The U.S. Navy Wasted A Whole Decade Building Bad Ships

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

The U.S. Navy spent a decade in the early 2000s building warships that either don't work, cost too much to build in large numbers or whose designs are fundamentally flawed on a conceptual level. Or all three.

These floating lemons include the speedy, inshore Littoral Combat Ship and the huge, under-equipped DDG-1000 "stealth" destroyers.

Historians might spend decades debating exactly what drove Navy leaders to pour billions of dollars into these ships for precious little return on their investment.

But at least one historian already has a pretty good idea what went wrong. "DDG-1000 and LCS came out of the moment of change and transformation, almost as if, absent a real strategic threat, that change would be our strategy," said Jerry Hendrix, author of the new book To Provide and Maintain a Navy.

In other words, the Navy got away with building bad ships because it didn't seem to matter all that much whether a particular vessel design actually worked in the real world. Whether anyone would admit it, the stakes felt that low.

The problem is, the stakes weren't actually low in the 2000s. While the U.S. Navy treaded water on its fleet design and force structure, the Russian and Chinese navies designed sound, affordable ships—and began building them in large numbers. The Americans' lost decade allowed the Russians and Chinese to catch up to U.S. sea power.

As conceived in the late 1990s, the LCS was supposed to be cheap, fast, flexible and easy to build. But after spending $30 billion over a period of around two decades, the Navy managed to acquire just 35 of the 400-foot vessels.

The fleet is already proposing to discard the oldest four LCSs—two each from both variants of the type. Meanwhile, the monohull Freedom variant has continued to suffer major problems related to its complex combined diesel-gas propulsion. It's not uncommon for a Freedom-variant LCS to set sail on a long-planned cruise, only to quickly break down and limp back to port.

The LCS's finicky plug-and-play weaponry and sensors, controversial and inadequate manning scheme and poor reliability have translated into a general inability to deploy. The Navy commissioned the first LCS in 2008. Thirteen years later, 20 of the ships are in service. Fifteen more are under construction.

But through last year, the fleet managed to deploy the type just eight times—once in 2013, 2014 and 2016 and five times between 2019 and late 2020.

To put that in perspective, the Navy has 68 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. At any given time, at least 20 of them are on six-month deployments. If the LCSs sailed at the same rate the Burkes do, six or seven of the smaller vessels would be on a front-line cruise at any given time for a total of at least a dozen LCS deployments annually.

The LCS's problems are myriad. The most serious of the type's flaws is rooted in its requirements. Bizarrely, the Navy insisted the LCS be capable of reaching a top speed of more than 40 knots, which is around 10 knots faster than most warships are capable of traveling.

The speed requirement forced contractors Lockheed Martin LMT and Austal to install efficient diesel engines for low-speed cruising plus powerful gas turbines for sprinting. These dual propulsion systems are expensive, complex, heavy and—as multiple underway engineering casualties have demonstrated—unreliable.

The kicker is that no one has ever proved the actual value of a 40-knot sprinting speed in any conceivable combat scenario for a vessel as large as the LCS is. A 500-mile-per-hour missile doesn't care if its target is traveling 40 knots or 30 knots. "Do I really need a Littoral Combat Ship to go 40 knots?" Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday asked last year.

Why was the Navy willing to risk so much time, money and opportunity on what amounted to an experiment in adding a one-third speed boost to one new class of ship?

Because it believed it was safe to tinker. "It was a widely held view that in the 1990s, the United States was in a historically unique, post-Cold War, 'strategic pause,'" Mark Czelusta wrote in a 2008 paper for the Pentagon's George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.

Candidate George W. Bush, in a 1999 speech, helped to define expectations for this strategic pause. "My goal is to take advantage of a tremendous opportunity—given few nations in history—to extend the current peace into the far realm of the future," Bush said. "This opportunity is created by a revolution in the technology of war. Power is increasingly defined, not by mass or size, but by mobility and swiftness."

The LCS as a concept was nothing if not mobile and swift. Legitimized by the political establishment, the LCS became a kind of cipher—an empty vessel for containing various half-baked ideas. Consider the following 2004 assertion by future deputy defense secretary Bob Work.

"The LCS is less of a ship, and more of a battle network component system, consisting of a sea frame, a core crew, assorted mission modules, assembled mission packages, mission package crews and a reconfiguration support structure."

In short, the Navy spent a decade investing a succession of weird ideas in an unsound ship design. Leaders seemed to assume these ideas somehow would erase the fundamental problems with the very things that make the LCS a warship: its engines, weapons and crewing.

That created an opportunity for the Chinese and Russian navies. All they had to do to catch up to the U.S. Navy, while the U.S. Navy was wasting time and money on the LCS, was build ships that worked. That is, conventional, 30-knot vessels with built-in radars, missiles and guns and big crews.

Those ships—Russia's new Project 22350 frigates and and China's new Type 052 destroyers and Type 055 cruisers, among others—are fairly old-fashioned by the standards of the LCS. But they apparently aren't exorbitantly expensive. And Russia and China have been able to build them in large numbers, year after year—and then deploy them.

The LCS wasn't the U.S. Navy's only failure of the 2000s. The Zumwalt-class destroyer, or DDG-1000, proved equally catastrophic.

Work began on the Zumwalt class during the same strategic pause that produced the LCS. The goal was to develop a large, heavily armed and highly survivable ship. But over a decade, the concept changed. With the Navy briefly focusing more on near-shore warfare, the Zumwalt evolved into a stealthy fire-support vessel sporting powerful 155-millimeter cannons.

Costs rose. The Navy cut the class down from 32 ships to just three. But the research-and-development overhead contributed to the three ship's enormous, per-vessel cost of nearly $8 billion, which is four times as much as the latest Arleigh Burke-class destroyers cost.

The 610-foot Zumwalts feature low-signature "tumblehome" hulls. Their missile-launch cells are along their outer hulls and double as armor. Their 155-millimeter guns are more powerful than are the 127-millimeter models on other surface ships.

But the ships have problems beside their high cost. They lack a volume-search radar. Their guns are incompatible with the Navy's standard ammunition. Efforts to develop custom, precision-guided shells have failed on account of the low quantity and resulting high price. Today the Zumwalts lack any ammunition for their guns.

The Navy in 2018 decided to convert the Zumwalts into anti-ship platforms by integrating SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles. The SM-6 is a long-range surface-to-air missile that also can strike ships.

But the fleet is struggling to figure out what to do with such a tiny class of ship. With just three Zumwalts, the Navy might be able to deploy one at any given time. But it's unclear whether the destroyers with their lopsided capabilities fit with existing carrier and amphibious groups.

While it mulls the deployability problem, the Navy has assigned the Zumwalts to an experimental squadron in San Diego. The destroyers are test assets for now. It wouldn't be shocking if they remained test assets forever.

On paper, the LCSs and Zumwalts pad the Navy's force structure, contributing to the fleet's official inventory of 296 front-line warships. In reality, the LCSs and Zumwalts as classes aren't reliably deployable.

The Navy might have 296 combat vessels, in theory. In practice, it has no more than 274 front-line ships that it actually can plan major operations around.

We can blame a decade of complacency, during which the Navy experimented—at tremendous expense—with bad ship designs and worse theories of warfare, all while secure in its wrong belief that no foreign fleet could challenge it, then or in the near future.