A potential fight among lawmakers over the future of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program was over before it began after Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) announced on Wednesday that she planned to withdraw her amendment to the 2017 defense authorization bill that supported a truncated LCS program.
The amendment would have ordered the defense secretary to ensure that production of the LCS was capped at 40 and that all ships produced after fiscal year 2019 would be manufactured by a single shipbuilder. If adopted, the language basically would have certified in law Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s memo to the Navy made last year.
The HASC seapower and projection forces committee in their portion of the fiscal year 2017 National Defense Authorization Act pushed back on that directive, adding funds to procure a third LCS and forbidding the Navy to downselect to a single builder until 2019 (Defense Daily, April 20).
Speier, like Carter, argued that the Navy would be better served by fewer LCSs and more high-end ships.
“These ships are more expensive than originally planned, take longer to develop, are unreliable, lightly armored and have limited offensive capabilities,” she said. “If the goal is to make this program more efficient, then we should downselect to one variant of the LCS as Secretary Carter has suggested.”
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) also spoke in favor of the proposed amendment, citing reports by the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation that critiqued the ship’s performance.
The seapower subcommittee unanimously rejected Carter’s plan, said Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.), who opposed the language. Byrne’s district is home to one of the LCS builders, Austal, which builds the Independence-class. Lockheed Martin [LMT] builds the Freedom-class variant.
“I’ve talked extensively to people up and down the chain of command in the Navy. They need this ship. The people that sail on it like these ships, and they like the fact that they have two variants,” he said.
Former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel chartered a review of the LCS program in 2014, and the Navy recommended retaining a 52-ship program of record, while upgrading the final 12 ships to an upgunned “frigate” version. Since then, service officials have testified to Congress that the 52-ship requirement hasn’t changed, Byrne pointed out.
“There has been no new study,” he said. Officials have “reiterated the need for 52 ships and reiterated the need to keep two shipyards because what they’ve gotten from this…is a program that’s gone down in cost.”