LCS: It Never Fails to Fail

For the Little Crappy Ship and its sub-optimal construct; it's the easiest thing to do.

We've been discussing Chris Cavas's articles on LCS for well over a half decade - and his latest work outlines in painful detail what critics have been warning about from the start.

More from the Perez report is so Salamanderesque that I swear their team has been hanging out on the front porch.

As we said in the middle of last decade, once hulls displace water in number; our reality will trump your PPT.

The limited ability of the LCS crew to perform onboard maintenance, and the need to return to port for even basic repairs, “negatively impacts” the ships’ availability to operational commanders, according to sources familiar with the classified report.

Further, the contractor teams handling maintenance duties are not performing up to snuff or being held accountable for their work. Many contractors are doing the work twice — the second time to correct problems with their initial work — avoiding penalties and billing the Navy twice for the jobs.

According to some LCS crews, the reliance on contractors actually results in more work for the crew, which is too small to supervise the contractors. Navy sailors often have to fix the problems after the contractors have left.

Extensive contractor services also are required to maintain spare parts inventories for the ships, since each of the two ship designs features a number of non-standard systems and the vessels are too small to carry many spares. Ships will be based on either the Lockheed Martin Freedom-class design or Austal USA’s Independence class.
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while LCS crews are functioning at the current 40-sailor level, safety and readiness are being harmed as a result. Crews tend to be exhausted after only three days of normal operations and soon begin to perform poorly. Navy studies show that the effects of several days of low-tempo LCS operations equate to high-tempo operations for a cruiser crew.

Even when in port, LCS duty sections are limited to three sections, meaning fewer days off and less time off the ship, and underway watches rarely exceed two or three sections — at a time when increased automation on ships with larger crews is seeing increases in many cases to five or six sections.

The manning margins are so thin on an LCS that crew members who need to be off the ship for training, briefings or any other reason may find the request denied if they can’t be even temporarily replaced. If a sailor holding one of 21 critical positions on the ship isn’t available, the ship might not be able to get underway, since there might not be another crew member with the required qualifications.