cracks can grow if the ships transits faster than 15 knots in seas with maximum wave heights of about eight feet.

...

Such cracks have since been discovered on six of those LCS variants, according to Baribeau, nearly half of the 13-ship Independence class fleet.

Some ships are just cursed, snakebit, or ... well ... just a LCS.

Light a candle for the crew of USS Little Rock (LCS-9). 

Our friend Megan Eckstein doesn't mean to pick on the handicapped, but she's a professional and has a job to do;

Littoral combat ship Little Rock lost power while operating at sea and had to return to port on Jan. 22, according to a Navy spokesman.

The four-year-old LCS was conducting sea trials following a 19-month maintenance period in the dry dock at BAE Systems Shipyard in Jacksonville, Fla. The ship departed Naval Station Mayport on Jan. 21 for the contractor’s trials, LCS Squadron 2 spokesman Lt. Anthony Junco told Defense News.

During the operations at sea, the ship temporarily lost power.

“While conducting operations, engineering malfunctions were identified that resulted in a temporary loss of power, and the decision was made for the ship to return to Naval Station Mayport on Jan. 22, under its own power,” Junco said in a statement.

“The Navy is conducting a technical investigation on the root cause of the engineering malfunctions. While there is not currently any indication the casualty is related to the combining gear class issue, the investigation will examine all aspects of what occurred,” he continued.  

In February 2020, Little Rock departed Mayport for its maiden deployment, but had to return about six weeks later due to the combining gear failure. LCS Detroit suffered a similar failure in late October 2020 and also had to return home.

Big Navy has plans to put her out of her misery ... but still ... someone has to stay to the end

The future of Little Rock remains unclear. The Navy asked to decommission both it and five-year-old LCS Detroit in its fiscal 2022 budget in part because of the cost the service would incur in replacing the combining gear system and repairing damage incurred during that propulsion failure.

LCS; the gift that keeps on giving. 

Buy a round at Singleton's for the crew. Hey, at least they are stationed in Mayport and the sea and anchor detail is short.

Both the Freedom and Independence Class LCS have been - if we are to be polite - suboptimal in both utility and performance. We've documented that for the better part of 17-years and that record is all available at the LCS tag, so no need to rehash the whole sordid thing again.

Well ... maybe just a little bit.

Of course we should have adopted Plan Salamander as outlined over 11-yrs ago, but we have what we have. Smart people with hard jobs given enough Sailor sweat and seabags of cash have managed to get the Independence Class to contribute to the presence mission in WESTPAC, but as outlined in Megan Eckstein's latest at Defense News, Freedom remains the more troublesome of the sisters.

There is a nice graphic in her article that I know the folks on The Front Porch would get a little schadenfreudesque pleasure in seeing because it reflects what many of us predicted when The Smartest People in the Room™ told us that the mission-module concept would be all that and a box of chocolates. Of course, as led by our friend Chapomatic and others, even before this blog started in 2004, people were warning that it was - like the phantasmagoric manning CONOPS - simply not realistic with the humans we have. 

In the end, these would be single mission ships. That was clear, but those warning were dismissed. And so, BEHOLD!

The LCS program originally promised three mission packages, each interchangeable with any of the ship hulls and able to be swapped on demand. The Navy changed its operational model in 2016, assigning each ship to a division within the LCS squadrons based on a single warfare area, allowing the ship crews’ composition and training to be tailored to that warfare mission.

LCSRON 2 set up a mine countermeasures division in October 2020; the division and its ships will finally get their mission package early this year.

Hopefully one of the lessons Big Navy will take away from the Age of Transformationalism is that if your programs are moving forward through threats and silencing people to the point that everyone in the room agrees with you that - yes - we can ignore centuries of best practices because we are smarter and better than previous generations who did great things ... then perhaps you're not in a good place.

Good to see that the Freedom Class is starting to get its footing and BZ to the good people in hard jobs for making it happen. It isn't what was promised or even what we need, but it is what we have; our legacy from the Age of Transformationalism we will simply have to make the best of. 

0.5 >0.0. Yes, we were promised 4.0 and only received 0.5 ... but I will go to war with 0.5 over 0.0 any day.

Think of thing in the Navy that, well, just don't make it to the recruiting advertisements.

Deploying over the holiday season.

Finding out your "liberty port" is Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Throw in the post COVID-19 experience, and, well ... so sorry Shipmates.

USS Milwaukee (LCS 5), a Freedom variant littoral combat ship, remains in port as some Sailors test positive for COVID-19. The crew is 100% immunized and all COVID-19 positive Sailors are isolated on board and away from other crew members. A portion of those infected have exhibited mild symptoms. The vaccine continues to demonstrate effectiveness against serious illness.

Knowing how Omicron is burning through everywhere ... is this going to be our standard response from here on out?

We'll see.

Well, besides working on PQS and catching up on PMS ... I wonder what else they can do?

Do they have a ships band? If so, GenX has an idea for them.

If you modify the lyrics (suggestions below) ... they the 80s may have something for them to work with.

This should be the USS Milwaukee's breakaway song: (apologies to the Dead Kennedys);

Watch the above but with these lyrics in your head ... I think it works. 

So, you've been on sea duty for a year or two

And you know you've seen it all

In COVID's Navy, thinking you'll go far

In the Caribbean your type don't crawl

Playing counter-drug to parade your aluminum

On your 3-jab vax

Braggin' that you know, how the Coasties feel warm

And sea duty is sea duty

It's time to test what you most fear

Cloth masks will not help you here

Test yourself, my dear

Test yourself, my dear

It's a holiday in Guantanamo 

It's tough, kid, but it's life

It's a holiday in Guantanamo

Don't forget your deployment wife

You've lost your taste, your smell

You want everyone to quarantine

Do PQS while you bitch, per diem will make you rich

But your CO gets more PMS from you

Well, COVID gets you more time in your rack

For a slider a day

Asymptomatic no one cares

Then your test is pos anyway

Now you can go nowhere

Now you are welded to the pier

What you need, my son...

What you need, my girl...

Is a holiday in Guantanamo

Where MA's won't let you leave the pier

A holiday in Guantanamo

Where you'll still get sea duty credit anyway

LCS, LCS

LCS, LCS

LCS, LCS

LCS, LCS, LCS, LCS, LCS, LCS

LCS, LCS, LCS, LCS, LCS, LCS

LCS, LCS, LCS, LCS, LCS, LCS

LCS, LCS, LCS, ...

And it's a holiday in Guantanamo 

Where you're called a plague ship

A holiday in Guantanamo

Where the banana rat makes fun of you

LCS!

photo credit Anne Ney 

New scholarship continues to come forward with a fresh look in investigating the causes of and lessons from the LCS program. 

There are firm lessons not just on how to run or not run a program, but also how perverse incentives hard wired in to our politics, acquisitions programs, and … yes … culture enabled abuse and wholesale institutional failure. 

Over at War on the Rocks, Emma Salisbury is doing exactly that. For those new to the LCS story – and there are many – Emma’s article is a great starting point;

Uncharitably dubbed the “little crappy ship” by its detractors, the program has faced cost overruns, delays, mechanical failures, and questions over the platforms’ survivability in high-intensity combat. Each of the 23 commissioned littoral combat ships cost around $500 million to build, with astronomical operating costs adding to the program’s hefty price tag. While the ships themselves are currently facing the prospect of decommissioning and replacement, and many will not be sad to see them go, the program has one saving grace — it offers some important lessons about the American defense industrial base.

Ship inactivation, are, in a way, sad things to see.

UNCLASSIFIED// ROUTINE R 021303Z JUL 21 FM CNO WASHINGTON DC TO NAVADMIN INFO CNO WASHINGTON DC BT UNCLAS   NAVADMIN 145/21   PASS TO OFFICE CODES: FM CNO WASHINGTON DC//DNS// INFO CNO WASHINGTON DC//DNS// MSGID/GENADMIN/CNO WASHINGTON DC/DNS/XXX/JUL//   SUBJ/FY22 PROJECTED SHIP INACTIVATION SCHEDULE//   REF/A/DOC/OPNAVINST 4770.5J/20200904// REF/B/DOC/OPNAVINST 5400.44A/20111013//   NARR/REF A IS GENERAL POLICY FOR THE INACTIVATION, RETIREMENT, AND DISPOSITION OF U.S. NAVAL VESSELS. REF B IS NAVY ORGANIZATION CHANGE MANUAL (NOCM) FOR SUBMITTING ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE REQUESTS (OCR) TO INCLUDE SHIP DECOMMISSIONINGS OR INACTIVATIONS.// POC/CDR JIM [redacted]/MIL/N9IS/LOC: Washington DC/TEL: 703-693-[redacted]/EMAIL: [redacted](at)us.navy.mil//   RMKS/1.  This message shall be read in its entirety to ensure all stakeholders in the ship inactivation process are aware of the projected retirement schedule for the upcoming fiscal year 2022 (FY22), respective responsibilities and necessary follow-up actions.  Ship retirement decisions reflected in paragraph 2 below align with the President’s Budget for 2022. This plan will be adjusted if necessary based on subsequent execution year decisions made by leadership or as required by Congressional action.   2.  To facilitate fleet planning efforts to conduct decommissioning continuous maintenance availability (CMAV) or inactivation availability (INAC), the projected schedule for inactivating U.S. battle force and non-battle force naval vessels in FY22 is promulgated as follows:   Ship Name                     Proj Inactive Date     Post Inactive Status USS TEMPEST PC 2              29 MAR                 FMS USS TYPHOON PC 5              14 MAR 22              FMS USS SQUALL PC 7               10 APR 22              FMS USS FIREBOLT PC 10            01 MAR 22              FMS USS WHIRLWIND PC 1            24 APR 22              FMS USS SAN JACINTO CG 56         30 SEP 22              OCIR USS LAKE CHAMPLAIN CG 57      31 MAR 22              OCIR USS MONTEREY CG 61            22 FEB 22              OCIR USS HUE CITY CG 66            31 MAR 22              OCIR USS ANZIO CG 68              31 MAR 22              OCIR USS VELLA GULF CG 72          18 FEB 22              OCIR USS PORT ROYAL CG 73          31 MAR 22              OCIR USS FORT WORTH LCS 3          31 MAR 22              OCIR USS CORONADO LCS 4            31 MAR 22              OCIR USS DETROIT LCS 7             31 MAR 22              OCIR USS LITTLE ROCK LCS 9         31 MAR 22     OCIR USS WHIDBEY ISLAND LSD 41     30 APR 22     OCIR USS PROVIDENCE SSN 719        02 DEC 21     RECYCLE USS OKLAHOMA CITY SSN 723     21 JUN 22     RECYCLE USNS APACHE T-ATF 172         30 JUN 22     DISPOSAL USNS 1ST LT HARRY L MARTIN T-AK 2015       30 DEC 21     DISPOSAL USNS LCPL ROY M WHEAT T-AK 3016               31 DEC 21      DISPOSAL   3.  Per reference (b), Fleet Commanders shall submit an Organizational Change Request for commissioned U.S. ships to formally notify the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV) of a ships decommissioning, inactivation, or end of service.  Submit revisions due to operational schedule changes per references (a) and (b).  It is the responsibility of Commander, U.S. Fleet Forces Command and Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet in coordination with their respective TYCOM to ensure the appropriate lower echelon commands are notified of any changes in the ship inactivation schedules, as well as Integrated Warfare (OPNAV N9I) and OPNAV resource sponsor.   4.  Adjustments to paragraph 2 ship inactivation's that cross the current fiscal year must be coordinated with OPNAV N9I due to Congressional requirements for execution year force structure changes that differ from what Congress authorized/appropriated and signed into law by the President. OPNAV shall promulgate changes to the inactivation fiscal year as required.   5.  The ships commanding officer, masters, or Immediate Superior In Command, shall submit a final naval message (normally transmitted in conjunction with the decommissioning ceremony) announcing the ships official retirement date and include a brief history of the significant events in the life of the ship per reference (a).  The Naval History and Heritage Command (NAVHISTHERITAGE WASHINGTON DC) and Naval Vessel Register Custodian (NVR NORFOLK VA), shall be included as INFO addresses.   6.  Released by Mr. Andrew S. Haeuptle, Director, Navy Staff.//   BT #0001 NNNN UNCLASSIFIED//

Ponder your reaction, the press, and Congress.

...then click over to USNIBlog and behold the latest spasm involving LCS.

Thanks to the GAO, we have some great info on the maintenance nightmare ... and a kind admission from the CNO that, yes, the anti-transformationalist were correct.

Details over at USNIBlog.

A long running concern here has been the intentional, and borderline criminal, neglect of maintenance Navy-wide in general.

The LCS program, from the manning CONOPS to maintenance has been one long example of bad ideas made flesh by an entire generation of pigheadedness.

In 2021, we have good people in hard jobs doing the best they can with the dog's breakfast of a class of ships they were given - and yet we can't seem to build anything straight connected to this crooked timber.

We should have stopped building them long ago - but we will have to make do with what we have.

If you want to, rage read the whole thing ... but I want to remind everyone - the first LCS was commissioned in 2008, over a dozen years ago.

We also found significant unplanned work in maintenance contracts we reviewed—often because the Navy didn't understand ship condition before planning repairs. One effect of unplanned maintenance is schedule delays that limit fleet readiness.

...

GAO found in the 18 LCS maintenance delivery orders it reviewed that the Navy had to contract for more repair work than originally planned, increasing the risk to completing LCS maintenance on schedule. A majority of this unplanned work occurred because the Navy did not fully understand the ship's condition before starting maintenance. The Navy has begun taking steps to systematically collect and analyze maintenance data to determine the causes of unplanned work, which could help it more accurately plan for maintenance. 

Amazing. Simply amazing. It is as if we didn't have a few centuries of experience maintaining warships.

The toxic culture of yes-men and happy-talk that begat the LCS program to begin with seems to be impacting maintenance as well.

Being that no one was held accountable for the former, I guess we should not be surprised about the later. 

All that being said, LCS will be with us for awhile, and good people in hard jobs are doing their best to squeeze some utility out of them. 

That is great ... but we have so little actual experience with LCS besides a few bespoke deployments that we need to be very careful thinking we can transfer "lessons" to new classes, like FFG-62, that will be used in very different ways ... like useful ways ... but I digress.

That won't stop some people, it seems;

 “When we started building frigate, we looked at lot at LCS and what we can learn – for example, the way we train on LCS, train to qualify, is a really good model and we’re going to leverage that for FFG-62,” Kitchener said during the media call ahead of this week’s Surface Navy Association annual symposiums.

I'm open to that, I guess. If it were so great - and I don't know if it is - why aren't we doing this with already existing classes of warships? Are we?

“And then the manning, we just looked at what we’ve done on LCS, the blue/gold concept, and how we’re going to fit them out. And we think that is probably the way to get the most presence” out of the frigate hulls.

Bullshit. Blue/Gold only works in the submarine world. If you want to copy their program, then great. All experience we have with Blue/Gold in surface ships doing surface ship business - and LCS has never done that - has always been, what is the world, "suboptimal."

It appears that this may be soaking in. Perhaps we are mature enough as an organization to admit that we can say, "No, this was a mistake." Close ... so close ... but perhaps we are allowing some to save face. We'll see.

“The ink’s not dry yet – we’re looking at, as the SWO Boss said, there’s some lessons learned from blue/gold crewing, I think there’s some ability to potentially deploy the ships for longer with a rotational crew model, and we are still learning about how to do that and what that right rotation is. So it’s a little bit pre-decisional still with Connie,” he said.

Let's pour bleach on that ink before it is dry and toss what remains in the shredder. 

“The crew on a frigate will be larger, so there’s kind of inherently more capability in that crew. It’s not a minimally manned platform as the LCS was. … That means that the frigate, the Connie-class crew size, will support being able to do more multi-mission sorts of things, whereas the LCS is more single-mission, one mission at a time platform,” he said.

“And there’s some more ability for the crew to do its own maintenance; planned maintenance will be done much more so by the ship’s force crew on a frigate, on the Connie class, than on the LCS.”

So close, so close to sounding like a customer of the military industrial complex as opposed to a PR spokesman ... so close. 

That being said, nice that Big Navy is starting to accept the critique from the Front Porch about LCS here well over a decade and a half old. I like how we are finally calling LCS's manning CONOPS not "optimally manned" but "minimally manned." Also admitting that - shocking I know - a ship needs the ability to do some of its own repairs ... and hey, multi-mission is a thing again. Good. Potential enemies were being a bit persnickity about signaling what the PMA of the Quarter was going to be in time for us to get the non-existent mission modules installed. 

Maybe soon we can say, "Little to nothing from LCS can be adopted by FFG-62. We learned a lot from LCS and will continue to, but the manning and deployment CONOPS for FFG-62 will be better aligned to a multi-mission frigate as we understand it in our and allied navies."