20 years later, the Navy says its littoral combat ships (kind of) work

[rebewranger]

20 years later, the Navy says its littoral combat ships (kind of) work
By Paul McLeary - Yesterday 4:06 PM
 
Two decades after Congress started pouring money into the Littoral Combat Ship program, it is finally “on trend to meet design requirements” established under then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Navy told Congress in a recent report.
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The staggering gap between the start of the program and the Navy finally managing to get its once-touted mission modules to work reflects 20 years of broken promises as the service continued to insist that it would get the program right, but continued to fail year after year.

The 15-page update on the troubled program, which has not been previously reported, was sent to the Hill in June and recently obtained by POLITICO.

“The LCS is on trend to meet design requirements for the [mine counter measures] and [surface warfare] missions as they were established ~20 years ago,” the report states. “At issue is the warfighting contribution those capabilities will provide in a changed strategic environment.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/20-years-later-the-navy-says-its-littoral-combat-ships-kind-of-work/ar-AAZCRYo?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=af04693260d247cbb90d7441548395d8

[PeteS in CA]

After a series of design failures, cost overruns and mission changes, now the Navy is saying that the scaled-down ambitions for the program are beginning to be met, albeit years late.

A look at the numbers shows that while the two mission packages appear to work, only the surface warfare module has actually deployed, while the minehunting module is still a work in progress but appears functional.
...
“We all know what lemon cars are. We have a fleet of lemon LCS ships,” Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing last month, while displaying a poster depicting the LCS as lemons.

“We have spent billions of dollars on this fleet when they have no capability to help us deal with what our largest threat is, which is that of China and Russia,” she said. “The only winners have been the contractors on which the Navy relies for sustaining these ships.”

1. No word on whether LCS-POSs will no longer need ocean-going tug escorts.

2. When Jackie Speier "gets it" ...

3. I am still of the opinion that LCSs were designed to be money pits diverting money from ship types useful in projecting US power.