"They Can Take Care of Themselves"

Dave Ahearn has an article in Defense Daily called Congress Gains Confidence In LCS Ship Costs So Multiple-Ship Buys Possible, which is a catchy headline that seems to inspire confidence in the Littoral Combat Ship. Hardly. The article is written as a result of discussions with Rep. Robert Wittman (R-Va.) after a live-fire demonstration at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren of the new 30mm gun for the LCS.

Do these quotes ring with the sound of confidence, or surrender?

Containing those costs is key to success of the LCS program, but Congress and the Navy have to move it forward because there is no alternative to the LCS, no fall-back program, he added in an interview with Defense Daily...

The key point here is that Congress and the Navy don't have much choice in the matter, he indicated: the sea service must have a ship like the LCS that can perform missions near shore, and those missions can't be performed by the current DDG-51 destroyers or the future DDG-1000 destroyers or by the future CG(X) cruisers. There is no fallback weapons platform that could be an alternative to the LCS, he said.

Wittman is ranting because of the choice he gets to make, LCS option 1a or LCS option 1b, also defined as the Littoral Combat Ship built by Lockheed Martin or the Littoral Combat Ship built by General Dynamics. The article actually goes on to imply Congress still expects a single winner because they see that as the best way to control costs, which Wittman suggests will be under $460 million. We'll see, we haven't even seen the $600m+.version get to sea yet, and we are already cutting $200m off the costs? If you recall, one of the original selling points for the Littoral Combat Ship was to get US Shipbuilders into the small combatant export market. For some reason, we don't hear about that anymore.

If you think the quotes by Robert Wittman sounded inspiring, you are going to love this comment by Vice Adm. Paul Sullivan regarding small crews for the LCS.

Many systems, Sullivan said, are designed for unattended operation, so they can take care of themselves.

Did he really say that? WHAT!?! Vice Adm. Paul Sullivan, you were program manager for the Seawolf and Virginia class, we expect smarter than this. Believe it or not, the Navy is planning and budgeting life cycle costs for the LCS on the theory that the crew will not do maintenance, and that about 60% of the shipboard processes in the maintenance cycle will be the responsibility of the shore based maintenance support infrastructure. Shore based maintenance support programs do not have a very good track record.

That means reliability is going to be at a premium with the LCS, because if something breaks while at sea, repairs are going to be a logistical nightmare for manpower and equipment.

Furthermore, consider the challenge for a LCS CO. Here is this pier side maintenance crew group that is responsible for the upkeep and condition of your ship, and yet what invested interest do they actually have in the ship? They aren't the crew of the ship, it isn't theirs.

Operating costs for a ship that can't repair any major problem, and 60% of the total processes, means this is not going to be a cheap ship to operate, indeed the Littoral Combat Ship is going to be a cost of ownership nightmare with this kind of maintenance logic. We hope someone tracks costs of the LCS due to unexpected maintenance, because only by comparing those numbers to the cost for additional crew will we ever know for sure reduced crews save money.

The Navy intends to deploy the LCS into the most back water places in the world, operating literally near some of the worst maintained ports in the world, in some of the most dangerous waters in the world, and do so absent self repairing maintenance capability... but everything is going to be OK because the unattended operations of these technologies will insure they "can take care of themselves", which is clearly a ridiculous logic that suggests interaction with sailors is the reason technology breaks.

It is very difficult to understand why there is so much optimism among so many intelligent people for the Littoral Combat Ship. Clearly too many people work in a world where there will be no accountability for failure when all the misguided theories about the reliability of complicated technology comes up short.

Is it possible several of these decisions are being made to insure failure?