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| USS Fort Worth Arrives in Singapore, December 2014, Military.com |
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.
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