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Littoral combat ships were supposed to launch the Navy into the future.
Instead they broke down across the globe and many of their weapons never
worked. Now the Navy is getting rid of them. One is less than five years
old.
In July 2016, warships from more than two dozen nations gathered off the
coasts of Hawaii and Southern California to join the United States in the
world?s largest naval exercise. The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia,
Japan, South Korea and others sent hundreds of destroyers, aircraft
carriers and warplanes. They streamed in long lines across the ocean,
symbols of power and prestige.
The USS Freedom had its own special place within the armada. It was one of
a new class of vessels known as littoral combat ships. The U.S. Navy had
billed them as technical marvels ? small, fast and light, able to combat
enemies at sea, hunt mines and sink submarines.
In reality, the LCS was well on the way to becoming one of the worst
boondoggles in the military?s long history of buying overpriced and
underperforming weapons systems. Two of the $500 million ships had
suffered embarrassing breakdowns in previous months. The Freedom?s
performance during the exercise, showing off its ability to destroy
underwater mines, was meant to rejuvenate the ships? record on the world
stage. The ship was historically important too; it was the first LCS
built, the first in the water, commissioned just eight years prior.
But like the LCS program?s reputation, the Freedom was in bad shape.
Dozens of pieces of equipment on board were undergoing repairs. Training
crews for the new class of ships had proven more difficult than
anticipated. The sailors aboard the Freedom had not passed an exam
demonstrating their ability to operate some of the ship?s most important
systems.
As the day to launch approached, the pressure mounted. Top officers
visited the ship repeatedly. The Freedom?s sailors understood that theirs
was a ?no fail mission? with ??no appetite? to remain in port,? according
to Navy documents obtained by ProPublica.
The Freedom?s Capt. Michael Wohnhaas consulted with his officers. Despite
crippling problems that had left one of the ship?s engines inoperable, he
and his superiors decided the vessel could rely on its three others for
the exercise.
The Freedom completed its mission, but the accomplishment proved hollow.
Five days after the ship returned to port, a maintenance check revealed
that the faltering engine had suffered ?galloping corrosion? from
saltwater during the exercise. A sailor described the engine room as ?a
horror show? with rust eating away at the machinery. One of the Navy?s
newest ships would spend the next two years undergoing repairs at a cost
of millions.
It took investigators months to unravel the mystery of the engine?s
breakdown. But this much was clear at the outset: The Freedom?s collapse
was another unmistakable sign that the Navy had spent billions of dollars
and more than a decade on warships with rampant and crippling flaws.
The ongoing problems with the LCS have been well documented for years, in
news articles, government reports and congressional hearings. Each ship
ultimately cost more than twice the original estimate. Worse, they were
hobbled by an array of mechanical failures and were never able to carry
out the missions envisaged by their champions.
ProPublica set out to trace how ships with such obvious shortcomings
received support from Navy leadership for nearly two decades. We reviewed
thousands of pages of public records and tracked down naval and
shipbuilding insiders involved at every stage of construction.
Our examination revealed new details on why the LCS never delivered on its
promises. Top Navy leaders repeatedly dismissed or ignored warnings about
the ships? flaws. One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to
build more of the ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons
systems failed. Staunch advocates in the Navy circumvented checks meant to
ensure that ships that cost billions can do what they are supposed to do.
Contractors who stood to profit spent millions lobbying Congress, whose
members, in turn, fought to build more ships in their home districts than
the Navy wanted. Scores of frustrated sailors recall spending more time
fixing the ships than sailing them.
Our findings echo the conclusions of a half-century of internal and
external critiques of America?s process for building new weapons systems.
The saga of the LCS is a vivid illustration of how Congress, the Pentagon
and defense contractors can work in concert ? and often against the good
of the taxpayers and America?s security ? to spawn what President Dwight
D. Eisenhower described in his farewell address as the ?military
industrial complex.?
?There is a lot of money flowing through this vast ecosystem, and somehow
the only thing all these people can agree on is more, more, more,? said
Lyle Goldstein, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College who is
now investigating the costs of war at Brown University. ?Unfortunately, I
just think it might be in the nature of our system.?
This year, the Defense Department asked Congress to approve a staggering
$842 billion ? nearly half of the federal government?s discretionary
spending ? to keep America safe in what the Pentagon says is an ever more
perilous world. As House and Senate leaders negotiate the final number, it
is unlikely they will spend much time discussing ways to prevent future
debacles like the LCS.
Such a conversation would cover hundreds of billions of misspent taxpayer
money on projects from nearly every branch of the military: The F-35
fighter jet, deployed by the Navy, Marines and Air Force, is more than a
decade late and $183 billion over budget. The Navy?s newest aircraft
carrier, the Gerald R. Ford, cost $13 billion and has yet to prove it can
reliably launch planes. And the Army?s Future Combat System was largely
abandoned in 2009 after the military had dedicated more than $200 billion
on a battlefield intelligence network meant to link troops, tanks and
robots.
The LCS program offers another clear lesson, one seen in almost every
infamous procurement disaster. Once a massive project gains momentum and
defense contractors begin hiring, it is politically easier to throw good
money after bad.
Stopping a weapons program in its tracks means people losing work and
admitting publicly that enormous sums of taxpayer money have been wasted.
In the case of the LCS, it took an array of naval leaders and two
consecutive defense secretaries to finally stop the program. Yet even
after the Navy said it only needed 32 littoral combat ships, far fewer
than the more than 50 originally planned, members of Congress forced the
Pentagon to buy three more.
Former Lt. Renaldo Rodgers remembered laboring in San Diego from sunrise
to sunset for months to ready the Freedom for a 2012 trial mission to San
Francisco, only to have the ship break down during pretrial tests. Rodgers
initially thought the futuristic ship looked like something out of ?Star
Trek.? But he soon learned it was no Starship Enterprise. It became the
laughingstock of the waterfront, with other sailors deriding it as ?Dry
Dock One,? because it so rarely left port.
?It sucks,? he said. The LCS was ?a missed opportunity.?
The Navy has tried to retire many of the littoral combat ships years
before they reach their expected lifespan. Ships designed to last 25 years
are being mothballed after seeing less than a decade of service.
In response to questions, the Navy acknowledged the LCS was not suitable
for fighting peer competitors such as China. The LCS ?does not provide the
lethality or survivability needed in a high-end fight.?
?The Navy needs a more ready, capable, and lethal fleet more than a bigger
fleet that?s less ready, less capable, and less lethal,? the statement
read, saying the money would be better spent on higher-priority
alternatives.
The cost of the program has gnawed at John Pendleton, who for years was a
top military analyst at the Government Accountability Office and has
studied the rise and fall of the LCS as closely as anyone in Washington.
Now retired, but unable to shake what he views as one of the most wasteful
projects he?d encountered in his nearly 35-year career, Pendleton reviewed
budgetary documents and GAO reports for ProPublica going back decades. His
conclusion: The lifetime cost of the LCS class may reach $100 billion or
more.
?In the end,? he said, ?the taxpayers get fewer than 30 limited-
survivability, single-mission ships.?
Pendleton is hardly alone in his assessment. Many regard the tortured path
of the LCS as evidence of a damaging strain of hubris that runs rampant in
the world of military innovation.
?It?s this zombie program phenomenon where everybody knows deep down we
are going in the wrong direction,? said Dan Grazier, a former Marine Corps
captain, who now works on Pentagon reform for the nonprofit Project on
Government Oversight. ?But because so much money is involved and so much
political capital is invested, you can?t stop the train until the problems
are so overwhelming that no one can feign support for it.?
The two narratives of the ship ? unstoppable in Congress, imperiled at sea
? intertwined alarmingly during one 10-month stretch beginning in December
2015. During that period, five of the vessels broke down across the globe,
each illuminating a new set of problems and effectively proving the
critics right.
The Freedom was the third ship to fail. Captured in a Navy investigation
more than 600 pages long, the incident stands out as a particularly
devastating and detailed example of the Navy?s plight.
The Problems With the Littoral Combat Ship
Minehunting Failures
Littoral combat ships were supposed to help find and destroy underwater
mines, but the remote minehunting system often returned false alarms
during testing, was unreliable, frequently broke down and was difficult
for sailors to control. The Navy turned to a new form of minehunting
technology, which is still under development.
Survivability
Because of the emphasis on speed, the ships were originally built in part
on designs used for commercial ferries. The designs did not contain
protections that could prevent the flooding of critical systems when under
attack. The Pentagon weapons testing department found that the design
requirements ?accept the risk that the crew would have to abandon ship? in
circumstances where service members on other vessels would not.
The Anti-Submarine Warfare Package
Littoral combat ships were supposed to be equipped to hunt and destroy
submarines with an interlinked package of sonar devices, helicopters and
torpedoes. But the systems didn?t effectively communicate with one
another, the towed sonar couldn?t function properly in the vessels? wake
and the Freedom class is considered too loud to hunt submarines. The Navy
canceled that function in 2022.
Combining Gear
The Navy traced many high-profile breakdowns of the Freedom-class littoral
combat ships to a design flaw in what?s known as the combining gear, a
complex mechanism that connects gas turbines and diesel engines to the
propulsion shafts in order to help the vessels reach top speed.
Limited Endurance
The Freedom is considered a ?gas hog? among Navy officers, meaning it
can?t go very fast for very long without running out of fuel. This creates
a logistical problem for the Navy because the ship can?t stray too far
from its gas supply.
Pentagon Icon
INSIDE THE PENTAGON
1
An Admiral?s Vision
In 2002, Adm. Vernon Clark stared down from the deck of a Danish warship
at a pier in Denmark and watched a demonstration that would shape the
future of the U.S. Navy.
A large deck gun sat below. On the orders of a Danish navy official, a
crane hoisted it off the pier and installed it on the ship. Within 40
minutes, sailors were rotating the weapon to prepare it for operation.
No American ship could swap weapons on and off deck like that. But the
Danes made reconfiguring a vessel to carry out different missions look
easy. Clark, the head of the U.S. Navy at the time, marveled at the
technology.
?This is it. Of course, this is it,? Clark remembered telling himself. ?I
didn?t know that they could do that.?
For Clark, the Danish demonstration crystalized his idea for a new ship
that would be different from anything the Navy had done before. It would
be small, relatively lightly armed and operated by about 40 sailors ? far
less than the average warship crew size. The weapons systems would not be
permanently installed.
Instead, he envisioned a sort of Swiss army knife for the Navy. Armed with
one set of weaponry, it could hunt and destroy submarines. But if the
threat shifted, it could be quickly outfitted to detect and clear
underwater mines or to fight other warships.
As Clark envisaged it, the new ships could be deployed in coastal, or
littoral, waters, where the Navy needed to expand its presence around the
world: in the Persian Gulf to participate in the war in Iraq, in the
Caribbean to track down gunrunners and in Southeast Asia to help smaller
allied navies. They would be one of the fastest warships in the world ?
able to fight near shore, outrun larger vessels or hunt down the small
ones increasingly popular with foes like Iran. The ships would be built
quickly, in large numbers and at low cost.
The first red flags emerged here, at the conception of the LCS. As Clark
began sharing his vision, concerns began to brew among Navy shipbuilding
experts, who feared it was overly ambitious and technologically
infeasible. Clark was unbowed.
He was an unlikely candidate to begin a revolution in shipbuilding. With
an undergraduate degree from Evangel College, a small Christian school in
Missouri, and an MBA from the University of Arkansas, he hardly fit the
mold of a prototypical chief of naval operations who was groomed for
leadership from his earliest days at the Naval Academy in Annapolis,
Maryland.
A self-professed ?radical,? at times irreverent and impassioned, he wanted
to run the Navy like a business, streamlining training, rooting out
misspent dollars, retaining sailors who shined and getting rid of those
who did not.
He believed the Navy needed a more cost-effective and technologically
advanced fleet. Many of the Navy?s ships had been built during the Cold
War. Massive carriers, destroyers, battleships and cruisers were facing
retirement, in part because updating them with modern technology was
prohibitively expensive, Clark said.
In keeping with his business background, Clark wanted as few people on the
new ships as possible. ?What I really want is an unmanned ship that?s got
R2-D2 in it,? he said, recalling his thinking at the time.
Doubt dogged Clark?s dream from the start. Congress agreed to begin
developing the ship in 2003 ? despite a House Appropriations Committee
report that warned that there was ?no ?road map? of how the Navy will
achieve the system required.?
One former admiral who worked on plans for the ship said Clark?s
insistence on speed ? up to 45 knots, or about 50 miles per hour ? created
immediate problems. A ship cannot go that fast for very long without
running out of gas, which meant it could never stray far from its fuel
supply. Its small size ? many in the Navy joked that LCS stood for Little
Crappy Ship ? limited the weapons it could carry.
The former admiral said he raised concerns with his superiors but wished
he had been more vocal. ?As a subordinate naval officer, when your boss
tells you, ?Here?s a shovel, go dig the hole,? you go dig the hole.?
The Navy pushed ahead. In May 2004, it awarded contracts to two teams of
defense contractors to build up to two prototypes, each of their own
design.
Both teams had lobbied heavily to win the contracts. Lockheed Martin,
which partnered with the Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin, plastered
the Washington, D.C., Metro system with advertisements extolling the
ability of its proposed ship.
The other team, a joint venture between General Dynamics and Australian
shipbuilder Austal, planned to build its version at a shipyard in Alabama.
In response to the Navy?s goals, the contractors both based their original
ship designs partly on high-speed ferries for cars or passengers, an
unusual choice for a vessel meant for war not transportation.
With an emphasis on speed and dexterity, the ships were not designed to
withstand much damage. Clark saw them fighting under the protection of
larger, more lethal ships. To him, investing too much in protecting the
ship with extensive armor would make it too heavy to operate near shore.
?Show me a ship that can take a direct hit with today?s modern weaponry
and survive,? he said. ?Why spend all this money pretending??
This argument disquieted lawmakers. Toward the end of Clark?s tenure,
members of Congress began to ask whether this meant the Navy had deemed
LCS sailors expendable.
After Clark left the Navy in July 2005, the Navy responded to the
concerns, redrawing the blueprints for the ships as they were being built
to better protect sailors.
Costs began to rise dramatically. The ships were originally supposed to
cost no more than $220 million dollars each, which had helped sell them to
Congress in the first place. But the final price tag rose to about $500
million each.
Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary who became a key proponent
of the ship, said many in the Navy thought the initial estimate was
unrealistic. ?The Navy never believed it, at least the people who had to
build the ship,? he said.
Despite the rising costs, the LCS soon gained a new champion so devoted to
its construction that he led a yearslong campaign to resist efforts by two
secretaries of defense to scale back the program.
OUT AT SEA
2
A ?Foreseeable? Disaster
On the morning of Nov. 23, 2015, the USS Milwaukee set out across the
frigid waters of the Great Lakes for its maiden voyage. The cost overruns
had made headlines, but with the fifth ship in the water, Navy officials
were hoping the vessel?s performance would lessen the growing doubts about
the project.
The Navy planned to sail the Milwaukee from the shipyard on the shores of
Lake Michigan in Marinette, Wisconsin, to its new home port of San Diego.
From there, it would eventually join its sister ship, the USS Fort Worth,
in helping to counter the Chinese navy?s expanding presence in the Western
Pacific.
In a press tour days before the launch, Cmdr. Kendall Bridgewater evinced
confidence, proclaiming that the enemy ?would be hard pressed to find a
vessel that could come up against us.?
But the ship wouldn?t need a fight to suffer its first defeat. Its worst
enemy would be its own engine.
On Dec. 11, about three weeks into the two-month journey, a software
failure severely damaged the Milwaukee?s combining gear ? a complex
mechanism that connects the ship?s diesel engines and its gas turbines to
the propulsion shafts, producing the power necessary for it to reach top
speeds.
A Navy salvage ship had to tow it some 40 miles for repairs at a base near
Norfolk, Virginia. The ship hadn?t made it halfway down the East Coast ?
let alone to the South China Sea ? before breaking down. If the Milwaukee
were a brand new car, this would be the equivalent of stalling on its way
out of the dealership.
Some former officers look back on the breakdown and those that followed as
a clear violation of a cardinal principle in Navy shipbuilding: to ?buy a
few and test a lot.? But with the LCS, the Navy was doing the opposite.
Commanders were learning about the flaws of the ships as they were being
deployed.
?This is a totally foreseeable outcome,? said Jay Bynum, a former rear
admiral who served as an assistant to the vice chief of naval operations
as the ships were entering the fleet. ?Just think about it, Toyota checks
out all of this before the car hits the showroom floor. What if the
engineering guys there said, ?Well, we think this is how the engine will
work, but let?s just start selling them.??
Pentagon Icon
INSIDE THE PENTAGON
3
?Do We Want This Ship to Survive??
On a breezy Friday in March 2011, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus
addressed a crowd of sharp-dressed politicians and begrimed workers
gathered at a shipyard in Mobile, Alabama.
Mabus, tall and dapper, announced the names for two of the Navy?s newest
littoral combat ships. One would be called the USS Jackson ? a reference
to the capital of his home state, Mississippi.
As he looked out at the waters of Mobile Bay, Mabus lauded the new class
of ships that had emerged from Clark?s vision a decade before.
?It?s a drug runner?s worst nightmare, it?s a submarine?s worst
nightmare,? he declared, speaking in his soft Southern drawl. ?It?s
anybody who wants to do harm to the United States of America or the United
States Navy, it?s their worst nightmare.?
In fact, the LCS was on its way to becoming one of the Navy?s worst
nightmares ? and Mabus was its biggest cheerleader.
Better known for his political acumen than his military experience, Mabus
served three years in the Navy in the early ?70s, including time at sea as
a lieutenant junior grade on board the USS Little Rock.
Afterward, he rose through Democratic ranks to become governor of
Mississippi, an ambassador to Saudi Arabia and eventually the longest-
serving Navy secretary since World War I.
During his tenure as the Navy?s civilian leader, he put his stamp on the
service by pursuing a range of progressive policies including gender
integration and the use of renewable fuels. He also took advantage of a
unique perk: tossing out the ceremonial first pitch at major league
stadiums across the country.
His most transformative view on U.S. military strategy was his belief in
the need for more ships.
The fleet had shrunk to less than half the 600 it wielded toward the end
of the Cold War. China was rapidly expanding its navy and Russia was
investing heavily in new submarines.
Mabus, who became secretary in 2009, pursued a plan that would make him
one of the Navy?s most prodigious shipbuilders.
In an interview with ProPublica, he reiterated the ?sheer importance of
numbers? for the fleet. He backed the LCS, he said, because it would help
meet an array of the Navy?s needs as fast as possible.
Even as a growing number of senior officers began to criticize the ships,
Mabus expanded the program, drawing on his political connections and savvy
dealmaking to defend the LCS against powerful opponents on the Hill and in
the Pentagon.
Mabus acknowledged that his support of the LCS project put him at odds
with some of the Navy?s top officers and the nation?s civilian military
leadership. He recalled resistance from what he dubbed the ?Alumni
Association,? powerful former Navy officers who he said reflexively and
unfairly disliked the ship because it was so different from anything else
the Navy had built. For Mabus, his key role as civilian leader of a
tradition-bound military service was overcoming its hostility to change
and innovation.
Chief among the old-school critics, he said, was Sen. John McCain, a
Republican from Arizona and decorated Navy veteran whose father and
paternal grandfather had both been Navy admirals. He, along with Sen. Carl
Levin, a Michigan Democrat, had emerged as skeptics of the LCS as leaders
of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Both were alarmed by the costs,
which had soared to more than $750 million apiece for the initial ships.
In response to such concerns, the Navy lowered the price by pitting the
two teams of contractors against each other in a bidding war. Austal and
Lockheed Martin turned in two different ship designs with similar price
tags. Navy leaders dithered over which to select.
In the fall of 2010, Work, the Navy undersecretary at the time, said Mabus
gathered senior naval leaders together to ask a blunt question: ?Do we
want this ship to survive??
When the group answered yes, Mabus proposed a politically adroit solution:
The Navy would select both companies to build the new ships in two
shipyards, one in Alabama and one in Wisconsin.
Mabus calculated that he would win the support of congressional
delegations from both places by delivering thousands of jobs and millions
in spending to each, Work recalled. Spreading the wealth would increase
the ships? chances of survival. But it would also make the program harder
to kill when problems arose.
?He was looking at the problem in a different way than we were looking at
it because he was a professional politician,? Work said.
Mabus? plan concerned some Navy leaders. The Austal ship, which was the
basis for the Independence class, would be an aluminum trimaran ? a ship
with three hulls. The Lockheed Martin ship, which formed the basis for the
Freedom class, would be a more conventional monohull forged of steel. The
radically different designs meant that the ships could not trade parts or
sailors, making them more expensive to maintain and crew. In addition, the
contracts called for the contractors to build a total of 20 vessels, a
large commitment for a relatively unproven warship.
But Mabus and his team argued that those additional costs would be dwarfed
by the savings the Navy would enjoy in the long run ? one top official
found that the Navy would save $2.9 billion by awarding long-term
contracts to both companies.
To Mabus, it was a win-win for all involved: each ship had its own
benefits, taxpayers would get a better price, the Navy would get more
ships faster and the shipyards would get more jobs.
He told ProPublica that keeping the shipyards active was always a
?consideration, but it wasn?t the main driver? behind the decision. The
real incentive, he said, was price, not politics.
But the political payoff soon became evident.
McCain held a hearing, where he excoriated the Navy. ?The story of this
ship is one that makes me ashamed and embarrassed as a former Navy person
and as a person who?s responsible to the taxpayers of my state,? he said.
(McCain died in 2018.)
But in a last-minute budget bill to keep the government open in late
December, Sen. Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican, inserted language
to buy ships from both shipyards.
?He made sure it happened,? a Shelby spokesman said at the time.
And Levin, the Michigan Democrat once critical of the ships, now supported
them. The Marinette shipyard is just over the Michigan border in
Wisconsin. Levin called the plan to build 10 ships there ?a major boost
for the region?s economy? and applauded the Navy in its efforts to bring
costs down. (Levin died in 2021).
As one former vice admiral put it, ?politics is king in the shipbuilding
business.?
Just a month after the USS Milwaukee stalled in Virginia, the ship it was
supposed to join in the South China Sea suffered its own embarrassing
breakdown.
The USS Fort Worth was nearing the end of an otherwise successful
deployment. It had helped with a search-and-rescue operation following an
Indonesian commercial plane crash and participated in joint exercises with
several allied navies.
But the Navy had decided to frequently rotate the small LCS crews in order
to reduce burnout and, in November 2015, a new, inexperienced crew took
over.
Even the commanding officer, Michael Atwell, had ?few opportunities to
gain valuable at sea experience? before his deployment, according to a
later Navy investigation.
On Jan. 5, hundreds of gallons of fuel spilled into the ship?s main
machinery room. The sailors had to spray chemical foam on the fuel to
prevent it from catching fire. Then, in grueling, filthy shifts, they took
turns crawling into the tight compartment to clean it up with rags and
pumps.
The day after the spill, the Fort Worth pulled into a port in Singapore
for a week of scheduled maintenance.
There it became clear that the ship had been ?ridden hard,? according to
officers interviewed in the Navy investigation. Leaks had sprung out of
various parts, the engines were in bad shape, the electric generators
needed work and the crew was exhausted. There was ?no break, no reprieve,
just increasing daily tasking,? one sailor said of their time on board.
The ship?s executive officer, the second in command, complained of a lack
of support from superiors.
?We ask for help, but there isn?t enough,? he said, adding that he was
told ?they don?t have the bodies.?
The ship was originally supposed to leave by Jan. 12 for a ?high
visibility? port visit in Hong Kong. Atwell and his executive officer
described a ?tremendous amount of pressure? to make it happen, according
to the Navy investigation.
The crew took shortcuts as it scrambled to test the engine. One of the
sailors in charge of starting it skipped a routine step, failing to
properly lubricate the combining gears.
?I messed up everything because I was going too fast,? the sailor later
explained.
The mistake damaged the ship?s combining gear, forcing it to sit for seven
months while waiting on replacement parts.
Navy leaders deemed Atwell unfit for command and removed him from his
position.
Reached by phone, Atwell declined to comment.
The breakdowns on the Milwaukee and Fort Worth formed the beginning of a
pattern that came to punctuate the life of the LCS program:
Ships were rushed to sea with faltering equipment. Shorthanded crews and
captains without sufficient training or support tried to make them work.
Breakdowns ensued. Then, the pressure to perform and restore the
reputation of the program intensified anew and the cycle repeated itself.
Soon it would be the USS Freedom?s turn.
Pentagon Icon
INSIDE THE PENTAGON
5
?We Were Essentially Telling a Lie?
In early 2012, sitting beneath the fluorescent glow of a Pentagon briefing
room, Rear Adm. Sam Perez received a stern warning.
Weeks earlier, Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert had asked Perez
to produce a report that would help him figure out how best to use the
dozens of littoral combat ships that would be delivered to the Navy in the
coming years.
The results were grim.
Discussing the details around a conference table, one fellow officer
raised a finger to his own temple and mimicked a gun going off: Perez, he
signaled, was about to risk career suicide.
It was a pattern with the LCS. Officers who criticized the ships faced
consequences. An assignment to an undesirable post. Even dismissal.
Perez had found that the crews were too small. Some were stretched so thin
that commanding officers had to spend time sweeping the decks, when they
could have been studying intelligence reports and focusing on navigating
the ship.
Contrary to what Clark observed in Denmark, the various weapons systems
would not be easy to swap out. The Navy hadn?t factored in the weeks it
could take for all the contractors, sailors and others who were needed to
fly in from around the world to help outfit the vessels for different
missions.
The two versions of the LCS complicated the problems. The designs were
vastly different: They could exchange neither parts nor sailors. Perez and
his staff worried that the ships would wind up sidelined because they
lacked either equipment or trained crew members.
Comparing the LCS to the fleets of potential adversaries, Perez concluded
that the vessels were only capable of fighting against lightly armed
small, fast attack boats.
A fellow officer warned him that painting this kind of damning portrait
for the highest ranking officer in the Navy, the chief naval officer,
could hurt his career. At that point, the Navy had already committed to
buying at least 20 more ships worth billions of dollars.
Perez had already shared some of his findings with Vice Chief of Naval
Operations Adm. Mark Ferguson, the second highest ranking official in the
Navy.
According to a former senior officer familiar with the events, Ferguson
told Perez that he was looking at the vessels the wrong way. The small
ship?s performance should be compared to a patrol boat.
Perez objected. Patrol boats aren?t supposed to clear mines, fight
submarines or attack surface warships. They are far smaller, designed
primarily for surveillance and interdiction.
The staffers worked on the comparison for about two weeks before they
began ?tearing each other up because we were essentially telling a lie,?
according to the former officer who worked on the project. After a vote,
they decided to stop comparing the LCS to a patrol boat.
Immediately after Perez delivered the report, he received a call from
Bynum, a former rear admiral who at the time worked for Ferguson. Bynum
told Perez to classify the report secret.
?That was absolutely my recommendation,? Bynum said in an interview with
ProPublica. The report, he said, included a ?host of vulnerabilities that
didn?t need to be shared in the open press.?
At a PowerPoint presentation of his findings, Ferguson was curt. The
former officer said Ferguson only allowed Perez about two words per slide,
instructing him to flip to the next image before he could finish the last
one.
In an interview with ProPublica, Ferguson did not recall asking Perez to
compare the LCS to a patrol boat, but he acknowledged he was disappointed
by key aspects of the report. Known to have a brusque style, he said he
may well have sped through his presentation.
?I didn?t dispute any of the critique,? Ferguson said. ?LCS had serious
issues. But I wanted more in the way of recommendations on how to go
forward; how to integrate them into the fleet.?
Soon after, Perez was assigned to the international relations department
of the Navy. About a year after that, he became liaison to the State
Department. Neither are regarded as ideal assignments for an admiral who
had spent a career carrying out missions at sea.
Perez declined to comment.
For his part, Greenert said the idea that Perez was punished for speaking
up was ?nonsense.? On the contrary, he said it helped prompt him to
increase the staffing and budget for LCS.
Around the same time, Greenert asked another senior officer, three-star
Adm. Tom Copeman, to evaluate the LCS as part of a larger report on the
surface fleet.
Copeman, then in charge of the fitness of the Navy?s vessels for combat,
echoed concerns about the ship?s combat abilities. He thought the LCS was
not lethal enough. The Navy?s contract called for 24 ships, with plans to
build more than 50. Copeman recommended that the Navy halt building the
ships after fulfilling the contract.
In March 2013, the memo was leaked to the trade press. Copeman immediately
received calls from one of Mabus? top staffers. He told Copeman that Mabus
was extremely disappointed that Copeman had publicly disagreed with him.
Copeman told him that the memo was never intended for public consumption
and that he didn?t know how it got out.
As ProPublica previously reported, Greenert asked Copeman to retire early
in mid-2013 after he had publicly expressed concerns over the fitness of
the Navy?s ships for combat.
Greenert said Copeman was not asked to retire early. He said Copeman
helped to convince him to ask for more weapons on the LCS.
Copeman declined to comment.
The Navy needed a lot more ships, and the LCS program was going to help
provide them.
OUT AT SEA
6
Freedom?s Troubles
About six months after two of its sister ships were docked for repairs, it
was the Freedom?s turn in the spotlight.
But on July 7, 2016, the day before the ship was supposed to begin its
part in the global Navy exercise, a string of equipment failures forced
its captain into a bad spot: Wohnhaas had to submit a ?fail to sail?
message to his superiors ? an embarrassing signal that the ship was not
ready to go.
Working through the night, engineers on the Freedom eventually realized a
part called a cannon plug used in the ship?s complicated propulsion system
needed to be replaced. Without it, the ship couldn?t go anywhere.
They discovered one in Port Hueneme, about an hour north of Los Angeles.
The engineer battled through five hours of Southern California traffic to
pick it up and bring it back. The ship departed its port in San Diego a
day late, then suffered another setback.
Three miles outside Mexican territorial waters, a loud metallic noise
clanged out, startling the crew. Wohnhaas slowed the ship down but it
began to drift. The crew dropped anchor to stop the ship and then steamed
back to port.
He was sent back out to sea and senior officers later criticized him for
holding up the mission.
Then on the evening of July 11, a leak erupted inside the main machinery
room, the mechanical heart of the ship, spraying the electrical system
with seawater. An inch or two pooled on the floor. If the leak wasn?t
stopped immediately, it could cause short-circuiting or even a fire.
One sailor searched for the source of the leak by hand, burning his arm on
a hot pipe before finding a hole seeping water. The sailors plugged the
hole, but the repair backfired. It forced water to burst through a rubber
seal that kept seawater out of the ship?s lubrication oil system. The
water mixed with the oil, pumping a kind of emulsified goo through one of
the ship?s four engines.
Two days later, the crew, again, had to return the ship to dock in San
Diego. The engineer responsible for the ship while in port determined that
a full repair of the engine could take as long as two weeks. Wohnhaas?
superiors rejected the idea. Time was running out for the ship to
participate in the Rim of the Pacific exercise, or RIMPAC.
A Navy diesel engine expert proposed a procedure to block further
corrosion of the engine with a special rinse.
A Navy expert in Philadelphia, referred to as ?the guru? in the Navy
investigation, approved that approach, which would allow the ship to get
back to sea more quickly and complete the mission by using the ship?s
three remaining engines.
Throughout the exercise, a parade of high-ranking Navy officials ?
including two rear admirals, a Marine Corps general, and a commodore ?
visited the vessel to turn up the heat on the crew and its captain.
They made clear that the Freedom?s participation in RIMPAC was ?crucially
important? to the entire LCS program and that there was ?no appetite? for
the Freedom to delay its departure. Freedom?s performance, they believed,
would ?perhaps modulate some of the program?s critics,? the investigation
said.
Given what happened on the Fort Worth and the Milwaukee months earlier,
top Navy leaders ?felt pressure to deliver a ?win? for the program,?
according to the investigation, which called the pressure on Wohnhaas
?severe.?
One senior officer invoked the commander of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Scott
Swift, as wanting to use the region as a ?testing grounds? for the Navy.
Reached by phone, Swift said he was a ?believer in the LCS? and
acknowledged that he had encouraged the Navy to test new weapons systems
in the Pacific. But he emphasized that it was not an order to deploy ships
at any cost.
?We made it clear if you want to take them off line, take them off line,
but I am not surprised that people further down the chain didn?t feel they
had that option,? he said. ?The offer could have been perceived as an
order, or taken advantage of by those that wanted to push harder to get a
win out of LCS.?
?As a four star, if you ask for something too often people think of it as
a requirement,? he said.
On the morning of July 17, 2016, the ship finally seemed ready to go.
The contractors completed the rinse and were packing up to leave. But when
the chief engineer looked at samples taken from inside the engine, he was
deeply worried.
?Holy shit,? he thought, according to an interview in a Navy
investigation. ?There?s still water in the engine.?
He sent a message to Wohnhaas that he later acknowledged was misleading
because it suggested the ship was ready to go. He blamed the mistake on
?not proof-reading? the text prior to sending it.
?Sir, the flush is done,? he wrote at 9:50 a.m. ?I [assess] that we are
still on track for tomorrow.?
Wohnhaas took this as good news and passed it on to his superiors:
?Everything is tracking toward an on-time departure,? he said in an email
sent to his commodore, Warren Buller, at 11:36 a.m.
In fact, the procedure approved by the Philadelphia guru hadn?t solved the
problem. Investigators would later determine the procedure could not have
worked ? it was meant to remove grit, not seawater, from engine oil.
The following morning, as the Freedom was preparing to depart, a senior
enlisted engineer ran into a contractor he knew as Joe.
Joe told him that the engine was still contaminated.
Alarmed, the engineer discussed the situation with his supervisor, the
chief engineer, who was smoking a cigarette on the front deck of the ship.
If they went to sea, the engine would rust, the engineer said. The chief
engineer told him he knew it and he was on his way to tell Wohnhaas.
In an interview with investigators, the chief engineer said he told
Wohnhaas something to the effect of ?we can?t get underway like this, we
gotta do something.?
Wohnhaas declined to comment for this story. In his interview with
investigators, he said that when he learned of the contaminated samples
from the chief engineer, he understood the engine was inoperable. But he
was confident he could avoid further damage and complete the mission by
relying on the ship?s other engines.
?There was a strong sense that we couldn?t have another LCS not meet
mission,? Wohnhaas said. He did not tell his superior officers the
uncomfortable fact that the engine was still contaminated because of the
pressure to get underway, the investigation said.
The Freedom sailed out and detected mines in the water. The mission was a
success ? at least so everyone thought.
But on Aug. 3, five days after Wohnhaas returned the ship, a routine
inspection revealed major damage to the engine, corrosion so extensive
that the ship was docked in repairs for two years. The engine needed to be
replaced.
The Navy investigation found that one failure led to another on the
Freedom: The inexperienced crew used the wrong procedure to stop the leak;
the Navy?s ?technical community? then recommended another incorrect
procedure to flush the engine; contractors executed it, providing ?false
hope? that it would prevent the corrosion.
Wohnhaas? key error, according to the investigation: He failed to tell his
superiors that the engine was still contaminated by seawater.
Wohnhaas was removed from command over the incident. Others, whose names
and titles are redacted from the Navy report, were also recommended for
discipline.
Pentagon Icon
OUT AT SEA
7
?It Just Felt Like a Big Joke?
By early 2017, Lt. Jett Watson was beginning to wonder whether he had
signed up to squander his naval career.
He was in the middle of training to serve as an LCS officer, spending
hours inside virtual reality simulators set up in San Diego to make
participants feel as if they were driving the ship.
The digital experience was impressive, but getting a real LCS out to sea
was more complicated.
?I?m sure it was funny to watch us get underway just to have a big cloud
of smoke go out because an engine went down and then have the tugboats
pull us right back into the pier, which happened very often,? he said in
an interview with ProPublica. ?I mean, it was almost a game just to
watch.?
Becoming a full-fledged surface warfare officer in the Navy requires
hundreds of hours at sea. In interviews with current and former officers,
the LCS program was described as a place where careers go to die. The
ships broke down so frequently that officers spent key years in which they
were supposed to gain experience at sea sitting around waiting for repairs
to be completed.
Watson felt deceived.
A couple of years earlier, he had come under the spell of the LCS as a
student at the Naval Academy.
There, recruiters for the program spread the gospel of its small crew size
and purportedly aggressive deployment schedule, convincing him that the
ship suited only the most elite sailors and officers.
Watson was so taken by the promise of the ship that he became a kind of
?LCS evangelist,? convincing his friends at the academy to join the
program with him.
He remembered sweltering beneath the Maryland sun during his graduation
ceremony, where Mabus delivered a kind of a final exhortation to the newly
sworn in officers.
?We are America?s away team,? Mabus said. ?You didn?t come to Annapolis to
sit at home when you leave here, and you won?t be sitting at home. Sailors
and Marines, equally in times of peace and at war, are deployed around the
world.?
Hailing from Lubbock, Texas, Watson thought the LCS would be his ticket to
a meaningful and exciting career in the Navy.
He went on to serve on three littoral combat ships, each belonging to the
less problematic Independence class.
?I would hesitate to say we ever did a mission,? he said.
Instead, he and others had to stomach what one current senior
noncommissioned officer described as ?a big shit sandwich? when they first
came on board.
General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin considered much of the data and
equipment on the LCS proprietary ? a problem that the GAO has identified
throughout the military. As a result, only their employees were allowed to
do certain repairs, former officers said. This sometimes meant that
contractors would go overseas to help, adding millions in travel costs and
often delaying missions. The Navy recently purchased some of the data. A
Navy spokesperson would not disclose the price ?due to proprietary
reasons.?
Watson and others spent much of their time escorting contractors while on
board because so many areas on the ship were considered classified,
reducing their ability to do their own jobs, according to interviews with
multiple officers who had served on the LCS.
Cumbersome negotiations meant it could sometimes take weeks to get
contractors on board. The delays were especially frustrating when trying
to fix the computer network that connected everything from the radars, to
the weapons systems, to the ship?s canteen. That system, another former
lieutenant said, frequently shut down because of software glitches.
?You can?t ask for help from your superior commands? on shore, said the
former lieutenant, who worked as a communications officer on Independence-
class ships. ?And you can?t even go buy yourself a soda.?
The ships needed constant repairs. But technical manuals were sometimes
written only in the native language of the contractor that built the
equipment. One former officer said that a manual for a davit, a type of
crane used to lower a search-and-rescue boat, was written in Norwegian. He
said the Navy had to spend thousands of dollars to fly in a contractor
from Norway to change two fuses.
The Navy has recently increased the amount of maintenance performed by
sailors.
?It just felt like a big joke,? said Watson, who left the Navy in 2021. He
said many of the highly qualified sailors he worked with sought mental
health assistance because they felt that their time on an LCS was a waste,
affording them little opportunity to apply their skills or learn new ones.
?An average week would consist of 90 to 100 hours in port doing, honestly,
nothing,? Watson said. ?It felt ridiculous. Many times we were there just
because we had to be there.?
At one point, a senior Navy official addressed a group of more than 50 LCS
sailors assembled in an auditorium and asked how many would volunteer to
come back. Two former officers familiar with the presentation said only a
handful said yes.
Pentagon Icon
INSIDE THE PENTAGON
8
A Fight over the Future
The ships? mounting problems drew attention from the highest reaches of
the Pentagon, eventually prompting two successive defense secretaries to
try to halt their construction.
The first, in 2014, was Chuck Hagel, a former Army infantry squad leader
and U.S. senator. The military was fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
but it also needed to save money. Hagel?s advisers told him he could do
that by keeping the LCS fleet to 32 ships, abandoning plans to build 52 of
them.
He?d be cutting what was already understood to be a deeply troubled
vessel. Studies showed that the ship couldn?t continue to fight after a
missile strike and that the interchangeable warfighting packages ? an idea
originally at the heart of the LCS ? were failing to perform.
?Do we want one-fifth of the future Navy fleet to be a ship that can?t
take a hit and continue its mission?? one adviser recalled thinking at the
time.
In February 2014, Hagel pledged to make the cut to 32 and asked the Navy
to come up with a design for a new frigate ? a larger, tougher type of
warship. But Mabus pushed back. A Navy task force suggested that the LCS
could be transformed into a frigate. The Pentagon?s top weapons tester
told Hagel that was infeasible. But Hagel agreed with the task force,
because the Navy was ?going to have to live with it, and justify it. And
count on it,? he said in an interview with ProPublica.
In December 2014, in one of his final acts as secretary of defense, Hagel
agreed to allow the Navy to build up to 52 smaller ships: a mix of the
littoral combat ships and the new frigates, which would be based on the
LCS design, but with more weapons.
In response to critics who said he had capitulated, Hagel characterized
his decision as a ?compromise? based on the advice of the government?s top
experts.
?We brought in a lot of different people on both sides of it,? he said.
?That?s the only responsible way you can evaluate these big projects as
secretary of defense, because you can?t know everything about this. It?s
just, no one person is that smart.?
The Navy later awarded a contract to the shipbuilder Fincantieri Marine
Group to build a new line of frigates based on a different design.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who followed Hagel, also took aim at the
LCS.
In a sharply worded December 2015 memo to Mabus, Carter said the Navy was
guilty of ?prioritizing quantity over lethality.? He told the Navy to
limit future purchases to 40 ships, including littoral combat ships and
frigates.
Mabus told ProPublica that he was blindsided by the change of course and
that it led to ?heated discussions? with Carter in private.
In public, he opposed his boss too: first at a naval symposium, then
before Congress, then at a Wisconsin shipyard where he assured LCS
builders they were working on the best ship in the world. In March 2016,
under questioning from Rep. Bradley Byrne, an Alabama Republican who
called the LCS his ?favorite topic,? Mabus told the House Armed Services
Committee that the Navy had a ?validated need? for the 52 ships.
Even as Mabus testified, the ships were breaking down at sea with
increasing frequency.
Mabus downplayed the severity of the incidents.
?We took it seriously,? he said. ?But it did not seem, from what we were
looking at, that it was a systemic problem.?
The contractors who built the ships defended their performance.
Eric Dent, a spokesperson for the Italian-based shipbuilder Fincantieri,
which also built the Freedom ships in Marinette, said it did so to a
design from Lockheed Martin and the Navy, referring questions to both.
Lockheed Martin spokesperson Patrick McNally said the company is proud of
its work with the Navy and is focused on delivering ?affordable
improvements to the platform.?
Australian-based shipbuilder Austal, which constructs the Independence
class of ships, and General Dynamics, which built the infrastructure for
the ship?s computers, both declined to comment for this story.
The weapons systems were failing as badly as the ship?s engines.
Without them, the LCS was ?only a box floating in the ocean,? said former
Lt. Cmdr. Mark West, who helped lead the Navy?s development of the
warfighting packages for years in uniform and as a civilian.
To help the LCS find mines, an important mission in 21st-century warfare,
the Navy built a remotely operated minisubmarine designed to detect
underwater explosives. West and others said it turned out to be too
difficult to operate. The Navy is now dependent on an aging fleet of
minesweepers that often cannot deploy.
?Imagine a 25-year-old sailor trying to remotely control a [minisubmarine]
in the water that weighs 20,000 pounds as the ship is going 4 or 5 knots,?
one current senior enlisted sailor said. ?Then trying to bring it to the
surface as a crane lowers a saddle on top of it to get it out of the
water. It was damn near impossible.?
After 15 years of development and more than $700 million invested in the
remote minehunting system, the Navy canceled it in March 2016.
To hunt submarines, the defense contractors created a sonar device the
ship dragged through the water on a long cable from the stern. When the
device detected a submarine, it was supposed to send a signal to the ship,
which then dispatched a helicopter to hover over the ocean and plunge
another sonar device into the water. The helicopter then dropped a torpedo
to destroy the sub.
None of these components effectively communicated with one another. And
the wake of the LCS made it extremely difficult to launch and recover the
sonar, according to one former commodore with direct knowledge of the
program.
After pouring hundreds of millions into the module, the Navy shifted the
function to its new frigate.
In an interview, West said the Navy never gave the modules the same
priority as the ships. They always played ?second fiddle,? West said.
Those working on them had to ?fight and claw? to get the time and money
necessary to ?ensure their success.?
Ship Icon
OUT AT SEA
9
Coronado and Montgomery
About a month after the Freedom?s engine failed, a fourth LCS, the USS
Coronado, broke down on its way to Singapore and had to limp back to
Hawaii.
The breakdowns had become routine by this point. First came the fanfare
over a newly christened ship, with all the requisite flag waving,
handshaking, speechmaking and celebratory Champagne bottle breaking.
Later, a perilous journey: a few days or weeks at sea, followed by another
busted part and another tow back to port.
This time, on the Coronado, a part called a coupling would be the culprit.
The device, which helped connect the water jets to the engine, had failed,
hindering the ship?s complicated propulsion system. The Navy discovered it
was a problem on several other littoral combat ships, too.
The GAO, which has produced dozens of reports criticizing the ships, later
learned that the Coronado failed to sail six times between 2016 and 2017
because ?it did not not have correct parts on board to fix simple
problems.?
Important items like ?circuit card assemblies, washers, bolts, gaskets,
and diaphragms for air conditioning units were not on board,? the report
found. ?The LCS may not have adequate space onboard to stock these items.?
In August 2016, the Navy ordered a 30-day stand down of all littoral
combat ships to retrain the engineering crews and improve the fleet?s
performance.
A month later, a fifth ship, the USS Montgomery, suffered a series of
mishaps. Over a two-month stretch, its engine malfunctioned, it collided
with a tugboat and it then cracked its hull after striking a lock in the
Panama Canal.
Pentagon Icon
INSIDE THE PENTAGON
10
"The Navy doesn?t want them"
On May 4, 2017, about three months into the administration of President
Donald Trump, the director of the White House Office of Management and
Budget at the time, Mick Mulvaney, sat for an interview with conservative
talk radio show host Hugh Hewitt.
They talked about ?Game of Thrones,? the repeal of Obamacare and a new
hire at the OMB before turning to Trump?s promise to increase the Navy?s
fleet to 350 ships. How, Hewitt wanted to know, was the president going to
achieve that?
Mulvaney said that the day before he had missed a meeting on the Paris
Agreement ? the international treaty to avert the catastrophic
consequences of climate change ? in order to discuss whether to buy more
littoral combat ships.
?The Navy doesn?t want them,? Mulvaney said.
With the Navy on its way toward building the more powerful frigate, it
appeared that the LCS program was on its last legs. The Navy requested
funding for only one LCS that year.
But once again, politics intervened.
Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic senator from Wisconsin, fought for more. She
wrote to Trump on May 12, casting the LCS as a rare opportunity for her
and the president to work together. Both support American workers making
American products, she said, but too few of the vessels in the budget
would cause her state?s shipyard to lay off hundreds of workers.
On May 24, in a move that shocked the defense community, the Trump
administration inserted one more ship into the budget after it had already
been sent to Congress.
The Trump administration had suddenly placed a $500 million order for a
new ship that the Navy didn?t ask for.
In an email to ProPublica, Baldwin said she takes ?great pride in
representing Wisconsin?s shipbuilding industry,? adding that she supported
the LCS because it ?provided new capabilities and capacity to the Navy.?
Over the next year, Congress funded yet more ships, leaving the force with
35, three more than the Navy said it needed. The additions cost taxpayers
more than $1.5 billion.
In the years since, both variants of the LCS have continued to grapple
with major problems. The Independence version has shown cracks in the
hulls of nearly half the class. The Navy determined that a flaw in the
combining gear affected the entire Freedom class. The Navy came up with a
fix at a reported cost of $8 million to $10 million per ship ? an expense
split with Lockheed Martin.
Naval experts worry that the failures of the LCS have put the Navy at a
greater disadvantage against China, which boasts the largest Navy in the
world with some 340 ships and submarines, according to the Pentagon?s most
recent report to Congress on the state of the Chinese military. By
comparison, the Navy has roughly 294 ships and submarines.
The Navy has begun to mothball littoral combat ships far before the end of
their expected lifespans.
In March 2022, the Navy announced plans to retire nine Freedom-class
vessels early because of their inability to hunt submarines.
In a predictable pattern, lawmakers representing states where the ships
are based fought to keep more of the ships at sea. They allowed the Navy
to decommission only four. The first of those, retired last month, is less
than five years old. Three other LCS had already been mothballed.
The Navy is now trying to retire two more, including the USS Jackson, the
ship named for the capital of Mabus? home state. It wrapped up its first
deployment last October. Meant to have a 25-year lifespan, the ship would
last only nine.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-littoral-
combat-ship
--- Xnews/2009.05.01
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