Good riddance.
Like a 30-year-old European project car that was on blocks in the driveway for the past three years — now finally hauled away by the scrapper — the last of the Freedom-class littoral combat ships (LCS) has been launched by Fincantieri Marinette Marine into Lake Michigan; it is a relief to see it go.
The future USS Cleveland (LCS-31) slid sideways down the ramps on Saturday, making room for useful ships to be built; an embarrassing chapter in American seapower acquisition is closer to its end.
Jerry Hendrix adroitly summarized the LCS’s many shortcomings for the magazine in August 2022:
The U.S. Navy is currently dealing with the aftermath of a series of bad decisions regarding a unique category of ships within its overall force-structure design. This category — the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) group — is composed of two distinct designs: the LCS-1 Freedom class, a steel monohull, and the LCS-2 Independence class, an aluminum trimaran (three-hulled) design, and represents a series of poor strategic assumptions, an irresponsible willingness to press the “I believe” button regarding a new generation of technologies, and an organizational culture that placed more emphasis on MBA management theory than on fleet “deckplate” leadership. These mistakes have left the modern Navy saddled with two decades’ worth of ships — some 34 hulls at present — that have experienced numerous critical design weaknesses and lack crucial mission modules. These ships are now scheduled for early decommissioning by Navy leadership as they cast about for money and manpower to build submarines and a new surface frigate that will be better suited to the challenges inherent to the great-power competition the United States finds itself in today.
The Littoral Combat Ship was conceived following the Cold War to be the low-end component of a new “21st-century family of ships” for the United States Navy. Facing no peer adversaries, and not perceiving any on the “end of history” strategic horizon, the heads of the Navy believed the service would be working in and about littoral (near-shore) environments, providing maritime support to forces ashore. 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.
You can read the rest here.
Marinette’s next job is to take a FREMM — a Franco-Italian frigate design — and make it suited to the U.S. Navy’s aims. The Navy has gone to some lengths to ensure that this time around, the ships are functional and economical, using a proven structure and components. Twenty frigates would go a long way toward alleviating the demands on the destroyers, which are picking up the slack from the decommissioned Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Oliver Hazard Perry–class frigates.
Sometimes it’s best to buy a Camry and swap the stereo instead of home-brewing a Porsche with pig iron and a crate LS engine in the barn.