Littoral Combat Ships

Author: Michael Redmond Edited by: Nora Lewis

Suggested Citation:

Redmond, M., Lewis, N. (2026). Littoral combat ships. Technology Assessment Project Case Study Library, University of Michigan. https://stpp.fordschool.umich.edu/tap-case-study-library/littoral-comba…

Littoral Combat Ships

Key Takeaways

• Security framing for new technologies can be used to suppress considerations of cost, effectiveness, and importantly, public benefits.
• Profit motivations and technological "lock-in" can drive the development of expensive and ineffective technologies.

In the late 1990s, the U.S. Navy began to assess its post-Cold War era needs. It found that the existing fleet of cruisers and destroyers, designed to fight open ocean naval battles with the Soviets, were ill-suited to coastal and shallow water (littoral) combat due to their large size, relatively slow speeds, and lack of maneuverability (Rowden, 2013). The Navy saw the littoral zone as the battleground of the future, and needed a fleet that could respond to a more dispersed and variable set of threats like smaller "fast-attack" craft, sea mines, and coastal submarines.

The original idea was to go big. Many high-ranking naval officials saw the massive, 17,500-ton DD-21 land attack destroyer as the ship of the future, believing that a large ship would be able to safely survive more missile attacks and fulfill a wide range of capabilities (Axe, n.d.). Given the military's increasing focus on land combat, the DD-21 program was a natural evolution for the Navy - a large, centralized, expensive piece of hardware that could exert full control over a specific geographic area while also assisting coastal ground troops in precise and meaningful ways (McKearney, 1998).

At the same time, two naval strategists, retired Capt. Waye Hughes and Vice Adm. Art Cebrowski, had begun developing ideas for a more distributed model of naval warfare that relied on a larger number of smaller, cheaper, and more specialized vessels (MacLeavy & Columba Peoples, 2009). Because of their size, the ships would be significantly less durable, but Cebrowski and Hughes argued that because they were so cheap (less than $100 million a pop) the ships could ultimately be treated as "single-use" or "disposable" (MacLeavy & Columba Peoples, 2009). The idea was met with harsh criticism from the naval establishment, leading the Navy to "opt out, and then ignore, this critically important debate" between large, centralized military hardware and a more distributed model.

Enter Donald Rumsfeld. Appointed Secretary of Defense in 2001, Rumsfeld said the military needed to "promote a more entrepreneurial approach…one that encourages people to behave somewhat less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists" (Macleavy & Columba Peoples, 2009). He wanted designs that were revolutionary, not evolutionary, and believed the answers lied in automation and technological sophistication coupled with "intelligent risk-taking" (Mcleary, 2022).

Rumsfeld's techno-speculative ideology, combined with a reduced ship-building budget and calls for rapidly expanding total ship numbers, led him to throw his weight behind what would eventually become the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program - a large fleet of small, inexpensive, technologically advanced vessels capable of executing a wide variety of missions in combat zones that would define the future. Based purely on this concept, and lacking a clear purpose, thorough testing, or robust strategic analysis, the Navy committed $15 billion to the LCS program in 2003 (Morgan, 2003).

The lack of defined goals or clear links between theory and implementation led to criticism at the time. A joint congressional report on the 2003 Defense Authorization Act states that the program "had not been vetted…particularly with regards to possible alternatives," and a high-ranking Navy official admitted to Congress that a "rigorous analysis" was conducted only after the Navy committed the initial $15 billion dollars to the program (Work, 2014).

Because no one knew exactly what the LCS was supposed to do, the list of missions and required capabilities ballooned rapidly. Adm. Vernon Clark, chief of naval operations at the time, said that "people started coming out of the woodwork" to add requirements following the program's announcement, further muddying the waters around the ship's intended purpose (Work, 2014). Largely due to this "requirements creep," the task force charged with defining the ship's function ended up assigning the LCS six primary missions; small boat combat, intelligence gathering, submarine and mine hunting, Special Forces transport, and drug/piracy intervention. The ships also needed to be capable of traveling 40 knots (extremely fast for a ship of that size), crossing the Pacific alone, and carrying at least one helicopter. And since the Navy had already committed to purchasing 55 ships when all this was decided, each LCS needed to cost less than $250 million dollars (more than the original estimate of $100 million but less than the ~$1 billion price tag of other modern Navy vessels) (Work, 2014).

Alongside technical sophistication and the automation of key systems, the diverse capabilities and low price of the LCS were to be achieved through modularity. The ship would essentially serve as a platform onto which different sets of equipment could be swapped on or off depending on the mission. (Work, 2014). The three primary "mission modules" - surface warfare (SUW), mine countermeasures (MCM), and anti-submarine warfare (ASW) - were designed to be swapped at any friendly port in a matter of hours, allowing individual ships or an LCS-centered fleet to adapt to a wide array of requirements or demands. But without these modules, which were heavily reliant on automated systems and technologies that existed only on paper, the ships would be essentially useless, carrying almost no weaponry or defensive capabilities.

To compound the program's confusion, and in line with Rumsfeld's competition-based venture capitalist approach to defense operations, the Navy decided to issue two separate contracts for the first round of ships (with the goal of eventually selecting one for mass production) (Military.Com, n.d.). In 2004, defense giants Lockheed and General Dynamics won bids to build a single test model (Flight 0) of their respective Freedom- and Independence-class LCS variants. They immediately (and successfully) lobbied the defense department on the need to build two Flight o ships each, arguing that building just one ship and idling production until one got picked would be too expensive (Salisbury, 2021). At the same time, members of the House Armed Services Committee were fighting to scrap the program altogether, again citing a lack of robust analysis or strategic value (National Defense Authorization Act, 2004). Lockheed responded with an all-out lobbying blitz, which included large newspaper ad buys and plastering the D.C. metro system with slogans like "Littoral Dominance Assured" (Brown, 2004). Completely unrelated to their massive ad-buys and campaign contributions, the final spending bill ended up authorizing the construction of the two Flight o models at a higher level than either Congress or the Navy originally asked for (Brown & Schulz, 2009).

In 2007, the Navy canceled the contract for the second batch of Flight 0 ships, citing cost overruns (Brown & Schulz, 2009). Lockheed's USS Freedom (LCS-1) had been completed the year before at more than twice the original $230 million price tag, and General Dynamics' USS Independence (LCS-2) was planned to launch in 2008, a modest $500 million over budget (Hodge, 2009). The contracts for LCS-3 and LCS-4 were renewed in 2009, but this time with a fixed-price of $490 million for each vessel. At the same time, the Navy put out bids for another 10 ships, and facing heavy pressure from Congress to control program spending, it emphasized that the lowest bidder would receive the contracts regardless of design or previous experience (Hodge, 2010). As it turned out, the threat of building no ships at all caused both LM and GD to submit bids so far below the Congressional price cap that the Navy decided to fully fund production of both variants, arguing that reduced procurement costs would offset the predictably high operational and maintenance costs of having two non-standardized versions of the same ship (Hodge, 2010).

Lockheed and GD's bids came in around $430 million for the first of the 10 new ships, $60 million under the Congressional price cap. Both companies said prices would drop further as production scaled and streamlined, with the eventual goal of ~$350 million for the last few ships in the contract (Hodge, 2010).The most recent (post 2021) Littoral Combat Ships each cost approximately $600 million (Bensaid, 2021). None of this includes operation and maintenance, or costs for the Mission Modules (MMs) (without which the LCS is basically an overpriced car ferry). The first full cost estimate for the MMs was done in 2007, four years after the Navy committed to the program, and put the price around $3.8 billion for 64 units. A GAO estimate in 2020 put the cost at $3.9 billion for 49 units, a 37% increase in per unit price (Fabey, 2022). In 2017 the Navy attempted to hide cost overruns in LCS construction from the public, deeming the information "sensitive but unclassified" and claiming it would reduce "competitiveness" with foreign adversaries (Barrett, 2017). Earlier this year, a federal grand jury indicted multiple former executives at Austal USA (GD's shipbuilding partner) on wire fraud and conspiracy charges, saying that during this same period (the mid 2010s) they artificially lowered LCS construction cost disclosures and projections in order to boost the company's stock price (Bensaid, 2021). The company continues to be a primary contractor for the LCS program.

Cost overruns in naval shipbuilding are nothing new, and may have been excused by policymakers and the public if the ships actually worked. Over a nine-month span beginning in 2015, four of the six finished littoral combat ships suffered major system or engine breakdowns (Ziezulewicz, 2022).17 Problems with the gearbox meant that for the foreseeable future, all ships in the program would need to travel at 10 knots or less, a far cry from the promised (and mission critical) 40 knot top speed. Once that was resolved, the Navy began noticing cracks in the hulls of the Independence-class ships, and warned that any ships in the class (half the LCS fleet) traveling over 15 knots in choppy seas were at risk for the defect (Ziezulewicz, 2022). Cracks have been identified in nearly half the Independence-class ships starting in 2019, but the Navy didn't publicly disclose the issue until a Navy Times investigation reported it in 2022. The Director of Operational Test and Evaluation for the Defense Dept. summed it up nicely, stating that the current LCS fleet had a "near-zero chance" of successfully operating for 30 days without a critical failure of one or more essential subsystems (McIntyre, 2016). To top the non-functionality off, it turned out that the modular systems around which the whole program was designed either don't work or take weeks to be swapped out (depending on the module), causing the Navy to abandon the concept and just outfit each LCS with a single module and weapons system for most of its service life (Sayen, 2012).

Even if all the ships were fully operational tomorrow, it's unlikely that they would meaningfully contribute to naval readiness. It's widely acknowledged that the LCS program was designed for another era, one characterized by distributed, asymmetrical combat with minimally-equipped organizations and/or nations. Now all eyes are on Russia and China, and the littoral combat ship is clearly outgunned and outmatched (Rogan, 2023). By design, the ship is incapable of successfully engaging in ship-to-ship combat with anything larger than a speedboat, much less a modern Chinese fleet. Newer, similarly sized vessels like the Constellation-class frigate (designed to replace the same Oliver Hazard Perry frigates the LCS was supposed to) make the LCS obsolete in any naval battle against a well-armed continental power, a fact that's left some in the Navy struggling to find a non combat-oriented role to justify the program's continued existence (Newdick & Rogoway, 2021; Thomas, 2023).

Importantly, the two dozen currently commissioned littoral combat ships serve to artificially inflate the size of the fleet while doing nothing to increase readiness or naval combat capabilities. The LCS program has been a numbers game from the start—one of its primary goals was to get the Navy's total ship numbers to 375 as quickly and cheaply as possible (Work, 2014). This same logic is used today to justify the program—while referring to the impacts that defunding the LCS program would have on competition with China, Rep. Rob Whittman (R-VA) rhetorically asked "I'm not a mathematician, but I want to know how do we do addition by subtraction? How does this budget…close this gap [with China]?" (McIntyre, 2016).

This focus on total ship numbers at the program's inception led to many of the program's eventual flaws (rushed timelines, shoddy production, critical malfunctions, etc.), and now serves to disguise the true political motivations behind keeping the LCS fleet in operation: maintenance contracts.

Operating an LCS is incredibly expensive—it costs an average of $70 million a year to keep one up and running (Newdick & Rogoway, 2021). Part of the reason is the Navy's "optimal manning concept," which was designed to keep costs down by reducing the overall number of personnel required to operate a vessel (primarily through automation) (Lagrone, 2017). But relying on increasingly complex technical systems caused routine maintenance costs to skyrocket and eventually required more on-shore personnel capable of fixing the ship's automated features. Furthermore, responsibility for this maintenance was shifted from naval personnel to private contractors, as explained by a 2021 War on The Rocks article:

"In concept, the LCS manning model envisioned the transition of sailors, and engineers in particular, from a "maintainer-operator" role to that of "operator only." However, the early LCS hulls faced many equipment casualties at sea, demonstrating the continued need for underway maintenance. Breaking the operator-only mindset proved difficult, as the original equipment manufacturers preserved their monopoly on expertise by keeping a close hold on the intellectual property — in the form of technical manuals, parts, and tools — necessary for maintenance and training. In other words, reducing maintenance at the operator level simply increased it at the intermediate and original manufacturer levels. Manning was not reduced, just transposed" (Panter & Falcone, 2021).

Because only private American contractors can perform LCS maintenance, crews have to be flown around the world on the taxpayer's dime anytime a ship needs even minor repairs. And unlike Navy maintenance officers (whose life may depend on a ship functioning properly), these contractor crews have comparatively less skin invested in doing their work well. As defense journalist Philip Ewing reported, "The contractor teams handling maintenance duties are not performing up to snuff or being held accountable for their work. Many contractors are doing the work twice—the second time to correct problems with their initial work—avoiding penalties and billing the Navy twice for the jobs," resulting in Navy sailors (who are not necessarily qualified to perform LCS maintenance) having to occasionally fix problems that contractors left behind (Pettigrew, 2015). All this adds up to a real drain on Navy and taxpayer resources and a massive boon to the defense contractors responsible (at least in part) for the ship's poor performance in the first place. These multi-billion dollar maintenance contracts have become a, if not the, primary reason for the LCS program's continued existence.

Efforts to defund the program have been met with open hostility from Congress, and to this day only three of the original Flight ships have been decommissioned. Take this year's (FY 2024) Defense Authorization Act as an example. After announcing plans to retire a majority of the existing Freedom-class ships, a measure that would save the Navy (and the American taxpayer) more than $4 billion in operational and maintenance costs on a boat that doesn't work, the defense companies holding the LCS maintenance contracts launched an intense lobbying campaign to once again keep the LCS fleet (and their contracts) afloat (Lipton, 2023). Within weeks, a bipartisan group of lawmakers (who together received millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the same contractors invested in the LCS program) added amendments prohibiting the Navy from decommissioning ships in the LCS program, citing job losses and competition with China (despite the fact that Adm. Gilday, Chief of Naval Operations, told the Senate appropriations subcommittee that the system "wouldn't match a Chinese threat," and the Navy would rather spend money on something that could) (Del Toro et al., 2022; Open Secrets, n.d.). Some lawmakers (mostly Democrats) called on the Navy to retire the fleet, with Rep. Jackie Speir (D-CA) saying, "The only winners have been the contractors on which the Navy relies for sustaining these ships," (Forbes Breaking News, 2022). Unlike previous years, however, the Navy sort of won when a deal between Speaker McCarthy and President Biden permitted the Navy to decommission some of the older Freedom-class vessels (Shelbourne, 2023).

Despite its well documented flaws, the U.S. seems intent on selling the LCS to foreign countries as a way to expand American influence. In 2015 the U.S. State Department approved the sale of four Multi-Mission Surface Combat Ships (MMSCs) and associated arms/equipment to the Royal Saudi Navy in a deal worth more than $11 billion (Defense Security Cooperation Agency, 2015). The MMSC is basically a souped-up, heavily armed version of Lockheed's Freedom-class LCS. The Saudis placed the order in 2019, and construction is currently underway (Peruzzi, 2022). The Navy has also floated selling decommissioned Littoral Combat Ships to Taiwan, and the Taiwanese government is "considering it" despite the robust agreement that the LCS is completely incapable of defending the island from a Chinese attack (Zaffar, 2022).

The Saudi deal is especially interesting given the Kingdom's special role in American foreign policy. The U.S. has become increasingly concerned about Saudi Arabia's growing relationship with China and Russia, and many in Washington are worried that the Kingdom could be a major domino in an increasingly polarized geopolitical landscape (Ebrahim, 2023). President Biden was openly hostile towards Saudi Arabia on the campaign trail, but has made clear efforts to strengthen relations since then with arms sales playing a starring role (Harris & Perez, 2022). The LCS/MMSC ships use Lockheed's proprietary Aegis Combat System, an advanced, intimately guarded military technology shared only by our closest allies (Office of the Press Secretary, 2009). This, combined with the recently announced potential "NATO-level mutual security treaty" between the U.S. and Rydiah signals that the LCS/MMSC may play a crucial part in integrating Saudi defense capabilities with proprietary U.S. technology (Friedman, 2023). Much like NATO, the deal would serve as a massive boon to defense contractors like Lockheed who would take primary responsibility for arming the oil-rich state. It's unclear whether the MMSC sale requires that American contractors perform maintenance for the service life of the ships, but so far the Pentagon has solicited bids to construct the "piers, wharf, fueling, maintenance, operations, and warehousing facilities, and associated site work and utilities necessary to support the Royal Saudi Naval Forces (RSNF)" for the deal (SAM.Gov, 2022).

Relevance to Advanced Nuclear Energy

The initial design and development analogs to advanced reactors are clear. Aging, conventional nuclear reactor fleets map onto the concern over an aging Cold War-era fleet of large, bulky destroyers that created the LCS. The decision to replace that fleet with a distributed network of small, modular, technologically advanced ships whose development would be fueled by a "venture-capitalist" approach also maps directly.

Importantly, the lack of specificity and clear purpose for how these new technologies would fit in the overall system or help achieve a specific goal resulted in extended timelines, problems with key systems, and bloated budgets whose burden is borne primarily by the taxpayer (as opposed to the private company engaging in "intelligent risk-taking"). Developers and governments then sought to broker deals to offload faulty LCS technology onto other nations seeking military protection, a schema of technology transfer and geopolitical motivation that could dictate transfers of advanced reactors abroad. And the intense lobbying money and techno-masculine marketing slogans both technologies have in common should not be overlooked.

Key References

Hodge, N. (2009, November 20). Navy's 'affordable' shoreline ship: $477 million over budget. Wired.

McLeary, P. (2022, July 15). 20 years later, the Navy says its Littoral Combat Ships (kind of) work. POLITICO.

Work, R. (2014). The Littoral Combat Ship: How we got here, and why. Undersecretary of the Navy.

References

Axe, D. (n.d.). How the Navy's warship of the future ran aground. Wired.

Barrett, R. (2017, March 16). Navy won't disclose cost overruns for USS Milwaukee. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Bensaid, A. (2021, April 14). US Navy's next-gen naval warfighter is a multi-billion dollar failure. TRT World.

Brown, B. & Schulz, B. (2009). The effects of the joint multi-mission electro-optical system on Littoral maritime intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations. Naval Postgraduate School.

Brown, M. (2004). Ads blanket Washington area: In Littoral Ship contest, Lockheed seeks edge with media blitz. Inside the Navy, 17(21), 1–11.

Defense Security Cooperation Agency. (2015, October 20). Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Multi-Mission Surface Combatant (MMSC) Ships.

Del Toro, C., Gilday, M., & Berger, D. (2022, May 26). Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense holds hearing on the fiscal year 2023 Navy and Marine Corps budget request. United States Navy.

Ebrahim, N. (2023, March 31). China and Saudi Arabia are getting closer. Should the US be worried? CNN.

Fabey, M. (2022, May 18). Pentagon budget 2023: LCS Mission Module continues apace as US Navy notes cost breach. Janes.com.

Forbes Breaking News. (2022, June 15). Jackie Speier warns, "We Have A Fleet Of Lemon Ships". YouTube.

Friedman, T. (2023, July 27). Biden is weighing a big Middle East deal. The New York Times.

Harris, B. & Perez, Z. (2022, October 12). Democrats jump into Saudi arms fight after Biden détente ends. Defense News.

Hodge, N. (2009, November 20). Navy's 'affordable' shoreline ship: $477 million over budget. Wired.

Hodge, N. (2010, December 30). Lockheed, Austal Unit win Navy bid. The Wall Street Journal.

Lagrone, S. (2017, May 18). Document: GAO report on Navy optimal manning practices. USNI News.

Lipton, E. (2023, February 4). The Pentagon saw a warship boondoggle. Congress saw jobs. The New York Times.

MacLeavy, J. & Columba Peoples. (2009). Workfare–warfare: Neoliberalism, 'active' welfare and the new American way of war. Antipode, 41(5), 890–915.

McIntyre, J. (2016, December 1). GAO: 'The miracle of the LCS didn't happen'. The Washington Examiner.

McKearney, T. (1998). The DD-21 as deus ex machina. U.S. Naval Institute.

McLeary, P. (2022, July 15). 20 years later, the Navy says its Littoral Combat Ships (kind of) work. POLITICO.

Military.com. (n.d.). Littoral Combat Ship: LCS.

Morgan, D. (2003, July 6). Proposed ship speeds into gathering storm. The Washington Post.

National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2005. (2004). Report No. 108–491.

Newdick, T. & Rogoway, T. (2021, April 12). Navy's 'cheap' Littoral Combat Ships cost nearly as much to run as guided missile destroyers. The Drive.

Office of the Press Secretary. (2009, September 17). Fact Sheet: U.S. missile defense policy, a phased, adaptive approach for missile defense in Europe. WhiteHouse.gov.

Open Secrets. (n.d.). Defense: Money to Congress.

Panter, J. & Falcone, J. (2021, December 28). The unplanned costs of an unmanned fleet. War on the Rocks.

Peruzzi, L. (2022, October 27). New developments for Saudi MMSC programme. EDR Magazine.

Pettigrew, N. (2015). When quality slips. Proceedings, 141/1/1,343.

Rogan, T. (2023, April 27). Fortunately for China, Congress remains beholden to the Littoral Combat Ship. The Washington Examiner.

Rowden, T. (2013). Littoral combat ship: All ahead full! U.S. Naval Institute.

Salisbury, E. (2021, November 15). Lessons from the Littoral Combat Ship. War on the Rocks.

SAM.gov. (2022, March 14). MMSC Facilities and infrastructure Royal Saudi Naval Forces (RSNF) Saudi Arabia.

Sayen, J. (2012, October 5). The Navy's new class of warships: Big bucks, little bang. Time.

Shelbourne, M. (2023, June 13). HASC agrees to Navy's plans to shed Littoral Combat Ships, moves to abolish CAPE. USNI News.

Thomas, R. (2023, January 24). Was the US Navy's Littoral Combat Ship a mistake? Naval Technology.

Work, R. (2014). The Littoral Combat Ship: How we got here, and why. Undersecretary of the Navy.

Zaffar, H. (2022, April 19). Taiwan considers buying decommissioned US Littoral Combat Ships. The Defense Post.

Ziezulewicz, G. (2022, May 10). The Littoral Combat Ship's latest problem: Class-wide structural defects leading to hull cracks. Navy Times.

Photo: Littoral combat ship USS Independence (LCS 2) arrives at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. U.S. Navy / Public Domain, via Defense Visual Information Distribution Service / Picryl.