[LINK] The “Little Crappy Ship”

[Stephen Loosley]

The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the “Little Crappy Ship”

by Joaquin Sapien Sept. 7, 2023 
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-littoral-combat-ship



The Navy is mothballing several of the $500 million ships long before 
the end of their expected lifespans.

Littoral combat ships were supposed to launch the Navy into the future.

Instead they broke down across the globe and many of their weapons never 
worked. Now the Navy is getting rid of them. One is less than five years 
old.


KEY TAKEAWAYS

* One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more 
littoral combat ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapon 
systems failed. The Navy wound up with more ships than it wanted, at an 
estimated lifetime cost that could reach $100 billion or more.

* The Navy’s haste to deliver ships took precedence over combat ability. 
Without functioning weapons systems the vessels are like a “box floating 
in the ocean,” one former officer said.

* Sailors and officers complained they spent more time fixing the ships 
than sailing them. The stress led many to seek mental health care.

* Top Navy commanders placed pressure on subordinates to sail the ships 
even when the crews and vessels were not fully prepared to go to sea.

* Several major breakdowns in 2016 exposed the limits of the ships and 
their crews, each adding fresh embarrassment to a program meant to 
propel the Navy into a more technologically advanced future.


In July 2016, warships from more than two dozen nations gathered off the 
coasts of Hawaii and Southern California to join the United States in 
the world’s largest naval exercise. The United Kingdom, Canada, 
Australia, Japan, South Korea and others sent hundreds of destroyers, 
aircraft carriers and warplanes. They streamed in long lines across the 
ocean, symbols of power and prestige.

The USS Freedom had its own special place within the armada. It was one 
of a new class of vessels known as littoral combat ships. The U.S. Navy 
had billed them as technical marvels — small, fast and light, able to 
combat enemies at sea, hunt mines and sink submarines.

In reality, the LCS was well on the way to becoming one of the worst 
boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and 
under-performing weapons systems. Two of the $500 million ships had 
suffered embarrassing breakdowns in previous months.

The Freedom’s performance during the exercise, showing off its ability 
to destroy underwater mines, was meant to rejuvenate the ships’ record 
on the world stage. The ship was historically important too; it was the 
first LCS built, the first in the water, commissioned just eight years 
prior.

But like the LCS program’s reputation, the Freedom was in bad shape.

Dozens of pieces of equipment on board were undergoing repairs. Training 
crews for the new class of ships had proven more difficult than 
anticipated. The sailors aboard the Freedom had not passed an exam 
demonstrating their ability to operate some of the ship’s most important 
systems.

As the day to launch approached, the pressure mounted. Top officers 
visited the ship repeatedly. The Freedom’s sailors understood that 
theirs was a “no fail mission” with “‘no appetite’ to remain in port,” 
according to Navy documents obtained by ProPublica.

The Freedom’s Capt. Michael Wohnhaas consulted with his officers.

Despite crippling problems that had left one of the ship’s engines 
inoperable, he and his superiors decided the vessel could rely on its 
three others for the exercise. Crew members understood that theirs was a 
“no fail mission” with “‘no appetite’ to remain in port,” according to 
Navy documents obtained by ProPublica.

The Freedom completed its mission, but the accomplishment proved hollow.

Five days after the ship returned to port, a maintenance check revealed 
that the faltering engine had suffered “galloping corrosion” from 
saltwater during the exercise. A sailor described the engine room as “a 
horror show” with rust eating away at the machinery. One of the Navy’s 
newest ships would spend the next two years undergoing repairs at a cost 
of millions.

It took investigators months to unravel the mystery of the engine’s 
breakdown. But this much was clear at the outset: The Freedom’s collapse 
was another unmistakable sign that the Navy had spent billions of 
dollars and more than a decade on warships with rampant and crippling flaws.

The ongoing problems with the LCS have been well documented for years, 
in news articles, government reports and congressional hearings. Each 
ship ultimately cost more than twice the original estimate. Worse, they 
were hobbled by an array of mechanical failures and were never able to 
carry out the missions envisaged by their champions.

ProPublica set out to trace how ships with such obvious shortcomings 
received support from Navy leadership for nearly two decades. We 
reviewed thousands of pages of public records and tracked down naval and 
shipbuilding insiders involved at every stage of construction.

Our examination revealed new details on why the LCS never delivered on 
its promises. Top Navy leaders repeatedly dismissed or ignored warnings 
about the ships’ flaws. One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress 
fought to build more of the ships even as they broke down at sea and 
their weapons systems failed. Staunch advocates in the Navy circumvented 
checks meant to ensure that ships that cost billions can do what they 
are supposed to do.

Contractors who stood to profit spent millions lobbying Congress, whose 
members, in turn, fought to build more ships in their home districts 
than the Navy wanted. Scores of frustrated sailors recall spending more 
time fixing the ships than sailing them.

Our findings echo the conclusions of a half-century of internal and 
external critiques of America’s process for building new weapons systems.

The saga of the LCS is a vivid illustration of how Congress, the 
Pentagon and defense contractors can work in concert — and often against 
the good of the taxpayers and America’s security — to spawn what 
President Dwight D. Eisenhower described in his farewell address as the 
“military industrial complex.”

“There is a lot of money flowing through this vast ecosystem, and 
somehow the only thing all these people can agree on is more, more, 
more,” said Lyle Goldstein, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War 
College who is now investigating the costs of war at Brown University. 
“Unfortunately, I just think it might be in the nature of our system.”

This year, the Defense Department asked Congress to approve a staggering 
$842 billion — nearly half of the federal government’s discretionary 
spending — to keep America safe in what the Pentagon says is an ever 
more perilous world.

As House and Senate leaders negotiate the final number, it is unlikely 
they will spend much time discussing ways to prevent future debacles 
like the LCS.

Such a conversation would cover hundreds of billions of misspent 
taxpayer money on projects from nearly every branch of the military: The 
F-35 fighter jet, deployed by the Navy, Marines and Air Force, is more 
than a decade late and $183 billion over budget. The Navy’s newest 
aircraft carrier, the Gerald R. Ford, cost $13 billion and has yet to 
prove it can reliably launch planes. And the Army’s Future Combat System 
was largely abandoned in 2009 after the military had dedicated more than 
$200 billion on a battlefield intelligence network meant to link troops, 
tanks and robots.

The LCS program offers another clear lesson, one seen in almost every 
infamous procurement disaster. Once a massive project gains momentum and 
defense contractors begin hiring, it is politically easier to throw good 
money after bad.

Stopping a weapons program in its tracks means people losing work and 
admitting publicly that enormous sums of taxpayer money have been 
wasted. In the case of the LCS, it took an array of naval leaders and 
two consecutive defense secretaries to finally stop the program.

Yet even after the Navy said it only needed 32 littoral combat ships, 
far fewer than the more than 50 originally planned, members of Congress 
forced the Pentagon to buy three more.

Former Lt. Renaldo Rodgers remembered laboring in San Diego from sunrise 
to sunset for months to ready the Freedom for a 2012 trial mission to 
San Francisco, only to have the ship break down during pretrial tests. 
Rodgers initially thought the futuristic ship looked like something out 
of “Star Trek.” But he soon learned it was no Starship Enterprise. It 
became the laughingstock of the waterfront, with other sailors deriding 
it as “Dry Dock One,” because it so rarely left port.

“It sucks,” he said. The LCS was “a missed opportunity.”

The Navy has tried to retire many of the littoral combat ships years 
before they reach their expected lifespan. Ships designed to last 25 
years are being mothballed after seeing less than a decade of service.

In response to questions, the Navy acknowledged the LCS was not suitable 
for fighting peer competitors such as China. The LCS “does not provide 
the lethality or survivability needed in a high-end fight.”

“The Navy needs a more ready, capable, and lethal fleet more than a 
bigger fleet that’s less ready, less capable, and less lethal,” the 
statement read, saying the money would be better spent on 
higher-priority alternatives.

The cost of the program has gnawed at John Pendleton, who for years was 
a top military analyst at the Government Accountability Office and has 
studied the rise and fall of the LCS as closely as anyone in Washington.

Now retired, but unable to shake what he views as one of the most 
wasteful projects he’d encountered in his nearly 35-year career, 
Pendleton reviewed budgetary documents and GAO reports for ProPublica 
going back decades. His conclusion: The lifetime cost of the LCS class 
may reach $100 billion or more.

“In the end,” he said, “the taxpayers get fewer than 30 
limited-survivability, single-mission ships.”

Pendleton is hardly alone in his assessment. Many regard the tortured 
path of the LCS as evidence of a damaging strain of hubris that runs 
rampant in the world of military innovation.

“It’s this zombie program phenomenon where everybody knows deep down we 
are going in the wrong direction,” said Dan Grazier, a former Marine 
Corps captain, who now works on Pentagon reform for the nonprofit 
Project on Government Oversight. “But because so much money is involved 
and so much political capital is invested, you can’t stop the train 
until the problems are so overwhelming that no one can feign support for 
it.”

The two narratives of the ship — unstoppable in Congress, imperiled at 
sea — intertwined alarmingly during one 10-month stretch beginning in 
December 2015. During that period, five of the vessels broke down across 
the globe, each illuminating a new set of problems and effectively 
proving the critics right.

The Freedom was the third ship to fail. Captured in a Navy investigation 
more than 600 pages long, the incident stands out as a particularly 
devastating and detailed example of the Navy’s plight.

The Problems With the Littoral Combat Ship:

Minehunting Failures

Littoral combat ships were supposed to help find and destroy underwater 
mines, but the remote minehunting system often returned false alarms 
during testing, was unreliable, frequently broke down and was difficult 
for sailors to control. The Navy turned to a new form of minehunting 
technology, which is still under development.

Survivability

Because of the emphasis on speed, the ships were originally built in 
part on designs used for commercial ferries. The designs did not contain 
protections that could prevent the flooding of critical systems when 
under attack. The Pentagon weapons testing department found that the 
design requirements “accept the risk that the crew would have to abandon 
ship” in circumstances where service members on other vessels would not.

Combining Gear

The Navy traced many high-profile breakdowns of the Freedom-class 
littoral combat ships to a design flaw in what’s known as the combining 
gear, a complex mechanism that connects gas turbines and diesel engines 
to the propulsion shafts in order to help the vessels reach top speed.

The Anti-Submarine Warfare Package

Littoral combat ships were supposed to be equipped to hunt and destroy 
submarines with an interlinked package of sonar devices, helicopters and 
torpedoes. But the systems didn’t effectively communicate with one 
another, the towed sonar couldn’t function properly in the vessels’ wake 
and the Freedom class is considered too loud to hunt submarines. The 
Navy canceled that function in 2022.

Limited Endurance

The Freedom is considered a “gas hog” among Navy officers, meaning it 
can’t go very fast for very long without running out of fuel. This 
creates a logistical problem for the Navy because the ship can’t stray 
too far from its gas supply.

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