The Navy defended its Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) as being sufficiently survivable–and easily upgunned where needed–after taking heat from House appropriators Tuesday on the LCS program and the Navy’s plans to reassess whether to keep the ship as is or adjust its requirements for a small surface combatant.
Though the Navy set up a task force to examine its small surface combatant requirements for the future, Greenert said the LCS is a viable ship: it can take a hit, survive and recover to get out of the battle zone just as well as a frigate. And anything it may be lacking in weaponry or electronic warfare can be added to the ship through its modular design, he told Defense Daily.
After Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.) kicked off a line of questioning on LCS during the House Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing, subcommittee chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen jumped in. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus had called the lead ship’s deployment to Singapore last year a success, which Frelinghuysen questioned. Mabus said the ship encountered some difficulties along the way but maintained the same availability rate as the rest of the Pacific Fleet and completed all the missions it was assigned.
“This is sort of what makes the committee very exasperated and frustrated–we look at the Army with the Ground Combat Vehicle, they messed around with that; with all due respect to the Expeditionary [Fighting] Vehicle…these are sort of what we want to eliminate, this type of situation here,” the chairman said, lumping LCS into that group of failed programs.
Mabus tried to defend the ship class, saying that the effort led by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to reassess the program was no different than happens with any other new ship class. Just as the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer program will soon begin building its fourth flight, and the Virginia-class submarine program is currently building Block 4, the Navy is essentially going to study LCS to determine what a Flight II small surface combatant will look like–the current LCS, a modified LCS, or a new design. Mabus also noted that the ship program had grown more stable, with the ships coming down in price from $750 million for the lead ship to $350 million for the most recent to go on contract.
That answer did not sit well with the subcommittee.
“In this case, [Hagel] talked about the literal survivability of the ship, he talked about the lethality of the ship, talked about the concept of operations–this isn’t just, this is a good ship, we can make it better,” subcommittee ranking member Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.) said. “And you mentioned that we’re hitting the cost target: I’m delighted, but if the ship’s not survivable, I don’t care if I hit my cost target if it’s at the bottom of the ocean.
Regarding the next small surface combatant, Visclosky said, “I’m an accountant, but I don’t want to just get to that number [of 52 desired ships], I want to have a survivable ship for the purpose it was intended, as opposed to one that meets costs that’s not survivable, not lethal.”
Mabus and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert told Defense Daily after a Wednesday morning hearing with Senate appropriators that the issue of survivability was being talked about too vaguely, leading to some flawed assumptions about the effectiveness of the current LCS design and what a future combatant might look like.
“Survivability is a broad statement, and it kind of has three parts: one, how susceptible are you to being hit by something? So that’s about shooting stuff down, spoofing it or whatever. Then there’s your vulnerability. In other words, if you’re hit, how much damage occurs? A lot of studies have been done on that, and that’s very well laid-out, that was in the design of the ship. Then there’s recoverability. Okay, you have damage, what happens now? Can you get back?”
“What I would tell you is, we’re very comfortable with the vulnerability of it and the recoverability of it,” Greenert said of today’s LCS. “Those are designed in. What most people are talking about, it doesn’t have enough weapons or something to shoot things down. We can fix that–that’s the backfit that goes on, that can be backfitted to the vessels that are already done. And in fact, there are plans in place for it. So I think we need to sit down with as many people as will listen and say, look, let’s go into the design–you have to get into the details because we’re speaking too broadly about survivability, in my opinion.”
Greenert added that lawmakers tend to view the frigates favorably, and that if a frigate and LCS were compared in terms of the three aspects of survivability, “they’ll look very much the same.” He noted that one frigate survived hitting a mine and another survived a cruise missile attack, and he expects the LCS could take similar hits and survive.
Greenert did not say, given his confidence in LCS’s vulnerability and recoverability and the ease with which he could boost its susceptibility, how likely it is that the upcoming review would conclude the LCS or a modified version of it should be the small surface combatant of choice going forward. But Mabus noted during the House and Senate hearings that the future combatant would be a modular ship like LCS.
“Anything that you build, you’d have to be modular moving forward because to build these [weapons] systems in and not be able to change them as technology changes, no matter what kind of ship we build, we just can’t afford to do that,” he told the House on Tuesday. “We take a look at these programs and change as requirements change, change as technology changes. And the great thing that a ship like LCS brings is that as technology changes, as missions change, because it’s modular, you don’t have to change the whole ship, you just change the weapons system,” he told the Senate appropriators.
The Navy’s review of the small surface combatant requirements will be sent to Mabus by the end of July, Vice Adm. Joseph Mulloy, deputy CNO for integration of capabilities and resources, told reporters Wednesday afternoon. Mabus will then review the recommendations, and a final decision will be made in time to inform the fiscal year 2016 budget request, Mabus and Greenert said.