The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the “Little Crappy Ship”

[Timber Rattler]

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-littoral-combat-ship?utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR3HHQG5kAks4MFvxceX2gwPcnGT-vNJJUgbL6y3FxupdN1nQ49zrQPUnRI

In July 2016, warships from more than two dozen nations gathered off the coasts of Hawaii and Southern California to join the United States in the world’s largest naval exercise. The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea and others sent hundreds of destroyers, aircraft carriers and warplanes. They streamed in long lines across the ocean, symbols of power and prestige.

The USS Freedom had its own special place within the armada. It was one of a new class of vessels known as littoral combat ships. The U.S. Navy had billed them as technical marvels — small, fast and light, able to combat enemies at sea, hunt mines and sink submarines.

In reality, the LCS was well on the way to becoming one of the worst boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and underperforming weapons systems. Two of the $500 million ships had suffered embarrassing breakdowns in previous months. The Freedom’s performance during the exercise, showing off its ability to destroy underwater mines, was meant to rejuvenate the ships’ record on the world stage. The ship was historically important too; it was the first LCS built, the first in the water, commissioned just eight years prior.

But like the LCS program’s reputation, the Freedom was in bad shape. Dozens of pieces of equipment on board were undergoing repairs. Training crews for the new class of ships had proven more difficult than anticipated. The sailors aboard the Freedom had not passed an exam demonstrating their ability to operate some of the ship’s most important systems.

As the day to launch approached, the pressure mounted. Top officers visited the ship repeatedly. The Freedom’s sailors understood that theirs was a “no fail mission” with “‘no appetite’ to remain in port,” according to Navy documents obtained by ProPublica.

The Freedom’s Capt. Michael Wohnhaas consulted with his officers. Despite crippling problems that had left one of the ship’s engines inoperable, he and his superiors decided the vessel could rely on its three others for the exercise.

The Freedom completed its mission, but the accomplishment proved hollow. Five days after the ship returned to port, a maintenance check revealed that the faltering engine had suffered “galloping corrosion” from saltwater during the exercise. A sailor described the engine room as “a horror show” with rust eating away at the machinery. One of the Navy’s newest ships would spend the next two years undergoing repairs at a cost of millions.

EXCERPT

Vern Clark was probably worst Chief of Naval Operations to hold that post.  Most of the bad things that have since happened to the Navy originated during his watch.

A self-professed “radical,” at times irreverent and impassioned, he wanted to run the Navy like a business, streamlining training, rooting out misspent dollars, retaining sailors who shined and getting rid of those who did not.

He believed the Navy needed a more cost-effective and technologically advanced fleet. Many of the Navy’s ships had been built during the Cold War. Massive carriers, destroyers, battleships and cruisers were facing retirement, in part because updating them with modern technology was prohibitively expensive, Clark said.

In keeping with his business background, Clark wanted as few people on the new ships as possible. “What I really want is an unmanned ship that’s got R2-D2 in it,” he said, recalling his thinking at the time.