The U.S. Department of Defense has a long history of sponsoring projects that have questionable usefulness. If you were assigned as a member of a project review team for a defense project, what criteria would you insist such a project have in order to be supported? In other words, what are the bare essentials needed to support such a project? The Navy Struggles to Avoid Cancellation of its Littoral Combat Ship Program It was supposed to be the newest and most effective class of ships in the U.S. Navy’s arsenal. The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was originally proposed as early as 2004 and designed to handle a new set of challenges that the 21st century Navy expected to face. Operating in hostile shallow water close offshore (in what is referred to as the littoral environment), the LCS was intended to serve as a new class of small support ships that are heavily armed, fast, and flexible enough to handle a wide variety of combat assignments. The goal was to emphasize simplicity of design, advances in electronics and robotics, and reconfigurable and upgradable weapons systems to create a ship that would become the backbone of the modern Navy. The original program was expected to cost upward of $35 billion and develop 52 ships in the coming decades.

When the Navy placed their first orders, they deliberately created a competition between two designs offered by competing firms: the 380-foot, 3,500-ton Freedom class built by Lockheed-Martin and the 420-foot, 3,100-ton Independence class ship, designed by General Dynamics and built at Australian shipyards by its partner, Austal. The assumption was that after both designs were built and tested against each other, the Navy would select one clear winner that would become the standard for the ship class. Original plans called for Congress to fund the LCS development program to support construction of the ships, which would replace aging frigates and coastal mine hunters. Unfortunately, since its original conception, the LCS program has changed its acquisition plan four times and canceled contracts with both competing firms, leading to renegotiations and mounting program delays. In fact, the original plan to force competition between the two contractors has evolved into a program that is ordering multiple copies of each variant—simplicity of design is giving way to keeping defense contractors (and their Congressional supporters) happy.

Since the first ship was ordered by the Navy in 2004, a total of 13 Littoral Combat Ships have been launched, evenly divided between General Dynamics and Lockheed-Martin variants. As of 2016, an additional 13 contracts had been awarded to bring the total up to 26 scheduled for construction and commissioning. In spite of the original plan to develop 56 ships of the LCS design, political pressure—coupled with engineering failures and spiraling price tags—is causing Congress to take a harder look at the program. Consider some of the more recent problems with just the engine/propulsion systems in the current fleet of 13 ships:

• In September 2015, the USS Montgomery (LCS 8), suffered two engineering failures in the course of just 24 hours of operations. First, says the Navy, a ”seawater leak [was detected] in the hydraulic cooling system. Later that day, Montgomery experienced a casualty to one of its gas turbine engines.”