The fate of the Freedom-class littoral-combat ship, plagued by cost overruns and limited utility, now rests with Congress.
The fate of the Freedom-class littoral-combat ship, plagued by cost overruns and limited utility, now rests with Congress.
R ecently, the Navy published a list of ships that it wishes to decommission or otherwise shift from active service in fiscal year 2023. The list’s fate now rests with Congress, which must approve it and may amend it before doing so.
While many of the Navy’s choices — older combat vessels, support ships, and minesweepers — should be uncontroversial, the inclusion of every Freedom-class littoral-combat ship (LCS) is eyebrow-raising, even if it ultimately makes sense, given the class’s myriad issues and specious defense value.
The Freedom class’s development has been plagued by cost overruns. Its ships also have limited use: They reportedly can’t be fitted with the anti-submarine warfare (ASW) module, which vastly reduces their suitability as sub-hunters. As a result, they can only really be used for drug-interdiction and anti-surface warfare (ASuW) work. (The most recent models have been altered to improve their ability to launch small boats, which points to their deployment in the Caribbean for the former purpose.)
Unfortunately, because the Navy has produced very few ships of late, retiring the Freedom class would mean a net loss of vessels over the next five years. And so the Navy’s list has touched off a clash between defense hawks, who reject the idea of lowering the Navy’s ship totals, and budget hawks, who see the LCSes as somewhat-buoyant burn pits for taxpayer money.
“The losses are the sunk cost of paying seven to eight hundred million for each of these [littoral-combat ships] and really not getting much value out of them. So the [downside of retiring the Freedom class] is, I think, embarrassment for the Navy, and also just a loss for the taxpayer,” a Senate aide familiar with defense matters told National Review.
When asked about the idea of spending a bit more money on the Freedom class to rectify its combining gear — effectively, its equivalent to a car’s transmission — in hopes that the class could be hauled from its premature grave, the aide explained why that approach might not make sense:
I think when you throw enough money and resources at just about anything, you could probably fix it. But again, I think it comes down to a cost–benefit of finite resources. And you could probably fix these things, but then for what purpose and at what cost? And I think everyone again, has come to the realization that these might not be the best type of ships for a great power competition that we may be fighting in the future.
In other words, it probably makes the most sense for the government to cut its losses on the Freedom class, as painful as cutting losses in the billions would undoubtedly be.
PHOTOS: U.S. Navy Littoral Combat Ships
Perhaps the most underreported drawback of the LCS program is its inveterate consumption of qualified and capable senior enlisted. Split into Blue and Gold crews, the sailors are expected to do the work of men thrice their number and across multiple disciplines. The Navy thought it best to staff LCSes with sailors from ranks E-5 and above (i.e., those with multiple years in the service and with proficiency at sea), and as a result it has lots of excellent upper enlisted stationed aboard ships that will not deploy, while the deployed surface fleet is desperately lacking just that exact sort of sailor. This state of affairs is the worst of both worlds: It’s unfair to the upper enlisted, and it also harms the Navy’s war-fighting capabilities.
How many of the current fleet’s woes could be blunted with the return of hundreds of senior enlisted freed from the littorals and allowed to return to warships? As much as sailors may moan about deployments, the more senior ones largely enjoy them — the pay improves, there’s common purpose, and the open water feels like home. With LCS crews denied any meaningful sailing work and their deployments proscribed for fear that their ships will break, it’s no wonder that the fleet is experiencing retention issues.
Thomas Jefferson had a vision for a Navy composed of small coastal gunboats manned by local militias. He thought this a cost-effective and anti-federalist solution, one that would signal a nonaggressive posture to the British. The idea largely failed because militias do not transform into competent seamen as readily as they transform into competent soldiers, and because the small boats were useless when not in the calmest of seas. We seem to have learned from the first lesson and stocked our little boats with the best enlisted men the Navy can offer. But we’ve failed to learn the second lesson, forgetting to make the ships those enlisted men sail seaworthy.
Whether the Navy should do away with the LCS is now a question for Congress to answer. Neither of the options on the table is ideal: If we decommission the Freedom class entirely, ten years from now we may find ourselves wishing for a coastal-patrol vessel that has since been passed along to the scrapyards of Brownsville, Texas; if we keep the ships in service, we may live to regret doing so just as much.
Either way, there is a debate coming between two camps that both wish to see a strong Navy but have conflicting ideas of what such a Navy should look like, and it is sure to be fascinating.