The Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship Lives On! Don’t Call the Grim Reaper Yet

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

(Washington DC) The Navy’s troubled Littoral Combat Ship has perhaps been the most criticized surface platform in Naval history, as the vessel received strong, high-level criticism at its inception and was subsequently derided and partially replaced for not being survivable enough.

Years ago former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel cut the planned fleet size by roughly ⅓ in large measure due to a chorus of concern that the ship simply was not “survivable” enough to support the kind of “blue-water” maritime warfare challenges envisioned by the Navy facing great power threats. This was the reasoning for why the Pentagon and Navy launched the FFG Frigate program, described as a specific effort to engineer a more “survivable” kind of LCS engineered with space armor, longer-range weapons, over-the-horizon missiles and a larger, more strongly reinforced hull.

As recently as last year, the Navy took its hesitation about the LCS so seriously that

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro told the House Appropriations Committee – Defense that a large number of LCS ships need to be retired because they simply cannot hold up against an increasingly advanced Chinese threat in the Pacific.

“The particular problem we are facing on the eight we plan to decommission is the problems with the new ASW (Anti-Submarine Warfare) modules on these ships. The ship’s were designed to meet a different threat and it will be challenging for these ships to contribute to the high-end fight,” Del Toro told Congress last year.

Del Toro’s comments were quite significant as they pertain directly to the Navy’s overall conceptual and strategic shift away from counter-terrorism, counter-piracy and Visit Board Search and Seizure kinds of missions to massive preparations for great power war againsts advanced adversaries on the open seas. Key elements threat-driven mission and readiness shift were supported as far back as 2015 when the Navy revved up its “distributed lethality” concept. This effort was designed to massively upgun the entire surface fleet for great-power warfare on the open ocean. Ships such as the LCS received new generations of weapons, drones and anti-submarine technology as part of a strategic fleet-wide initiative to make the surface fleet much more lethal and capable of contributing with key relevance to great power warfare.