Observing Why Flight 0 LCS Will Do Just Fine

As has been known to happen, an interesting back and forth took place in the comments this evening in a previous discussion topic that caught my attention, and I feel it necessary to comment in a new post. It began with this comment by phrank47:

My problem with LCS has always been we are building a ship before we have the weapons that will go on it. Not just a little but years before. We are building ship that seems so pointed toward one goal that I wonder what we give up. I look at the navy what they are building and the numbers and I see a navy that 1/3 of there surface combat ships will soon be LCS I fear.

Where ID contributor CDR Chris Rawley responded:

The Spruance class destroyer entered the fleet with not much more than two 5"/54 guns, ASROC, and BPDMS. By the time the class was decomm'd, they had 61 cell VLS with TLAM and VLA, 2 x CIWS, 25mm, 8 x harpoons, and RAM, plus a number of C4I upgrades. Obviously, adding capabilities to LCS would be a bit different in there are weight (and volume) constraints tied to her speed requirements. The point is that it isn't unprecedented to commission ships with minimal weapons systems and grow them.

Which Scott Brim, USAF Partisan replied:

On the other hand, the Spruance design was up to the task of handling the upgraded capabilities, once they were mature enough for deployment. Given all the criticisms that have been hurled at the LCS, is it clear today the LCS will be a suitable platform once the mission modules arrive?

What a great topic. Lots of good points all around.

First, it is too early to tell what the Navy will do with LCS after FY15. Until more ships start getting fielded, it is very unclear whether there will in fact be more than the 24 already funded. Yes, the Navy has stuck to the official line of 55 hulls, but I know for fact that LCS-3 is different than LCS-1, and LCS-5 will be different than LCS-3. What will LCS-21 and LCS-23 look like? Evolutions throughout the first block could make the second block look very different, and the second block will likely come after we see foreign military sales injected into the equation suggesting design investment and options can potentially influence the LCS in many ways. What happens if, for example, beginning with LCS-25 or LCS-26 the Navy drops the speed requirement for one or both versions? The combat system question still lingers as unanswered, among many unanswered questions.

Second, what does growth for a small ship like LCS look like, and what needs to grow? Some would immediately suggest the LCS lacks firepower, of which I believe every SWO in the US Navy would agree wholeheartedly. Both LCS can trade the speed requirement for VLS from a design perspective, so it isn't as if options don't exist. But when I look out over the next 10-15 years, adding more weapons to LCS isn't my top priority in the context of growth.

Which leads to the last question asked by Scott Brim, "is it clear today the LCS will be a suitable platform once mission modules arrive?" The answer to this question is - YES - ABSOLUTELY, as long as Navy leaders remain focused on continuing to develop capabilities the LCS is designed and intended to do.

The biggest challenge facing LCS has nothing to do with details of individual module systems, nor the lack of firepower included in the Flight 0+ LCS design - the biggest challenge facing LCS is the development of the LCS information system that is in the future intended to feed significant multi-sensor data into a larger battle force network information system.

Sense. Decide. Act. And do it all in a combat functional communication system.

That is the biggest challenge facing LCS, and it entails a series of lessons yet to be learned and processes yet to be developed that will likely take a long time to work out the kinks; very likely the entire life-cycle of the first Flight 0 ships.

Today sense, decide, and act functions of the information system are relatively contained in form and function to an organization no larger than a strike group, but more specifically often limited to a few sensor platforms, a few strike platforms, and either a Hawkeye or CIC. With additional capabilities like the Littoral Combat Ship and associated modules, P-8, BAMS, etc, and continued evolution of combat and communication systems - the US Navy hopes to extend interoperability in both scale and scope throughout the entire Navy battle force network.

But it is actually much more than a cross-system interoperability challenge or even a bandwidth challenge (both being significant challenges on their own), rather the Navy must solve the very real challenge of collecting vast amounts of data from a vast number of offboard systems concurrently and convert that data into useful information that can then be aggregated throughout the network quickly - not just on LCS but eventually throughout the battle force network. Basically, we are talking about the bridge between Sense and Decide, taking data from multiple sensors and making that data useful information, and doing so at a speed that supports the decision process necessary to be relevant during combat operations where actions and reactions measured in seconds can mean life and death.

There are a large number of human and engineering challenges just to get Sense and Decide nodes designed into the LCS network model to function properly. The LCS is moving the Navy into an entirely new level of autonomous and remote controlled sensor capacity that is intended to accumulate enormous amounts of data under, on, and over the sea spread over vast geographical areas in a largely autonomous information system that today is done by the US Navy at sea almost entirely with manned aircraft - each of which is trained to function as part of a small manned network that took many years to develop, or as it's own Sense-Decide-Act information system if necessary.

Can you conceptualize what many of the challenges facing the Navy are as they introduced vast numbers of unmanned systems into their existing organizational structures? Can you conceptualize what the product will be once we see numerous Littoral Combat Ships distributed throughout a region like the South China Sea, each deploying half a dozen or more individual systems? For some, the complexity of the challenges are ignored because very little respect is given the immense difficulty facing the Navy to operate a battle capable network potentially 50x larger and vastly more distributed than the existing Navy network today.

In the future Naval Battle Force Network saturated with unmanned systems - which is the network the Littoral Combat Ship is opening the barn door towards; the US Navy wants to be able to take data from an autonomous sensor deployed from a LCS, rapidly convert that data from that node into usable information like the track of a ballistic missile submarine, move that tracking data of the ballistic missile submarine immediately to a another platform like a P-8, and convert sensor data into track information for a torpedo strike without the P-8 ever needing to reveal itself with it's own sensors to the SSBN before the torpedo hits the water and is on top of the SSBN.

What sounds like a simple process will place the US Navy generations ahead of where the rest of the world is today, or even tomorrow, because no one else is even remotely close to being able to execute that type of networked combat capability. The US Navy is fielding Littoral Combat Ships today that leads towards that capability down the road, and yet, critics say cancel the LCS because the ship can't shoot the torpedo itself - even though the LCS will likely be hundreds of nautical miles from the autonomous sensor that detected the SSBN, too far away to shoot ASROCs even if it had them.

Today's US Navy flies no more than a handful of UAVs at a time over vast areas of ocean. Believe it or not, on a good day the US Navy has one UAV able to function in an anti-piracy role off Somalia. That is one UAV - on a good day - for that vast region of seas pirates operate in. If you assume the US Navy is flying one or more than one UAV on an average day over the Indian Ocean, you have assumed wrong. That is where we are today, but for some reason people have a completely different expectation.

Why do you think deploying 3 Fire Scouts on USS Halyburton (FFG-40) was a big deal? The disconnect between the expectation of today's US Navy UAV networks and the reality of those networks is enormous. When the Navy operates UAVs today (which they do), the Navy operates those UAVs over land. Why? Because almost all of the infrastructure that supports UAVs are used for supporting operations over populated land areas, not the vast unpopulated areas of sea.

Just developing towards coordinating the data of a dozen offboard unmanned autonomous and remote controlled systems deployed simultaneously from a pair of Littoral Combat Ships is a giant early hurdle facing the US Navy in the very near future. So when Scott Brim asks whether the LCS is a suitable platform to handle the challenges it faces when the mission modules arrive, which is basically the development of a functional battle capable information system that supports large numbers of unmanned systems at sea, my answer is ABSOLUTELY - YES.

The challenge facing LCS is not the "act" (weapons delivery) module of the information system even if the "act" module of the information system is the single most cited complaint of the LCS; the challenge facing LCS is the development of the "sense" and "decide" functions and processes and lessons towards the future networked information system intends to field over this decade, and the LCS hull is designed to support the engineering upgrades necessary to address those sense and decide challenges.