Remember: LCS-1 was commissioned over 12.5 years ago.
That is a year and a half more time time from the first American in space on Mercury-Redstone 3 to the final landing on the moon with Apollo 17; from the Fall of Saigon to Soviet leader Gorbachev campaigning for Glasnost and Perostroika.
That’s a lot of time.
The last decade or so we’ve seen good people in hard jobs do their best to rescue, reconfigure, reimagine, or just pour money and Sailor sweat on the LCS disaster hoping to salvage something useful out of it.
We see small victories here and there, but the displacement/utility ratio is something simply not discussed in polite company.
The circle of LCS-advocates continues to shrink compared to the growing tribes of LCS-resigned and LCS-loathers.
So, we have the latest announcement:
The Navy has installed a one-star admiral to oversee a task force focused on refining the employment, maintenance and reliability of the Littoral Combat Ship program, the service announced today.
Rear Adm. Robert Nowakowski, the deputy commander of Navy Recruiting Command and Naval Education and Training Command Force Development, is spearheading the effort – called Task Force LCS.
How many times have we thrown special commissions/working groups/sacrificial Flags in the gaping maw of Vaal that is LCS?
I’ve lost count. Will Rear Admiral Nowakowski – great of a naval officer and American as he is – be the one to make everything right?
Well, we should be so lucky…but other things are going on.
We’ve already started the process to decommission some of the first four LCS, and we want to decommission more – some just single digit years old.
The Navy has already received congressional approval to decommission LCS 1 and 2, which have long been relegated to a test and training role due to breakdowns. In the Pentagon’s defense budget proposal for FY2022, the service now seeks authorization to decommission hulls 3, 4, 7 and 9, for a total of six to be removed from the fleet and written off.
LCS 3 and 4 were put on the chopping block last year, but Congress declined to authorize their deactivation. LCS 7 and 9 – commissioned in 2016 and 2017, respectively – are newly added to the request.
Meanwhile, our Navy is facing a substantial crunch of funding.
In a memo dated June 4, acting Navy Secretary Thomas Harker called on the Navy to choose one of the three programs to initially pursue in earnest in the Program Objective Memorandum 2023 budget cycle.
“The Navy cannot afford to simultaneously develop the next generation of air, surface, and subsurface platforms and must prioritize these programs balancing the cost of developing next-generation capabilities against maintaining current capabilities,” the memo reads. “As part of the POM23 budget, the Navy should prioritize one of the following capabilities and re-phase the other two after an assessment of operational, financial, and technical risk.”
Enough. The delta is too great to play face saving games.
If we must take a hit, then let’s take it where it hurts the least. Accelerate a decoupling from the whole LCS project. It is but a vanity project to protect tender egos now – at least at the scale they are at.
Single crew. Retro-downselect to the Independence Class alone – if at all.
Do it sooner than later so we can protect units of greater value to the fleet.
It is The Terrible 20s navalists, set condition zebra.
