The US Navy commissioned the last of its 35 littoral fight ships, the USS Cleveland, earlier this month at a pier in its namesake Ohio metropolis.
“Steel. Strength. Power,” performing Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao posted on social media to mark the event.
Critics of the littoral fight ship (LCS) program had another descriptions.
“Easy meat,” mentioned one.
“An experiment that didn’t work,” mentioned one other.
And an costly one. The value of the program is pegged at $60 billion, however a 2023 report from the investigative journalism site ProPublica mentioned the eventual value might high $100 billion.
“One of the worst boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and underperforming weapons systems,” the ProPublica report mentioned.
The LCS are at what the Navy calls the “low-end” of its floor ship fleet. They’re smaller than its guided-missile destroyers, carry fewer crew, and have much less firepower and defenses, however they’re quicker and capable of function in additional shallow waters.
But after the ships have been stricken by a spread of mechanical failures and mishaps since the first one was commissioned in 2008, they’ve earned a derisive interpretation of the LCS acronym, “little crappy ships.”
After the Cleveland entered the fleet last weekend on the shores of Lake Erie, the huge query grew to become – what now for the LCS?
The LCS had its origins round the flip of the century, as naval planners regarded for a smaller platform to work in coastal environments, the place circumstances may make bigger warships like destroyers susceptible, in keeping with a 2017 Navy report.
The service was additionally going through the retirement of older, bigger ships and was trying for methods to take care of its fleet dimension with smaller floor combatants that could possibly be constructed extra shortly and cheaply than larger vessels, the report mentioned.
Then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark determined to go along with the LCS, a warship not like something the Navy had acquired earlier than.
And that will have been a part of the downside.
Critics argued “Admiral Clark first decided he needed a ship and only then turned to figuring out what the ship would do,” a 2014 report by then Undersecretary of the Navy Robert Work says.
In that report, written to clarify the origins and problems of the LCS program, Work mentioned the Navy acquired the shipped it requested for – “and in some key aspects a better ship than expected.”
But he acknowledged the ship’s improvement was “marked by constant change” that obscured its position and left it ripe for criticism.
The Navy acknowledged it was attempting one thing totally different with the LCS.
“The LCS program marked a significant shift in how the Navy approaches shipbuilding and fleet modernization emphasizing flexibility, speed, and cost-effective construction,” a Navy truth sheet says, including that the ships have been to be quickly reconfigured as missions – mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare or floor warfare – modified.
But the service didn’t decide on a single design, as a substitute constructing two variants, the monohulled, steel-constructed Freedom class – like USS Cleveland – and the trimaran, aluminum-hulled Independence class.
A Navy truth sheet says it was anticipated there can be just one design chosen between plans submitted by builders Lockheed Martin and Austal USA, however two variants have been chosen after competitors between the two yielded “a highly efficient” shipbuilding course of.
But two variants complicate logistics and provide chains, critics say.
The Independence class is the larger of the two, 422 toes lengthy and 104 toes vast, in contrast with 388 toes lengthy and 58 toes vast for the Freedom class. The latter has the larger displacement, at 3,450 metric tons to three,200.
Neither makes use of propellor propulsion or rudders; as a substitute, fuel generators energy high-speed water jets. The design permits the LCS to function in shallower coastal waters and keep away from getting tangled in wires or cables, like people who may tether mines.
An LCS commander once touted the ships as “a military jet ski with a flight deck and a gun.”
In 2008, the first monohulled LCS, USS Freedom, was commissioned. In 2010, the first trimaran, USS Independence, adopted.
The LCS was envisioned as a key part of US naval energy in areas dominating present headlines, like the Persian Gulf, the place the US and Israel are at conflict with Iran, and the South China Sea, the place the US and its allies are defending freedom of navigation.
Early proponents of the ship referred to as it a “streetfighter,” in keeping with the Navy report, speedy and capable of fight small-boat swarms, however with the versatility to hunt mines like these Iran is reported to have laid in the Strait of Hormuz.
But issues started to mount. In January 2016, USS Fort Worth suffered harm to its propulsion system in Singapore. Though the downside was later discovered to be brought on by operator error, the then-4-year-old ship was out of motion for eight months.
And the incident was certainly one of four mechanical problems with the LCS fleet in a year, staining the popularity of the ships’ reliability.
As the LCS issues materialized, Navy leaders thought cash budgeted for the program could possibly be higher spent elsewhere.
In 2021, it started decommissioning the oldest of the ships – totaling seven so far – together with the USS Sioux City, which was decommissioned in 2023 after spending solely 5 years in a fleet the place ships are anticipated to last 25 years.
An eighth, USS Fort Worth, is anticipated to be retired in July, however Congress blocked plans to decommission much more, citing the service’s want for ships and a want to defend taxpayer investments of billions of {dollars}.
So, the Navy is forging forward attempting to make the better of ships its leaders didn’t need just some years in the past.
The 2026 Navy shipbuilding plan launched earlier this month calls the LCS “an essential low-end fleet capability … capable of complicating adversary decisions,” saying it may be an efficient mine countermeasures platform and armed with the Naval Strike Missile for floor warfare motion.
“The strategy for LCS is a transition from acquisition to sustainment and modernization to keep these ships relevant, combat credible, and reliable through their service lives,” the plan says.
Analysts are skeptical.
“What remains to be seen is how useful they would actually be in a combat scenario, as they have never been in one,” Emma Salisbury, a non-resident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s National Security Program, informed NCS.
She mentioned she’s seen no proof that, in the present conflict with Iran, the three LCS deployed to the Middle East for minesweeping duties have finished the job. When requested by NCS, US Central Command mentioned it couldn’t touch upon what position the LCS have enjoying in the battle.
When US Central Command introduced in April it was starting to set the circumstances for mine clearing in the Strait of Hormuz, it was not LCS however destroyers that have been the first to undergo the waterway.
Since the conflict started, at the very least two of the three LCS assigned to the gulf for minesweeping have been noticed as distant as Malaysia and Singapore.
Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain, informed NCS the LCS lacks sufficient anti-aircraft defenses for any actual war-time position in contested waters.
Though the Navy mentioned in 2025 it had begun upgrading LCS defenses to counter drones, Schuster is unconvinced.
“They are easy meat to a cruise missile, drone or aviation platform,” he mentioned.
“They are all but helpless in any kind of threat scenario. Even anti-pirate patrols are too dangerous in areas where there is a hostile air, drone, missile or swarm threat,” he mentioned.
The LCS is “an experiment that didn’t work as advertised, so the US Navy does its best to use the ships for what it can,” Salisbury added.
Both Salisbury and Schuster see the LCS as primarily stopgaps for the Navy, seemingly to provide approach to a brand new technology of frigates that was introduced last December.
Those ships, identified for now as the FF (X), can be based mostly on the Coast Guard’s Legend-class nationwide safety cutters. They’ll be larger than the LCS, displacing 4,750 tons, in keeping with a Navy doc introduced at a naval symposium in January reported by Naval News.
A Navy announcement of the new frigate from December 2025 mentioned the service hopes to have the first hull in the water by 2028. The Navy might ultimately discipline 50 to 65 of the new frigates, in keeping with Naval News.
Schuster doesn’t see a vivid or lengthy future for the LCS fleet.
“They will be kept until the new (frigates) enter service in 3-4 years … Then they’ll be quietly retired one or two at a time.”