Winning: LCS Died From A Bad Habit
January 8, 2022: The U.S. Navy has not made it official yet, but its ambitious but poorly implemented "Littoral Combat Ship" (LCS) program is rapidly fading away after more than a decade of effort to build at least fifty of them to replace 51 very successful Perry-Class frigates and 26 smaller mine warfare ships. By April 2022 only seventeen LCS ships will be in service with only eleven fully capable. Six have operational limitations because of engine problems and are unable to go overseas or do much more than act as patrol ships in the Caribbean, interdicting illegal drug smuggling. By early 2022 six of the older LCS ships will have been retired early, four of them of the type that have debilitating engine (combining gear) problems.
Currently it looks like the Navy is going to end up with about 18 these ships rather than the 55 originally planned. The failure of the LCS was not unusual because the U.S. Navy has, since the 1980s, had an impressive and disastrous number of new ship designs that failed. The LCS failure was not sudden, but the result of a growing number of construction defects and design flaws that have caused the planned number to be produced or kept in service revised downward five times. The latest reductions may be the last, because a replacement ship has already been selected and ordered.
https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htwin/articles/20220108.aspx
