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

By Joaquin Sapien Sept. 7, 2023

Littoral combat ships were supposed to launch the Navy into the future. Instead they broke down across the globe and many of their weapons never worked. Now the Navy is getting rid of them. One is less than five years old. 

Key Takeaways:

• One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more littoral combat ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons systems failed. The Navy wound up with more ships than it wanted, at an estimated lifetime cost that could reach $100 billion or more. 
• The Navy’s haste to deliver ships took precedence over combat ability. Without functioning weapons systems the vessels are like a “box floating in the ocean,” one former officer said. 
•  Sailors and officers complained they spent more time fixing the ships than sailing them. The stress led many to seek mental health care. 
•  Top Navy commanders placed pressure on subordinates to sail the ships even when the crews and vessels were not fully prepared to go to sea. 
• Several major breakdowns in 2016 exposed the limits of the ships and their crews, each adding fresh embarrassment to a program meant to propel the Navy into a more technologically advanced future. 

Complicated equipment needed lot's of training. The ship’s executive officer, the second in command, complained of a lack of support from superiors.“We ask for help, but there isn’t enough,” he said, adding that he was told “they don’t have the bodies.”“I messed up everything because I was going too fast,” the sailor later explained.

 

The mistake damaged the ship’s combining gear, forcing it to sit for seven months while waiting on replacement parts.Ships were rushed to sea with faltering equipment. Shorthanded crews and captains without sufficient training or support tried to make them work. Breakdowns ensued. 

 

Then, the pressure to perform and restore the reputation of the program intensified anew and the cycle repeated itself. Foreign contractors, and often with manuals that aren't written in English. Intricate systems that failed to communicate with each other, The GAO, which has produced dozens of reports criticizing the ships, later learned that the Coronado failed to sail six times between 2016 and 2017 because “it did not not have correct parts on board to fix simple problems.”

 

Important items like “circuit card assemblies, washers, bolts, gaskets, and diaphragms for air conditioning units were not on board,” the report found. “The LCS may not have adequate space onboard to stock these items.”A month later, a fifth ship, the USS Montgomery, suffered a series of mishaps. Over a two-month stretch, its engine malfunctioned, it collided with a tugboat and it then cracked its hull after striking a lock in the Panama Canal.................“This story was originally published by ProPublica.  To Read More....Much More.....follow this link.”  

• Eight Things You Need to Know About the Navy’s Failed Multibillion-Dollar Littoral Combat Ship Program The key takeaways from ProPublica’s investigation into the decades long project that could end up costing American taxpayers more than $100 billion..............Here are eight takeaways from ProPublica’s report on the Navy’s littoral combat ship program, which has cost taxpayers billions but failed to deliver on its promise.

1. Navy officials vastly underestimated the costs to build the ship in estimates provided to Congress. The original price tag more than doubled.

Contractors were supposed to build the ships fast, in large numbers and at an original cost of $220 million each — cheap for a Navy vessel. The ships were based in part on designs for commercial car or passenger ferries. As the Navy began to apply tougher standards, costs soared.

2. The ships were supposed to be equipped with interchangeable weapons systems to allow them to fight, hunt submarines and detect mines. The Navy failed to make this happen.

Former officers said that the Navy’s haste to deliver the ships took precedence over the vessels’ combat abilities. After spending hundreds of millions, the Navy abandoned its plan to outfit the ships to find and destroy submarines; the system to hunt undersea mines is still under development. Without functioning weapons systems, one former officer said, the ship was only a “box floating in the ocean.” In response to questions, the Navy acknowledged the LCS was not suitable for fighting peer competitors such as China. The LCS “does not provide the lethality or survivability needed in a high-end fight.”

3. Scores of sailors and officers spent more time trying to fix the ships than sailing them.

Because the crews were so small, only the most elite officers and sailors were meant to sail the ships. But breakdowns meant that the ships often spent more time in port than at sea. Some sailors sought mental health assistance because of the challenges. The LCS program became known as a place where naval careers went to die. Over time, the Navy increased crew sizes on the LCS.

4. The Navy relied so heavily on contractors for maintenance and repair that sailors and officers were unable to fix their own ships.

Sailors and officers were not allowed to touch certain pieces of equipment because of complicated arrangements with Navy contractors. Cumbersome negotiations meant it could sometimes take weeks to get contractors on board. “An average week would consist of 90 to 100 hours in port doing, honestly, nothing,” one former officer said of his time. The Navy has recently increased the amount of maintenance performed by sailors.

5. A string of high-profile breakdowns at sea beginning in late 2015 laid bare the limits of the ships and their crews.

In late 2015, the USS Milwaukee broke down en route to its home port, the equivalent of a brand new car stalling on its way out of the dealership. In January 2016, the USS Fort Worth broke down when a crew of exhausted sailors failed to execute a routine procedure, costing the Navy millions in repairs. Months later, the USS Freedom saw its engine destroyed by a seawater leak. Then the USS Coronado had trouble with its water jets, followed by the USS Montgomery, which collided with a tugboat, then cracked its hull after striking a lock in the Panama Canal. Each incident added fresh embarrassment to a program meant to propel the Navy into a more technologically advanced future.

6. Top Navy commanders pressured subordinates to sail even when the crews and ships were not fully prepared to go to sea.

On the Freedom, sailors and officers understood that they had a “no fail mission” with “‘no appetite’ to remain in port.” Even though one engine was contaminated, the ship’s commander took it to sea. Afterward, the ship needed repairs that took two years to complete and cost millions. On the Fort Worth, one sailor complained that there was “no break, no reprieve, just increasing daily tasking.”

7. One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more of the ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons systems failed. The Navy wound up with more ships than it wanted, at an estimated lifetime cost of $100 billion.

Time and again, senior officers voiced their concerns about the ineffectiveness of the ships, yet members of Congress, the Pentagon and Navy leaders advocated for them anyway. In some cases, officers assigned to review the ships’ performance saw their careers derailed after sharing their unvarnished, critical findings.

Former Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said the Navy took the breakdowns seriously, “but it did not seem, from what we were looking at, that it was a systemic problem.”

8. Lawmakers with shipyards in their districts played a key role in expanding the program and protecting it from scrutiny.

When the Navy decided to issue contracts to build 20 littoral combat ships in two states in 2010, it encountered stiff resistance from the then-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John McCain, a Republican. But Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican representing Alabama, where some of the ships were being built, slipped in an amendment that would allow the Navy to do so in a last-minute budget bill. 

“He made sure it happened,” a Shelby spokesman said at the time. Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, who was initially skeptical of the ships, supported the proposal. He said the plan to build 10 vessels at a shipyard in neighboring Wisconsin would provide “a major boost for the region’s economy.” Even after the Navy finally determined that it only needed 32 of the ships, Congress managed to fund three more.

• Despite Major Reform to Military Justice System, Navy Still Leaves Public in Dark A new law enacts sweeping changes to make prosecutions for serious offenses like sexual assault or murder more fair. The Navy is still fighting a ProPublica lawsuit to make those court cases public.........
• The Army Increasingly Allows Soldiers Charged With Violent Crimes to Leave the Military Rather Than Face TrialA federal watchdog called for ending the practice nearly 50 years ago, but the military pushed back. Now, soldiers leave the Army with a negative discharge, avoiding possible federal conviction and with little record of the allegations against them.............

My Take - First, we need to get over the idea career military people are brighter than everyone else.  In point of fact, they got promoted because they were go along get along guys, and based on my experience in the Navy, they were, over all, lazy, under bright, over educated, strutting, arrogant incompetent bullies, and this article substantiates that view, along with the corrupt politicians who supported all this obvious insanity.  As a former admiral who had concerns about all this but mostly kept quiet said: 

“As a subordinate naval officer, when your boss tells you, ‘Here’s a shovel, go dig the hole,’ you go dig the hole.”A fellow officer warned him that painting this kind of damning portrait for the highest ranking officer in the Navy, the chief naval officer, could hurt his career. At that point, the Navy had already committed to buying at least 20 more ships worth billions of dollars.Soon after, Perez was assigned to the international relations department of the Navy. About a year after that, he became liaison to the State Department. Neither are regarded as ideal assignments for an admiral who had spent a career carrying out missions at sea.

I despised most of the officers I knew.  As for the all the politicians and civilian authority that allowed this to go on, there needs to be a RICO investigation over this.   

“politics is king in the shipbuilding business.”

I had a couple of officers I worked for I actually thought were good leaders, mostly because they left us alone to do our work without harassment.  It's the senior enlisted personnel who make the Navy work, and a good officer recognizes that and doesn't interfere except to support those actually doing the work.

A friend of mine was a graduate of the Air Force Academy, and he said one of his room mates made the Air Force a career and became a two start general.  He also said was one of the dumbest members of his class.   

Col. John Boyd is one of my personal heroes, who became a legend spending his career fighting with the generals over this kind of  stupid, expensive boondoggle thinking.  So none of this is surprising, except for the massive costs involved.  Even I didn't think they were that stupid.

I've been criticized for my views of officers, and now we're seeing how the military has been corrupted by all these nitwits, and in the case of military officers, they swore an oath to support the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, but in reality there were nothing but heretics worshiping at the secular alter of the Church of Wokeness and it's destroying America's military.  

And whaddaya know, the bug man was right once again.  Imagine that.