RIP Little Crappy Ships

NAVY SPENT $3 BILLION ON SHIPS THAT COULDN'T OUTRACE COLUMBUS, NOW IT'S SCUTTLING THEM.

The U.S. Navy is finally striking the colors on what must have been the most disastrous boondoggle in service history. The brass called them Littoral Combat Ships. The newly unveiled FY 2023 budget calls for scrapping at least nine Littoral Combat Ships built at a cost of at least $3 billion (out of a planned fleet of thirty five LCS) though they are years away from normal retirement age. In a withering report released this February, the Government Accountability Office declared “The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) fleet has not demonstrated the operational capabilities it needs to perform its mission. Operational testing has found several significant challenges, including the ship's ability to defend itself if attacked and failure rates of mission-essential equipment.” Crews always called them Little Crappy Ships. Here’s why.

A Rumsfeld Legacy, Of Course.

Spawned in the age of Donald Rumsfeld as a cheap way to hit his promised target of a 300-ship Navy, and touted as an exercise in “transformational [read ‘ill-thought out and untested’] technology,” the LCS was supposed to operate in “brown water” close inshore, fending off asymmetric threats such as Iranian Revolutionary Guard fast boats and Somali pirates. The original specifications accordingly called for an exceptionally shallow 11- foot draught, a 50-knot top speed and a 4300-mile cruising range at 20 knots. The admirals’ blossoming imaginations allotted to the LCS worthy tasks such as minesweeping and anti-submarine warfare, as well as bombarding enemy coastlines when required. To perform these various functions, interchangeable modules dedicated to the differing missions would be swapped in and out as the need arose. In keeping with this spirit of interchangeability, crews were also to be swapped around, ensuring that none would feel any particular sense of responsibility for any specific ship, and could therefore blame all shortcomings on someone else. In a bid to keep costs down, the admirals decreed small crews, no more than 50 for the ship plus another 20 for whatever module was in use.

The ships’ original proponents had hoped to keep the weight under 1500 tons. However, as designs progressed, the LCS grew inexorably, following the universal naval imperative toward bigger ships – after all, the higher the tonnage the greater the scope for officer promotion – and eventually hit the water at around 3500 tons. But there was still that mandatory shallow draught, supposedly essential for performance of the ship’s mission. The eminent naval architect Kenneth Brower, designer of the Royal Navy’s carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth among many other ships, pointed out to me that the shallow draft (which in practice expanded to just over 14 feet) is “operationally useless,” as nefarious Iranians and Somalis are often to be found in far shallower waters. “So why,” he enquired, “uniquely constrain the draft of a 3500-ton ship?” Among other deleterious effects, this shallow draught precluded the big propellers normally installed on a ship of this size, forcing their substitution by water-jets. These work fine at high speeds, for which the LCS employs a fuel-guzzling gas turbine. But they are particularly vulnerable to barnacles, and remarkably inefficient at cruising speeds, when the ship switches over to a theoretically more economical diesel engine.

How Did They End Up With Two Designs?

Uninitiated observers may wonder why, when the plan called for a single LCS design, the us Navy ended up with two, very different in appearance and each endowed with unique disabilities. One is a trimaran, and the other a monohull resembling a giant cigarette boat. The answer is readily apparent to anyone versed in the political economy of weapons production. Originally, two giant weapons makers, General Dynamics and Lockheed-Martin, were contracted to build competing prototypes (two each). General Dynamics offered its trimaran design, built in Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Michigan, while Lockheed-Martin tendered the cigarette boat from its Mobile, Alabama shipyard on the Gulf Coast. After trials, the Navy would in theory select the lucky winner of the full multibillion-dollar production contract.

Duh!

In reality, given the billions of dollars at stake, there was never much chance that the contractors’ Congressional supporters, firmly entrenched on powerful committees, would allow Darwinian competition to stand in the way of their clients’ interests. So in due course the Navy graciously conceded that it would buy both designs, starting with ten of each. Lockheed’s offering was dubbed the Freedom class, while GD’s adopted Independence.

Whoops, It Capsizes!

Though the shallow(ish)-water mission justifies its existence, the LCS has to cross open ocean to reach whatever coastline it will patrol. This poses problems, especially for the lucky crews assigned to the trimaran variant. Trimarans tend to be heavy, which is a problem for a ship required to travel at high speed. So to cut down on weight, the General Dynamics team opted for an all-aluminum structure, a recipe for corrosion, early-onset metal fatigue, and above all spectacular flammability in the event of a combat hit with the shaped-charge warhead common to most anti-ship missiles. The Lockheed cigarette boat also has severe weight and stability problems, so it has an almost equally vulnerable aluminum superstructure; in addition to which, the cigarette boat’s planing hull ensures an exciting life for crews in anything approaching rough seas. Lockheed’s ship, Brower informed me, “will probably slam in sea state 4 [four to eight-foot waves]’ which is hardly healthy for hull strength, nor for the crew’s ability to carry out combat tasks. The General Dynamics trimaran,” he added bleakly, “will capsize in quartering seas.”

It Can’t Even Keep Up With the Tanker.

Should it somehow succeed in remaining afloat, the LCS takes a long time to get anywhere. The cigarette boat, it turned out, could never reach the promised range of 3500 nautical miles even at the reduced requirement of 14 knots, though it did manage to make 1960 nautical miles at that speed in calm water. (Any faster, and the range shrank dramatically.) In calm water it could of course switch to the gas turbine (a process said by crews to take a full 30 minutes) and sprint ahead briefly before running out of fuel. Any extended voyage therefore required an escorting tanker, which, though capable of cruising at 18 to 20 knots, was forced to slow down so that the accompanying warship could keep up. The trimaran, on the other hand, could make 4200 nautical miles in calm water, though only with a load of fuel that violates the ship’s safe weight margins. On the other hand it failed to make the required sprint speed, and like the cigarette boat, could never achieve the required 1250nm sprint endurance. Practical experience, however, suggests that few voyages would ever last long enough to test either the cruising or the sprinting endurance limits, given the horrendous breakdown rate. The Freedoms, in particular, suffered from an abiding engine transmission problem, so bad that the Navy has had to abandon its normal problem-solving expedient of throwing taxpayers money at it for a decade or so, opting to junk the Lockheed variant instead.

Weapons? What Weapons?

If an LCS somehow make it through the hazards of the open ocean in time to confront the enemy, the latter may have little to fear. So excited were the naval planners by the ‘transformational technology’ slogan that they paid little attention to equipping this warship with offensive armament. The foredeck sports a puny 57mm gun, though the Navy is in the process of upgrading this to a (very) marginally more robust 76mm weapon. There are also some smaller 30mm cannon and four machine-guns, as well as an anti-aircraft missile. The interchangeable modules – which are finding it difficult to meet the severe weight constraints of the already overweight ships – sporting missiles, a torpedo-carrying helicopter, and sundry items of hi- tech gadgetry. Sadly the ‘transformational’ module concept has been found wanting, not least because swapping one module for another has turned out to take not three days, as originally promised, but three weeks.

Bowing to reality, the navy abandoned module- swapping in favor of ships dedicated to specific missions. The relevant accoutrements for such tasks have, however, proved mostly unusable. The helicopter selected to tow a minesweeping sled proved too puny for the job, and the mine-sniffing underwater drone turned out to be dubiously reliable. Meanwhile, according to the gratifyingly incisive reports of the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, every component of the anti-submarine package failed, including the towed sonar.

A National Embarrassment

Many deservedly cruel things have been said about what Brower termed a “virtually useless ship, a national embarrassment”. The Pentagon’s chief weapons inspector declared that it is ‘not expected to be survivable’ in combat. ‘Little Crappy Ship’ sums up the crew verdict. But one particular statistic throws the disaster into vivid relief. The monohull version can just manage a 3000- mile transatlantic crossing if it steams at 9 knots – the same speed regularly achieved by Christopher Columbus when he made the voyage 500 years ago.

(This post is adapted from an article that originally appeared in Marine Quarterly, the world’s greatest nautical journal.)