Navy Will Mothball Its First Four Littoral Combat Ships In Nine Months If Congress Lets It – The Drive

The U.S. Navy expects the first four of its perpetually underperforming Littoral Combat Ships, a pair of ships from each of the two subclasses, to be out of service within the next nine months. Some members of Congress, however, are now seeking to block the mothballing of two of these vessels until all of the tests of the various and continually delayed mission modules for each variant are complete, which is still years away from happening.

The Navy provided the update on its plans to inactivate these Littoral Combat Ships in an official internal message dated June 20, 2020, which Defense Newswas first to report. The missive says that USS Freedom and USS Independence, both of which are the first ships in their subclasses, along with the Freedom class USS Fort Worth and Independence class USS Coronado, are set to be "Out of Commission, In Reserve," or OCIR, by March 2021.

The Navy first revealed its plans to retire these four LCSs, also known by their hull numbers, LCS 1 through LCS 4, in its budget request for the 2021 Fiscal Year, which it released in February 2020. The service had previously planned to assign these ships to a new surface warfare development unit, Surface Development Squadron One, where they would have joined the three Zumwalt class stealth destroyers, the last of which is still under construction, and the Sea Hunter unmanned surface vessel.

It was an unprecedented admission that the Navy did not feel that these vessels were even worth keeping around in a primarily test and evaluation role and as the seagoing force continues to struggle to find a pathway to reaching its long-standing goal of a total fleet size of 355 ships. These first four littoral combat ships were commissioned between 2008 and 2014, making them all relatively young vessels. However, the reflected early iterations of their respective designs and had already been relegated to test and training roles for years.

Those four test ships were instrumental to wringing out the crewing, the maintenance and all the other things we needed to learn from them, Navy Rear Admiral Randy Crites, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Budget, said a press briefing for the 2021 Fiscal Year budget request in February. But theyre not configured like the other LCS in the fleet, and they need significant upgrades. Everything from combat [systems], to structural, you name it. Theyre expensive to upgrade.

It's worth noting that the Navy does not appear to have ever publicly disclosed what it would cost to fully upgrade these four LCSs. The fact that these initial examples differ so significantly from later models is also a product of a process called concurrency, wherein the production of the ships began with the understanding that modifications and fixes would get inserted throughout the process. This was supposed to help reduce costs by allowing for construction to ramp up quicker than normal, but the amount of reworking necessary proved to be more extensive than initially expected.

The Navy is still continuing to take deliveries of new LCSs. Just this week, it accepted the delivery of the future USS Oakland, an Independence class vessel, which the service touted as being on track to bring its total fleet to 300 ships. It's not clear how long that milestone might last amid the planned retirements of the first four LCSs and other ships.

The Navy is also working to make the three different mission modules fully operational. There are presently three different packages, a mine countermeasures one, one focused on anti-submarine warfare, and another that provides additional anti-surface warfare capabilities.

The original plan had been that these modular packages would allow for the relatively rapid reconfiguration of individual LCSs from one mission set to another, making the multi-mission capable without having to lug around all of the different weapons and other relevant systems at once. This was a core component of the LCS program.

The Navy has since decided that this is not necessarily a viable operational model and it plans to effectively permanently mount certain modules on various ships in both subclasses, which will make them significantly less flexible. The service has begun creating new dedicated Mine Divisions within Littoral Combat Ship Squadrons in recent years, reflecting this change in the concept of operations.

Still, the capabilities the LCSs offer, even with the various mission modules installed, have long been underwhelming. There is an effort underway now to add launchers for the RGM-148A Naval Strike Missile (NSM) to at least some of the ships, giving them a sorely needed boost in firepower.

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Navy Will Mothball Its First Four Littoral Combat Ships In Nine Months If Congress Lets It - The Drive