When you start to look at trade-offs, when you rack-n-stack what you have vs. what you can afford, the relative value of options becomes clear.
Early on, you can draw a line where below are those things you can live without. You have another line where above are things you will part with last. In the middle, that is the famous crunch. That is where it hurts – where it is hard to decide what one item is really more important than the other. It is an unpleasant place to be.
As the emerging battle between the immovable budgetary realities of the 2020s comes in to contact with the irresistible desire to get to 355, both advocates and critics of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) have been waiting for another signal from the marketplace.
The US Navy has put forward a proposal to decommission the first four littoral combat ships in 2021 as part of a cost-savings measure, according to a memorandum from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to the Defense Department.
The memo obtained by Defense News outlines plans to decommission the littoral combat ships Freedom, Independence, Fort Worth and Coronado, part of an overall plan to shrink the size of the force to deal with a flat budget. The ships all have between a 12 and 17 years of planned hull life left.
LCS isn’t even going to make it to the crunch. We will keep what we can, but the weakest of the batch are going to be fed to The Beast first.
This fight, if there is actually one, will be one of the stories of 2020 to watch.
