Top Navy officers are once again defending the survivability of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) following the most recent report by the Pentagon’s testing office stating the ships would not be able to stay on mission if they took a significant hit.
Several admirals speaking at the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium this week expressed confidence in the ships’ survivability while pointing out that the vessels meet the requirements for the missions they were designed to carry out.
Rear Adm. Tom Eccles, the chief engineer and deputy commander for naval systems engineering at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), said comparing LCS survivability to other, larger surface combatants was flawed, and noted that the LCS class brings an enhanced capability when it comes to speed and evading threats.
“Survivability comes in lots of shapes and sizes,” he told a gathering yesterday at the second of a three-day conference just outside Washington. “This ship meets its requirements.”
“It also does so with its ability to perform to a mission set that is appropriate to what the threat environment is and its inherent capability to recover from whatever hit may be taken,” he added.
The LCS is designed to deploy swappable mission packages for surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare and mine countermeasures. Those modules are still in development even as the first ship in the class, the USS Freedom (LCS-1), prepares for its first major oversees deployment to Singapore in the spring.
“Every ship type and class in our inventory has its own position in the survivability spectrum,” Eccles said. “These ships are designed for speed, designed for their ability to bring a modular capability to the fight, and designed to be in the fight and then get themselves out of that fight when it’s required.”
The Pentagon office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) released its annual report this month saying the Littoral Combat Ships were not designed to sustain operations after taking a hit.
“LCS is not expected to be survivable in that it is not expected to maintain mission capability after taking a significant hit in a hostile combat environment,” the report said.
Vice Adm. Richard Hunt, the staff director at Naval Operations (OPNAV), said there will be times when the ship operates alone but that its survivability must also be viewed in the context of operating in a strike group that includes guided missile destroyers and cruisers that provide theater area missile defense in addition to the LCS’s own defensive capabilities.
“This is part of a warfare package across the board,” said Hunt, who was also on the panel with Eccles, as well as with Vice Adm. Tom Copeman, the commander of Naval Surface Forces, and Vice Adm. Walter Skinner, the principal military deputy assistant secretary of the Navy in the Office of Research, Development and Acquisition.
Rear Adm. James Murdoch, the executive officer overseeing the LCS acquisition program at NAVSEA, pointed out that the survivability questions surrounding the ships have appeared in years worth of DOT&E reports.
“That has been an ongoing assessment not so much of the ships that we have built but of the requirements they are built to,” he said.
“The more survivable you choose to make a ship, the heavier it will be, the more systems and redundancy it will have, and, consequently, the more expensive and slower it will be,” he added.