Lockheed Martin-Led Team Lays Keel on Nation’s Ninth Littoral Combat Ship

A Lockheed Martin led industry team officially laid the keel for the U.S. Navy’s ninth Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the future USS Little Rock, in a ceremony held at Marinette Marine Corporation.

The industry team is building the Freedom-variant LCS for the U.S. Navy on budget, has delivered two ships with four others under construction and two in the early material procurement stages. With the nation’s first LCS, USS Freedom, currently on its maiden deployment to Southeast Asia, the Lockheed Martin-led team is addressing the Navy’s need for an affordable, highly-networked and modular ship unlike any other in the world, designed to conduct a variety of missions including anti-surface, mine and submarine warfare. 

In keeping with a time-honored tradition, ship sponsor Janée Bonner authenticated the keel by having her initials welded into a sheet of the ship’s steel. She was assisted by Marinette Marine Corporation’s President and CEO Chuck Goddard.

“It is an honor to serve as the sponsor of the future USS Little Rock, the ninth ship in a class that’s so vital to our national defense strategy,” said Janée Bonner. “This marks the beginning of my commitment to support her, as well as the brave crews that will serve on the ship to defend our country.”

The Lockheed Martin-led LCS team includes ship builder Marinette Marine Corporation, a Fincantieri company, naval architect Gibbs & Cox, as well as nearly 900 suppliers in 43 states, including approximately 30 small businesses in Wisconsin and Michigan. 

“This is a great milestone for the U.S. Navy’s future USS Little Rock and for the program as we continue to deliver ships,” said Joe North, vice president of Littoral Ship Systems at Lockheed Martin Mission Systems and Training. “As we transition into serial production, we’re applying lessons-learned to the construction process that our team has learned from supporting the U.S. Navy in maintaining the team’s first and second ships.”

Lay the keel is a shipbuilding term that marks the beginning of the module erection process, which is a significant undertaking that signifies the ship coming to life. Modern warships are now largely built in a series of pre-fabricated, complete hull sections rather than a single keel, so the actual start of the shipbuilding process is now considered to be when the first sheet of steel is cut and is often marked with a ceremonial event.

Navy Ship Can’t Meet Mission, Internal U.S. Report Finds

U.S. Navy leaders were warned last year that a $37 billion program to build Littoral Combat Ships can’t meet its promised mission because the vessels are too lightly manned and armed, according to a confidential report. 

“This review highlights the gap between ship capabilities and the missions the Navy will need LCS to execute,” said the report prepared last year for the Navy by Rear Admiral Samuel Perez. “Failure to adequately address LCS requirements and capabilities will result in a large number of ships that are ill-suited to execute” regional commanders’ warfighting needs. 

The 36-page report obtained by Bloomberg News is at odds with assurances from Navy leaders that their project is on course to deliver a small, speedy and adaptable ship intended to patrol waters close to shore. 

The review, requested by Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the chief of naval operations, echoes findings by critics inside the Pentagon who deride the vessel. The report, stamped “confidential draft,” found that the plans to swap equipment needed for different missions are impractical, the vessel’s width may prevent it from docking in some ports, and the decision to proceed with two versions complicates logistics and maintenance. 

A steel-hulled version of the vessel is being made in Marinette, Wisconsin, by a team led by Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT), and an aluminum trimaran is being built in Mobile, Alabama, by a group led by Austal Ltd. (ASB)

Greenert’s Council

The review is dated March 9, 2012, and labeled as “not subject to” disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. It remains relevant today because its findings, and those of three other internal reviews, formed the nucleus of an “LCS Council” that Greenert set up last year to improve the program. The council’s charter was renewed and expanded in March of this year. 

Representative James Moran cited the Bloomberg News report on the LCS assessment at a hearing today of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, saying Perez “addresses some of the issues that some of us have raised.” 

The combat ships “are only marginally useful,” said Moran, a Virginia Democrat. “We are now in the context of sequestration where we’re furloughing folks, we’re cutting back on programs, so I do think we need to address the appropriateness of putting this much money” into the Littoral Combat Ship. 

‘Great Shipbuilders’

Asked by lawmakers about the Perez report, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said the ship started out as a “mess” and has “become one of our best-performing programs.” He praised “two great shipbuilders” and said the vessels are now “coming out under budget and on time.” 

Greenert said the “study is over a year old -- we’ve done a lot since then.” 

In the report, Perez said “the first step in ‘getting LCS right’ is to determine the correct concept of operations.” He said the Navy advertises’’ the vessel as a replacement for frigates, patrol craft and countermine ships and “drafted the initial concept of operations accordingly.” 

While the Perez report said the Navy must deal with the major problems outlined “as soon as practical,” it didn’t recommend canceling the program or cutting its numbers. The report said the LCS has “the potential to be a remarkable ship” and the use of mission modules to swap armaments can prove an “outstanding asset.”

Four More

The Perez review, along with the three other assessments and wargames, “identified areas where the program needed improvement and further development,” said Lieutenant Junior Grade Caroline Hutcheson, a Navy spokeswoman. 

The Navy has 20 vessels under contract out of a planned fleet of 52. Construction costs have doubled to $440 million per ship from an original goal of $220 million. 

The Navy is requesting $2 billion to buy four more in fiscal 2014, half from Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed and half from Henderson, Australia-based Austal. 

“LCS will stand up to the scrutiny,” Representative Jo Bonner, a Alabama Republican who represents Mobile where the Austal vessel is built, said today in an interview. “I welcome it.” 

Key to the Littoral Combat Ship’s success is fulfilling its planned capability of switching within 96 hours the vessel’s weapons modules for missions, such as finding mines, conducting anti-submarine operations and waging surface warfare.

96-Hour Goal

The confidential report found, though, that the 96-hour goal doesn’t represent the entire process of switching weapons modules. The clock only starts when the module and everything ready to support it are dockside, the report said. 

One wargame demonstrated that “getting all of the right people and equipment on station to conduct the exchange could take several weeks,” according to the report, and that process “removed LCS from the tactical fight.” 

The concept of swapping equipment modules “no longer has the tactical utility envisioned by the original designers,” it found. 

A March 29 Navy memo expanding Greenert’s advisory council said the LCS’s “requirements, rapid acquisition and innovative manning and sustainment strategies pose unique challenges” as it’s introduced into the fleet.

Staffing Questioned

The council “will rapidly and decisively resolve impediments” to the success of the LCS, “determine the way forward for the future evolution of capabilities and inform senior” leaders of “key issues which require decisions at the highest level,” according to the memo. 

The Perez report recommends that the Navy reconsider its plan to have as few as 40 sailors per vessel whose mission is to run the ship because it “compounds the problems of executing” the service’s intended operations. Having so few produces a “very fragile” operating environment, according to the report. 

“Crew interviews confirmed fatigue levels setting in by the third day of normal LCS operations,” the report found. “The minimal-manning level and subsequent fatigue result in significant operational and safety impacts, with notable degradation of crew readiness, performance levels and quality of life.” 

The Navy’s LCS Council is reviewing the manpower requirement to include lessons from the current eight-month deployment to Singapore of the USS Freedom, the first completed Littoral Combat Ship.

Not ‘Survivable’

The Perez report also highlights the vessel’s limited combat capability. The Navy has acknowledged that the vessels are being built to the service’s lowest level of survivability, a Pentagon-approved decision that sought to balance cost and performance. 

The ship “is not expected to be survivable in that it is not expected to maintain mission capability after taking a significant hit in a hostile combat environment,” Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester, said in a January report. 

Even in its surface warfare role, when all armaments are working as intended, the vessel “is only capable of neutralizing” small, fast-attack boats and it “remains vulnerable to ships” with anti-ship cruise missiles that can travel more than five miles (8 kilometers), according to the Perez report. Iran has 67 such vessels, according to a chart in the report. 

The Littoral Combat Ship is “ill-suited for combat operations against anything but” small, fast boats not armed with anti-ship missiles, the Perez report found. 

Also, the 104-foot (32-meter) beam, or widest width, on the second LCS, a trimaran, “may be a navigational challenge in narrow waterways and tight harbors,” according to the report.

How could the Navy begin to remake LCS?

The only thing that’s clear anymore about the Navy’s littoral combat ships is that they haven’t turned out as hoped.

As Defense News’ naval man Christopher P. Cavas has revealed in a series of extraordinary reports, the bottom has dropped out of the LCS stock inside the service, which quietly worries the ships can’t do several of the key things for which they were designed: Deploy with small, highly expert crews; quickly and easily swap their mission equipment in foreign ports; or keep the ships in fighting shape on an extended voyage at sea.

Cavas’ latest report references an internal Navy study that found it’ll be more difficult than anyone thought for LCS crews to do maintenance on deployment. They rely on American contractors who must fly in to help. U.S. law prohibits foreign workers from doing the kind of work LCS needs — a fact that, incredibly, seems to have escaped Navy leaders despite the years and billions they’ve spent on the program. This means taxpayers must pay for a team to fly from the U.S. to meet an LCS in, say, Busan, South Korea, to help the crew with the ship’s upkeep.

Wrote Cavas:

    The limited ability of the LCS crew to perform onboard maintenance, and the need to return to port for even basic repairs, “negatively impacts” the ships’ availability to operational commanders, according to sources familiar with the classified report.

    Further, the contractor teams handling maintenance duties are not performing up to snuff or being held accountable for their work. Many contractors are doing the work twice — the second time to correct problems with their initial work — avoiding penalties and billing the Navy twice for the jobs.

    According to some LCS crews, the reliance on contractors actually results in more work for the crew, which is too small to supervise the contractors. Navy sailors often have to fix the problems after the contractors have left.

    Extensive contractor services also are required to maintain spare parts inventories for the ships, since each of the two ship designs features a number of non-standard systems and the vessels are too small to carry many spares. Ships will be based on either the Lockheed Martin Freedom-class design or Austal USA’s Independence class.

    But the reports note the parts and work requirements need to be identified and ordered well in advance, so they’re available when needed — a situation that severely limits the flexibility of the LCS.

You don’t get to see the actual report itself, of course, even though you’ve paid for the ships and the contractors — twice — who phoned in their work here. It’s possible the congressional anger that LCS stirred up earlier this year could result in more disclosures about what the Navy has learned, but do not hold your breath for that.

As for now, the Navy has already conceded it’s adding 20 more racks to its LCS the USS Freedom, and in another Cavas report, that LCS can’t take many of the missions the Navy needs and can’t do the relatively quick toe-touch port swap of mission modules that was to have been its ace in the hole. In that story, Cavas wrote this:

    The shortcomings are well known in the fleet, prompting a perception that service leaders are looking for missions to fit LCS, rather than the other way around.

And in Monday’s story, he wrote this:

    The OPNAV report, according to sources, concluded that, in light of what the ships can and can’t do, the entire LCS concept of operations needs to be reviewed, along with the minimal-manning requirements and the contractor-based maintenance schemes.

    The studies make plain the Navy’s concern with exhaustion and fatigue among LCS crews and the need to improve their quality of life, and cite “the reality of the workload” to bolster those positions.

    The review efforts also highlight the extreme complexity of the LCS program — the multiple crews, additional mission module packages and aviation detachments, and two distinct ship classes — as major factors in developing solutions.

So: The Navy has boxed itself into a program that it apparently cannot execute as it once planned. Despite years of criticism and skepticism from the outside, the service is at last reaching this conclusion for itself. Its leaders are acknowledging the need to take another look. Which makes the next question: Where could LCS go now?

Maybe Norman Polmar will win his dollar bill and the Navy will not order any more ships. Ending the current run at 22 vessels, instead of 55, could let the fleet field more sailors per ship and get more good out of each — “wholeness” being a favorite goal of Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the chief of naval operations. Building fewer ships also could theoretically free up money to better equip them, since it appears the Navy may be forced to rely more than it first wanted on built-in weapons and equipment, as opposed to the interchangeable gear.

(Cavas wrote that Navy leaders have acknowledged they’re looking at installing Harpoon anti-ship missiles and a 76 mm gun, to upgrade from today’s 57 mm — though the larger gun may not fit onto the Independence-class ships’ narrow bow.)

It’s not difficult to imagine the Navy dividing up its smaller but fully manned LCS fleet into dedicated squadrons with permanent missions. Some ships could be rigged for surface patrols, others for mine countermeasures and others for anti-submarine warfare. The Navy would get some of the ships it says it needs, though sacrificing each individual ship’s ability to be a wild card.

The Navy brass, under its LCS-Is-A-Phish-Concert Doctrine — nobody knows where the groove will take us, bro! — would probably say the beauty of the program is its ability to accept these changes. The challenge is that LCS can only change so much; the ships are what they are, and altering them too much, to improve their endurance or increase their size, would spoil the progress of the Navy and its vendors in reducing their costs as they have. Whatever the heirs of the Freedom and Independence become, they probably cannot be true frigates or destroyers. Wrote Cavas:

    Range is still another concern, because of capacity for both fuel and crew provisions. Although the original [concept of operations] called for ships to operate at sea for at least 21 days, the ships have storage capacity to only carry enough food for 14 days, according to sources familiar with the classified report.

So LCS could become something other than LCS we thought we’d get, but the ships that today’s Navy is inheriting may only be able to do so much.

Navy tests LCS weapons package components

The first of class littoral combat ships USS Freedom (LCS 1), rear, and USS Independence (LCS 2) maneuver together during an exercise off the coast of Southern California, near San Diego on May 2, 2012/ .The littoral combat ship is a fast, agile, networked surface combatant designed to operate in the near-shore environment, while capable of open-ocean tasking, and win against 21st-century coastal threats such as submarines, mines, and swarming small craft.

Gun and other components of the warfare mission package of the U.S. Navy's Littoral Combat Ships have completed Phase One development testing.

The Navy said the tests involved surface warfare components such as the MK 46 gun system, .50-caliber and 7.62mm machine guns, rigid inflatable boats and an MH-60R helicopter outfitted with a Hellfire simulator.

"The capabilities included in the surface warfare mission package will project power and presence in key overseas environments," said Rear Adm. James Murdoch, program executive officer Littoral Combat Ships. "An LCS outfitted with these capabilities, teamed with the ship's inherent speed and maneuverability, will provide a capability in a single platform never before available to the U.S. Navy."

The tests were performed recently using the USS Freedom, the first ship of the LCS class, which is modular and as such allows rapid reconfiguring of mission packages for fleet protection from small boats and other asymmetrical threats.

"Although data collected during testing remains under analysis, the systems accomplished each of the challenging test scenarios," said Capt. John Ailes, program manager for LCS Mission Module Integration. "The LCS program continues to mature and demonstrate that this ground-breaking concept of operations works and works well."

The Navy said Phase Two developmental testing of the weapons package will begin in August, with initial operational testing and evaluation scheduled for early 2014.

In addition to surface warfare packages, the Navy plans mine-counter-measure and anti-submarine packages for the 55 LCS ships it will acquire.