The U.S. Navy Is Now Paying a Price for Its Littoral Combat Ship Mistakes

[rangerrebew]

The U.S. Navy Is Now Paying a Price for Its Littoral Combat Ship Mistakes
.By James Holmes
 

There’s already some evidence that using littoral combat ships in this manner yields strategic advantage in the gray zone.

As so often, Admiral Jim Stavridis called it right. Of this week’s decommissioning of USS Sioux City, a Freedom-class littoral combat ship (LCS), after less than five years’ service, the retired NATO supreme allied commander and Fletcher School dean declared: “Hard to figure this one out . . . . Hate to see anything decommissioned when we are so far behind China in overall ship count.”

Yes. It is a head-scratcher.

The retirement of Sioux City and the Aegis cruiser Mobile Bay the week before left the U.S. Navy’s tally at 297 ships of war, to around 340 for China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy. And that deficit vis-à-vis China is only set to widen as American shipbuilding dawdles while China gallops ahead. The U.S. Navy needs new hulls displacing water. And it needs to find ways to wring value from the assets it already has—especially from new assets like Sioux City that have plenty of service life left.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/08/23/the_us_navy_is_now_paying_a_price_for_its_littoral_combat_ship_mistakes_974768.html

[DefiantMassRINO]

The Navy has made several rookie procurement boners in the last couple of decades, order new technologies to production before adequate proof-of-concept and mission testing.

Reliance on contractors sounds like a good idea for cost saving and flexibility, but, they are private companies incented to make profit by aspiring to the lowest common denominator.

Around late 1990s / early 2000s, software companies were selling non-existent products to customers on the basis of promises comprised of many buzzwords that were euphemisms for nothing.  We called these things "vaporware".  Basically, the vendor was going to charge the customer to develop, test, and deploy a non-existent, unproven product.  Needless to say, many of these years-long projects ended up in the waste bins of failed IT projects.

[PeteS in CA]

The whole LCS concept was an intentional moneypit, IMO. Money got sunk into POSes that were incapable of projection of power.