SEATTLE—This week, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson told Congress that the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) requirement remains 52 ships, but Defense Secretary Ashton Carter on Thursday doubled down on his assertion that 40 will be adequate.
“Forty is enough, and the Navy’s own warfighting analysis indicates that,” he said during a gaggle with reporters in Seattle, where he was meeting with executives from Microsoft [MSFT] and Amazon [AMZN]. “And so we are adjusting the buy of the Littoral Combat Ship, or Fast Frigate, to forty, and that’s the right decision to make because it allows us to have the right kinds of ships, lethality and to make investments in technology.”
The department is making a “deliberate choice” to favor lethality through investments in undersea technologies and missiles, he added. “We are, in the budget we submitted, going to increase the number of ships in the U.S. Navy, but not by increasing the number of Littoral Combat Ships as much as we had once planned.”
Carter directed the Navy in a 2015 memo to slash its program of record from 52 to 40 ships and to downselect to a single shipbuilder in the next few years.
During a House Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, Mabus and Richardson confirmed that the service requirement continues to have a requirement for 52 small surface combatants, which includes LCS and the upgunned frigate version.
“We have a validated requirement for 52 Littoral Combat Ships,” Mabus said, adding he had not heard of any Navy analysis that decreased the requirement.
The service’s head of acquisition, Sean Stackley, made similar comments last week, going so far as to say that a 40-ship small surface combatant fleet would have the Navy accepting additional risk.
LCS Program in Flux
In the wake of the decision to cut the LCS buy, the Navy is rethinking other elements of the program. For years, Navy leaders have talked about the novel way the LCS will operate, styling it as a modular vessel that could be configured for various missions and manned by a smaller crew that would conduct performance-based maintenance that included some repairs at sea.
Now that the service has six LCS vessels in its fleet and is slated to accept a steady stream of newly constructed hulls over the coming years, it wants to review whether that operational construct still makes sense.
In a Feb. 29 memo, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson directed Brian Persons, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems (OPNAV 9), Vice Adm. Thomas Rowden, commander of naval surface forces, and Vice Adm. David Johnson, the principle military deputy to service’s chief acquisition official, to evaluate the crewing, operations, training and maintenance of the ships. The review is due in 60 days and will help define whether there should be any changes to the plan.
The service isn’t unequivocally walking away from any part of the original LCS operational construct, and there were no specific concerns that prompted the review, a Navy official told Defense Daily.
“We’ve had two deployments, so there’s two deployments worth of data. You’ve had two ships that have been operating off the continental U.S., doing mission module testing and other testing. So there’s a lot of information that is available now,” the official said. “With six already in the fleet and adding one every six months or so, now is the right time to look at these concepts and either validate, adjust or move in a different direction.”
One of the LCS’s signature characteristics is its modularity, and it was designed to accommodate one of three mission packages that could be swapped out as need dictates. As part of the review, the service will evaluate how many antisubmarine warfare, mine countermeasures and anti-surface warfare packages it needs. It will also consider alternative approaches, including permanently assigning specific mission modules to ships or putting a mix of capabilities from the modules on a ship.
The review team will assess the ship’s’ 3-2-1 manning construct, which posits that three crews would be assigned to two ships, one of which is deployed. It will also look at the size of the crew, which was originally conceived as to be as small as possible to reduce cost.
“We started at 40 base crew, then we went to 50,” the official said. “Is that enough? Do we need to go a little higher? Does it make more sense to drop the mission module crew numbers and make that more a permanent ship company?”
On the maintenance side, Richardson wants the review evaluate the balance of work between the service and contractors, including the possibility of “additional ship maintenance organic to the ship or LCS squadron.” Originally, the idea was that the crew, aided by defense contractors, would conduct limited conditions-based maintenance while deployed instead of the periodic, preventative maintenance that most ships receive.
The review will also identify whether the program has the right mix of simulated and shore-based learning versus training at sea. Specifically, it will assess whether the ships should transition to the training approach specified in the Optimized Fleet Response Plan, which lays out a 36-month cycle of maintenance, training, deployment and sustainment.