Monday, January 11, 2024

GAO Wrong on LCS Survivability



USS Fort Worth Arrives in Singapore, December 2014, Military.com
     The recent (18 December 2024) GAO Report entitled, “The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS): Knowledge of Survivability and Lethality Capabilities Needed Prior to Making Major Funding Decisionsdemonstrates the Government Accountability Office’s flawed understanding of modular warship survivability and lethality concepts. The agency has a point in suggesting LCS survivability needs more testing, but has made nearly the same demand for most warship classes of the last several decades. It rarely, however, presses that call beyond the boundaries of modeling and simulation. The LCS program is far from perfect, and has yet to meet a number of important milestones. That said, the survivability of LCS as defined by the September 2012 Navy Instruction on the subject is equivalent to that of the retired Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates in their final configuration. LCS replaces the Perry's in their final status and not in the medium air defense and heavy convoy escort roles they were originally designed to fill. The LCS mission modules could also be tailored to support additional weapons and systems that reduce susceptibility and vulnerability. 
     GAO has secured much of its evidence for LCS’s lack of survivability from a Total Ship Survivability Trial (TSST) conducted on USS Fort Worth (LCS 3) in October 2014.[1] TSST focuses on the crew training necessary to conduct the damage control to restore the ship’s operational capability while it remains in a combat environment. LCS would obviously not fare well in such testing for two reasons. First, a substantial portion of the equipment that could be damaged in an attack and the additional personnel that operate that equipment are not physically present on the current sea frames. They are resident in the yet to be fully developed mission modules. Any present TSST of LCS would be partially incomplete. Second, LCS is not designed to restore battle damage and immediately return to the fight, as are higher capability warships. It was conceived to survive damage and withdraw as necessary.[2]
     GAO acknowledges the limits of the LCS Concept of Operations (CONOPS) and notes the Navy’s 2012 change in the foundation of survivability from ship “characteristics” to “capabilities.”[3] The agency persists, however, in aiming its report on the sea frame’s physical damage control aspects; its characteristics, rather than its capabilities to avoid or prevent attack, such as its installed active and passive defense systems.[4] It continues to reference a 2004 Navy measurement of survivability in describing LCS that is no longer used by the Navy. GAO notes the deletion of three design features of survivability from previous LCS designs due to weight/cost considerations. Given that the sea frame’s armament is unchanged, it seems that these missing elements were characteristics and not capabilities. Finally, GAO seems to suggest that the Navy deliberately changed the LCS CONOPS in order to, “To compensate for any gaps in the ship’s survivability and lethality capabilities.”[5]
     The Navy altered its survivability description for good reason. The principal threats faced by surface warships have significantly changed in the last two decades. The proliferation of capable cruise missiles, submarine torpedoes, and naval mines represents a significant threat to any ship less than 600 feet in length and 10,000 tons displacement. These limits encompass the entire U.S. Navy surface combatant force (excepting the Zumwalt class destroyer.) Damage to U.S. Navy surface ships in the last several decades has been limited to small cruise missiles such as the Exocets that damaged the USS Stark in 1987 and the relatively small influence and contact mines that crippled the USS Princeton in 1991 and nearly sank the USS Samuel B. Roberts in 1988. Current versions of these weapons are larger, faster and much more capable. The recent Russian cruise missile salvo (at least 26 missiles) fired against land targets in Syria from a flotilla of small warships suggests the level of threat faced by U.S. warships.[6] Surface combatants no longer carry armor and are fully dependent on their installed active and passive defense systems to avoid, decoy or shoot down such weapons. While damage control remains important, survivability must not be fully predicated on a ship’s physical characteristics. The Navy’s measurement of survivability properly changed in response to the change in the threat to surface ships from a new generation of larger and more capable cruise missiles, and improved torpedoes and mines.
     GAO’s assessment of the lethality of LCS suffers from the same problems associated with its survivability measurements. The agency agrees that LCS completed interim testing of its surface warfare (SUW) package in April 2014, but then said that testing was incomplete due to the lack of both sea frames being tested (a valid point), but also because not all SUW requirements could be met. That should not be a surprise considering the evaluated SUW package was an interim fitting and not the ship’s final operational capability module. Testing cited by GAO, and done by the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) further states that the testing of the SUW package was, “insufficient to provide statistical confidence that LCS can consistently demonstrate this level of performance.”[7] How much testing of an interim package is required to attain statistical confidence and how much would this testing cost or limit the ship’s operational employment? DOT&E in fact requires the LCS program to re-test an entire mission package if even one component (however small) is changed. LCS is dependent on the ability to rapidly field new mission packages in response to different tactical and operational circumstances. The testing regime of the analysis community would seem to limit this important LCS capability.
     The threat environment facing the LCS has changed significantly since the program was announced in November 2001. The Navy has attempted to respond to this change by modifying the sea frame, mission modules and ship’s CONOPS to meet the changing threat environment. The analysis community, as represented by GAO and DOT&E seems trapped in the relatively stable Cold War and post-Cold War era where slow, predictable, incremental change was managed through an ever-expanding test and evaluation regime. LCS, with many of its most lethal capabilities in separate mission modules, and/or still under development will not likely meet the requirements of the 1960’s-era analysis community until its mission modules are fully developed. The ability of LCS to rapidly adjust its capabilities in response to new threats will remain limited with such stringent testing requirements accompanying each mission package change.
     GAO’s unhappiness with LCS should come as no surprise. A short review of the last 40 years of surface warship construction suggests that the agency has little love for any particular platform. It has severely criticized the Perry class frigate for survivability issues[8]; the Spruance class destroyer for a lack of lethality[9]; and the Ticonderoga class cruiser for lack of AEGIS testing and room for growth.[10]    
     GAO has a point in suggesting that capability-based survival of warships needs evaluation beyond modeling and simulation. Live fire tests on naval platforms were the normative method of predicting survivability from the 1920’s through the end of the Cold War.[11] The number of hits a vessel could sustain was an adequate predictor of its survival as an operational contributor in combat. The development of more powerful weapons, the evolution of very effective active and passive defense systems and the accelerated fragility of surface combatants in supporting them have changed these time-honored evaluation criteria. Those active and passive systems are now the equivalent of what armor was to combatants of the early 20th century. While these systems have been tested through modeling and simulation, the only real way to examine their effectiveness is through expensive live fire exercises against a target ship with active systems including surface to air missiles, guns and electronic countermeasures. This last recommendation is a useful contribution from the GAO report, but the office must recommend such testing for all surface combatants and not just LCS.
          Evaluation of LCS using Cold War-era methodology is not an accurate measurement of the class’ survivability or lethality. GAO has a long history of criticizing surface combatant programs, and the office’s present dislike of LCS should be no surprise. GAO should recommend that all surface combatants be tested according to their capabilities and not just their characteristics. Finally, GAO should re-evaluate the survivability of LCS to take into account its modular design.  


[4] Ibid, p. 12.
[5] Ibid
[6]http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34479873
[10]http://archive.gao.gov/f0102/115229.pdf
[11] https://clashofarms.com/files/Staying_Power.pdf

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