XBradTC

Of course, CDR Salamander has been preaching against the awful LCS program for well over a decade now. And pretty much every issue he’s had with it has been mocked and scorned by the program’s supporters. And after much mockery and scorn, those same supporters get slapped in the face with the reality that ‘Phib was right, and they were wrong.

The LCS was designed to be minimally manned with rotating crews to keep the ships forward and underway as much as possible. The 3-2-1 concept: three crews would be assigned to two ships. Typically, a crew would be deployed, a second crew would be training to deploy on a ship based out of the U.S. and the third crew would be restarting their training ashore and getting downtime after their deployment.

That set-up is likely to change, say two sources familiar with the Navy’s deliberations. The review ordered by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson will likely include recommendations to shift to a Blue and Gold crew structure, a set-up used on ballistic missile and guided missile submarines where two crews swap custody of a single hull to maximize deployed time. The Navy has been moving away from rotational crew models other than the Blue and Gold out of concern that maintenance issues may slip through the cracks for crews serving only temporarily aboard any ship.

The review will also recommend changing some of the signature modularity of the program — the concept that ships at sea could readily swap out sensors and weapons packages to meet emergent missions.

Instead of three mission modules being available to switch out on deployment, the Navy is looking at moving to a “one ship, one mission” approach, where each LCS will be designated as surface, anti-submarine or mine countermeasures ships with the ability to switch out if needed.

Let’s start with the crewing concept. A huge part of the sales pitch for the LCS was minimal manning. The “base” crew was only supposed to be 40 people, with something like a 25 man aviation detachment, and a handful more for whatever embarked mission modules were used. It was only after a few years of experience that the Navy learned such a small crew simply couldn’t keep up with the routine day to day maintenance required to run a warship. They then rolled out the 3-2-1 concept, when they realized people were simply ground to dust after six months of trying to run the ship and keep it operational. But that plan has ownership issues. Not to mention, it still wore out the crews. And so now, they’re looking at going to a Blue/Gold crew concept. So we’ve effectively doubled the manpower required for LCS crewing. Which, a decade ago, CDR Salamander (and your humble host) were already arguing that you’d need at least twice as many people to crew the ship. Worse, now you have twice as many bodies tied up in the program, but only half of them are ever available to work on the ship or stand watch. It’s the worst of both worlds. It’s one thing to have Blue/Gold crews for Fleet Ballistic Missile submarines, which receive more care and attention to their maintenance than any other ships in the fleet.  It’s an entirely different matter for what is essentially just a big corvette.

As to the mission modules, again, CDR Salamander was spot on. Not because he’s unusually bright, but because it was so bloody obvious. The concept of being able to quickly plug and play large equipment modules aboard a warship is a pleasing one (and, in fact a goal we should continue to pursue). But the entire LCS program took the approach backwards. They designed the ships, and left room for the modules. The modules were simply vaporware at the time. The right approach is to design modules to perform a mission, test them out, and then design a ship to carry them.

And once you’ve installed a mission module on a ship, there are practical operational reasons to simply leave it there. Let’s indulge a fantasy, and pretend that a counter-mine mission module existed and worked. Mine Warfare is such a specialized mission, you need considerable training, not just for the module operators, but for the entire ship, to become proficient at it. The plan to routinely swap out mission modules on a whim would also see the tribal knowledge of each specific mission area erode away with every swap.

The F-35 probably gets more bad press than any other defense program today. But in the end, we’re going to have a pretty decent light strike fighter. The LCS, however, was a fundamentally flawed conception, poorly procured, and will never yield the fruits its proponents promised us, and instead, is simply a lemon that will sour the surface fleet for decades to come.