Surface Forces: Despised LCS Survives with Upgrades
March 8, 2024: This year the U.S. Navy decided to reverse its plan to quickly discard its remaining LCS (Littoral Combat Ships) and instead upgrade many of them. In late 2023 it came as no surprise when the navy recently made it official that its ambitious but poorly implemented Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program will be eliminated. That came 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. Only 35 LCS ships were built and now they are being rapidly retired, often after only a few years of service. The main reason for this is that the LCS never performed adequately, and cost much more than they were supposed to. The navy saves a lot of money by eliminating the LCS ships and can use the savings to maintain or expand construction of ships that work.
Currently there are only 21 LCS ships in service, but many are not operational. In early 2022 only seventeen LCS ships were in service with only eleven fully capable. Six had operational limitations because of engine problems and were 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 were retired early, four of them of the type that have debilitating combining gear engine problems.
The Navy never came close to obtaining the 55 LCS ships 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.
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