For some of us, mustering up sympathy for a federal bureaucrat is difficult. Very, very difficult.
But consider the feelings of Paul Francis, when he learned that the Coronado “was decommissioned in San Diego” earlier this month, “less than nine years after the pricey ship entered active service.”
Nearly six years ago, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) auditor told Congress that the littoral combat ship (LCS) program was in big trouble. Francis, in testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, said that the Navy had “deviated from traditional shipbuilding acquisition in hopes of rapidly delivering ships to the fleet,” but the “consequences of this approach” were abysmal — “costs to construct the ships have more than doubled from initial expectations, with promised levels of capability unfulfilled and deliveries significantly delayed.”
It started innocently enough. Back in the Rumsfeld era, the military-industrial complex grew excited about “a new kind of U.S. Navy vessel” that would “interdict ships carrying terrorists and pirates,” “go in close to shore to do ‘littoral penetration’,” and complete its tasks “cheaply and effectively, at $400 million a shot.” Affordability was a key pitch for LCS lobbyists, and this time the Navy would finally manifest what The New York Times called the service’s “faith in a feat of maritime alchemy: building a hardened warship by adapting the design of a high-speed commercial ferry.”
But as Francis testified:
Whereas acquisition best practices embrace a “fly before you buy” approach, the Navy has subscribed to a buy before you fly approach for LCS. Consequently, the business imperatives of budgeting, contracting, and ship construction have outweighed the need to demonstrate knowledge, such as technology maturation, design, and testing, resulting in a program that has delivered 8 ships and has 14 more in some stage of the construction process … despite an unclear understanding of the capability the ships will ultimately be able to provide and with notable performance issues discovered among the few ships that have already been delivered.
A few months after the committee’s hearing, the GAO reported that the LCS’s unit cost was 81 percent over budget, the program’s acquisition cycle time had extended 78 months, and the bill for LCS research and development had soared by 313 percent.
Those numbers are worrisome abstractions. Here are real-word examples of what taxpayers — as well as American sailors unlucky enough to have been assigned to the LCS fleet — have endured:
• In August 2016, the Coronado — “two months into its maiden deployment” — had to return to port, to fix an “engineering casualty.”
• In February 2017, the crew of the Coronado was “marooned in Singapore,” because the “Navy’s top Surface Warfare Officer announced a sweeping overhaul to the LCS program’s training standards that was spurred by a string of accidents.”
• In April 2018, the “long awaited upgrade of Northrop Grumman’s MQ-8C Fire Scout unmanned helicopter with weapons” was put “on hold.” The problem: “integration issues and the limited magazine space that we have in trying to find out what the weapons mix should be” for the LCS.
• In June 2019, the commanding officer of the Billings was “removed from his job after the vessel hit another ship in Canada.” (Witnesses said the ship “somehow lost control after the lines from tugboats assisting it were let go when it was leaving the dock in the St. Lawrence River.”)
• In February 2020, “the U.S. Navy’s budget director said” that the “cost of upgrading and repairing the first four” LCSs was “too high and it’s better just to decommission them.”
• In October 2020, the Detroit “limp[ed] back to Mayport, Florida,” due to a glitch with its combining gear, “which is a complex transmission that connects power from two large gas turbine engines and two main propulsion diesel engines to the ship’s propulsion shafts, which propels the ship through the water with water jets.”
• In May 2021, the GAO found that “the Navy doesn’t even know how to repair many commercial systems onboard LCS and is starting to pay the manufacturers of such systems for the required data to troubleshoot and fix issues on the ships.”
Angry yet? Get this: According to one of Francis’s colleagues, “the Navy is in the process of buying an entirely new class of ships — the frigate — because of shortfalls in the LCS.” And the FFG(X) program is very likely to make many of the same blunders as the clunker it’s replacing.
Shipyard workers vote, though. And for fedpols, if it’s a choice between reelection security and national security, you know which option always prevails.
The Coronado Times announced in Mar 2009 that the ship is named in honor of the patriotic citizens of Coronado, Calif. Coronado has been home to the Navy since 1917. Two other vessels were named after Coronado. I'll bet there will be a fourth.