Littoral combat ship

Based on Wikipedia: Littoral combat ship

The Ship That Would Abandon Ship

In 2012, Admiral Jonathan Greenert made a startling admission about the United States Navy's newest class of warships. If one of these vessels were struck by enemy fire, he explained, the crew would "conduct an orderly abandon ship." This was not a worst-case scenario. It was the plan.

The littoral combat ship, or LCS, represents one of the most ambitious and troubled naval programs in recent American history. Designed to operate in the shallow coastal waters that give the ship class its name—"littoral" simply means the zone where land meets sea—these vessels were meant to revolutionize how the Navy fights in the crowded, complex environments close to shore.

What emerged instead was a cautionary tale about the gap between military ambition and engineering reality.

The Promise of a Swiss Army Ship

The concept sounded elegant. Rather than building specialized ships for different missions—one type to hunt submarines, another to sweep mines, a third to combat small boats—the Navy would create a single adaptable platform. Swap out mission modules like changing attachments on a power tool, and the same hull could transform from submarine hunter to minesweeper in a matter of hours.

Former Secretary of the Navy Gordon England described the vision: a small, fast, maneuverable, and relatively inexpensive warship that could replace slower, more specialized vessels. The ships would handle anti-submarine warfare, mine countermeasures, surface combat, intelligence gathering, special operations support, and logistics. All from the same basic design.

The Navy didn't build one ship to test this concept. They built two completely different ones.

The Freedom class, constructed by Lockheed Martin, uses a conventional single hull—what naval architects call a monohull design. The Independence class, built by General Dynamics, takes a radically different approach: a trimaran with three separate hulls, the main body flanked by two smaller outriggers. Think of a high-speed catamaran ferry, but with an extra hull and bristling with weapons.

Both designs emphasized speed above almost everything else. These ships can exceed forty knots, roughly forty-six miles per hour, making them among the fastest warships afloat. The idea was that if the ship couldn't take a punch, at least it could dodge one.

Smaller Than You'd Think, Bigger Than They Look

To understand what the LCS is, it helps to understand what it isn't. It's not a destroyer, those versatile workhorses that form the backbone of the modern Navy. Destroyers displace around nine thousand tons and carry sophisticated radar systems, dozens of missiles, and enough defensive firepower to protect an entire carrier battle group.

The LCS is also not quite a frigate, the next step down—though the Navy has tried to rebrand it as one. Frigates traditionally handle escort duties, protecting slower ships from submarines and aircraft.

What the LCS most closely resembles is a corvette, a class of small warship that many navies use for coastal patrol and limited combat missions. Each LCS displaces around three thousand tons, making it slightly smaller than the Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates the Navy retired, but substantially larger than the Cyclone-class patrol boats used for special operations.

Despite their modest size, these ships pack some surprising capabilities. Each carries a flight deck and hangar large enough for two Seahawk helicopters. A stern ramp allows the ship to launch and recover small boats while underway. There's enough cargo space to transport a small assault force with fighting vehicles to a friendly port. The standard weapons fit includes a 57-millimeter gun—roughly two and a quarter inches in diameter—and Rolling Airframe Missiles for close-in defense against aircraft and incoming missiles.

The ships also carry drones. Lots of them.

Unmanning the Front Lines

If there's one area where the LCS program genuinely pointed toward the future, it's in the embrace of unmanned systems. The Navy's goal, as they put it, was to "unman the front lines."

Consider the dangerous work of hunting mines. Traditionally, this required specialized minesweeper ships to sail slowly through potentially mined waters, using sonar to detect threats and various systems to neutralize them. The crew was always at risk of missing something and detonating a mine beneath their own hull.

The LCS approach moves humans away from the danger. Remote minehunting systems—essentially underwater robots—do the actual searching. The ship stays at a safe distance, controlling the drones and analyzing their data. The same principle applies to submarine hunting: unmanned surface vessels can tow sonar arrays and even launch torpedoes, keeping the parent ship out of harm's way.

The Fire Scout drone helicopter can scout ahead of the ship, identify threats, and even engage targets with missiles. The Spartan Scout unmanned surface vehicle can patrol the waters around the ship autonomously. These systems exploit advanced concepts like bistatic sonar, where one vehicle transmits a sonar ping and another, positioned miles away, listens for the echo—making it much harder for submarines to evade detection by tracking the sonar source.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, even developed plans for a medium-altitude long-endurance drone that could operate from the Independence class. This aircraft would carry six hundred pounds of payload out to ranges of six hundred to nine hundred nautical miles—roughly seven hundred to a thousand regular miles.

These unmanned systems represented genuine innovation. Unfortunately, the ships carrying them had problems of their own.

Survivability: A Polite Word for Vulnerability

In 2010, the Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation delivered a damning assessment. Neither LCS design, the report found, was expected to "be survivable in a hostile combat environment." Neither ship could withstand the Navy's full ship shock trials—tests where explosives are detonated near a vessel to ensure it can survive nearby misses.

The Navy's response revealed the fundamental compromise at the heart of the LCS concept. These ships, officials explained, were built to what's called a "Level 1+" survivability standard. In plain terms, this means the ships are designed to survive in low-threat environments. They rely on warnings from networked sensors and their exceptional speed to avoid being hit in the first place. If they are hit, they're designed to limp to safety rather than continue fighting.

That's a significant departure from traditional naval thinking. Most warships are built to take damage and keep fighting. The LCS was built to avoid damage or accept that it couldn't survive it.

One particularly embarrassing limitation: neither LCS class can effectively defend itself against anti-ship cruise missiles. These weapons are precisely the threat most commonly encountered in coastal waters—the very environment the ships were designed for. The ships can scatter into shallow water better than larger warships, using their draft of less than fifteen feet to hide in waters too shallow for destroyers, but that's more of an escape tactic than a fighting capability.

The ships were also not equipped with the Aegis Combat System, the sophisticated radar and missile defense network that protects most American surface combatants. This made them the first major Navy warship class in a generation to lack this capability. Communications and radar systems proved unreliable and required expensive refits.

The Modular Dream Deferred

The centerpiece of the LCS concept—rapidly swappable mission modules—proved far more difficult in practice than on PowerPoint slides.

The original vision imagined a ship pulling into any commercial port and swapping its submarine-hunting equipment for mine-clearing systems in a matter of hours. Reality proved stubbornly resistant to this fantasy. A 2012 sustainment wargame reportedly found that module changes might take weeks rather than hours, partly for logistics reasons. The Navy quietly began planning to assign each LCS a single permanent mission module, with changes becoming rare exceptions rather than routine operations.

In fairness, the Navy demonstrated in 2014 that the Independence-class ship could switch from mine warfare to surface warfare configuration in ninety-six hours—four days. That's impressive compared to building an entirely new ship, but a far cry from the quick-change flexibility originally promised.

By 2016, the Navy acknowledged reality with a radical reorganization. The first four ships became dedicated training vessels. The remaining twenty-four were divided into six divisions of four ships each, with each division permanently assigned to one of the three mission types. The signature modular concept was essentially abandoned.

The manning concept faced similar disappointments. The Navy had planned an innovative 3:2:1 system: three crews for every two ships, with only one ship deployed at any time. The other ship and the non-deployed crews would be preparing for deployment or rotating. This would theoretically require half as many ships and three-quarters as many sailors as traditional practices.

It didn't work. Ships fell short of required manning. The Navy ended up installing extra berthing modules in the mission bays just to carry enough crew for operations. The silver lining: the ships were designed with enough headroom to convert two-high bunk beds to three-high if needed, potentially accommodating crews of one hundred.

Arming Up

The combat capabilities of the LCS were initially described, even by Navy officials, as "very modest." This became more concerning when the XM501 Non-Line-of-Sight Launch System was canceled—a missile system that would have given the ships the ability to strike targets twenty-five miles away without direct line of sight.

The replacement, the Griffin missile, had a range of just three and a half miles. That's essentially knife-fighting distance in naval combat. The Navy planned to deploy these in sets of forty-five missiles, but canceled the procurement entirely after determining the missiles were "too lightweight" for the threats the ships might face.

The search for adequate armament became a recurring theme. The Navy tried the Hellfire missile, originally designed as an air-to-ground weapon for attack helicopters. Each LCS can carry twenty-four Hellfires in vertical launchers, giving the ships access to the Army's existing stockpile of ten thousand missiles. But Hellfire was always intended as an interim solution while the Navy searched for something with longer reach.

The real transformation came from an unlikely source: Norway.

Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace proposed equipping the LCS with their Naval Strike Missile, a weapon specifically designed to evade radar detection while striking targets over the horizon. The missile has a range exceeding one hundred nautical miles—more than a hundred fifteen regular miles—outranging even the venerable Harpoon anti-ship missile that has served the Navy since the 1970s.

There was a catch. The LCS lacks the long-range fire control systems needed to detect targets at that distance. The ships would need targeting data from other platforms—aircraft, satellites, or larger warships—to exploit the missile's full capability.

Nevertheless, in September 2014, an LCS successfully test-fired the Naval Strike Missile against a mobile target. It was the first time an LCS had fired a surface-to-surface missile of any kind. The Navy ultimately selected the NSM as the standard over-the-horizon weapon for the class.

Navy wargames revealed something interesting after the ships received serious anti-ship missiles. The adversary's calculations changed dramatically. Enemies now had to devote more reconnaissance assets to tracking the smaller ships and suffered heavier losses in simulated combat. Even a modest warship becomes more dangerous when it can strike from beyond visual range.

Finding Their Place

By 2012, senior Navy leaders were being blunt about how the LCS would actually be used. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Greenert stated plainly: "You won't send it into an anti-access area."

Instead, groups of two or three LCS would perform missions like minesweeping while operating under the protective umbrella of a destroyer. The LCS would handle lower-intensity tasks—patrolling, port visits, anti-piracy operations, and what the Navy calls "partnership-building exercises" (essentially showing the flag and training with allied navies). This would free up destroyers and cruisers for missions requiring their heavier armament.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus elaborated: the LCS could operate in combat zones, but only while protected by other warships. The relationship would mirror how destroyers protect aircraft carriers—the LCS would provide specialized capabilities while larger ships provided defensive cover.

This represents a significant retreat from the original vision of an independent ship capable of dominating coastal waters. But it's not without value. At roughly one-quarter the cost of a destroyer, more numerous LCS can sweep for mines and deploy sophisticated submarine-detection sonar while the expensive capital ships handle air and missile defense.

The surface warfare module, designed to combat swarms of small boats, earned praise as "the best swarm killer in the surface fleet." It includes two 30-millimeter guns (about one and a quarter inches in diameter), a counter-boat missile system, rigid-hull inflatable boats for boarding operations, and weapons deployed from helicopters and Fire Scout drones. Against the kind of small-boat swarm tactics Iran has practiced in the Persian Gulf, this makes the LCS a genuinely useful platform.

Submarines and Mines

Anti-submarine warfare represented one of the more troubled mission modules. The focus shifted from stationary detection systems—where the ship stops and lowers sensors into the water—to "en-stride" systems that work while the ship keeps moving. This made the modules useful in open ocean as well as coastal waters, but added complexity.

The French defense company Thales sold the Navy their CAPTAS-4 low-frequency active sonar, designed to be towed behind the ship. This system derives from the Sonar 2087 used on British Type 23 frigates, well-regarded vessels with a strong anti-submarine reputation. The Navy tested combining this with American systems like the TB-37 Multi-Function Towed Array.

Both systems can operate in passive mode, simply listening for submarine noise, or active mode, sending out sonar pulses and analyzing the returns. Variable-depth sonar allows the sensors to be lowered to optimal depths for detecting submarines hiding beneath thermal layers in the ocean—boundaries between water masses of different temperatures that can reflect or absorb sonar energy.

The anti-submarine module was scheduled for deployment in 2016, though budget sequestration threatened to push this back. By 2022, the Navy had canceled the originally planned Raytheon sonar system entirely, forcing a return to the drawing board.

The Numbers Game

The LCS program's requirements shifted repeatedly as problems mounted and budgets tightened.

The Navy initially planned to build fifty-five littoral combat ships. By 2013-2014, this was cut to thirty-two as the service proposed developing a more capable frigate better suited to high-intensity combat. In late 2014, the Navy developed a plan for enhanced versions of the LCS to meet a revised requirement of fifty-two ships, with the improved vessels to be redesignated as frigates.

In December 2015, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter ordered further reductions: only forty ships would be procured, and the Navy would have to choose one of the two designs by fiscal year 2019 rather than continuing to build both.

That decision was effectively overtaken by events. In July 2017, the Navy requested information on entirely new designs for a multi-mission guided-missile frigate. The requirements specified a ship that could perform the same roles as the LCS while having better offensive and defensive capabilities. Any existing design that could be adapted was welcome to compete—the field extended well beyond the two LCS variants.

In April 2020, the Navy selected its winner: a design from Fincantieri Marinette Marine based on the Italian-French FREMM multi-purpose frigate. This would become the Constellation class, a proper frigate with the combat capabilities the LCS never achieved. The LCS's role as the future of American surface warfare had lasted barely a decade.

Lessons in Shallow Water

The first LCS, USS Freedom, was commissioned in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in November 2008. The first Independence-class ship, the trimaran USS Independence, followed in Mobile, Alabama, in January 2010. Both cities are on the Great Lakes and Gulf Coast respectively—appropriately, given that these ships were designed for coastal and shallow-water operations rather than blue-water combat.

What followed was a program that never quite found its footing. The modular concept that justified the ships' limited armament proved impractical. The survivability standards that accepted the ships couldn't withstand heavy combat led to the remarkable "orderly abandon ship" doctrine. The two-variant approach meant the Navy was essentially running two separate programs, with neither achieving the economies of scale that might have brought costs down.

Yet the program also advanced ideas that will shape naval warfare for decades. The aggressive use of unmanned systems—aerial, surface, and subsurface—pointed toward a future where human crews increasingly control rather than conduct dangerous missions. The networking concepts, while troubled in execution, reflected a genuine understanding that modern naval combat is as much about information as firepower.

The LCS also demonstrated that speed alone cannot substitute for capability. A ship that can outrun danger is useful only until it meets a threat it can't outrun. And in an age of hypersonic missiles and networked sensors, there are fewer places to hide.

Perhaps most significantly, the program revealed the limits of optimization. A ship designed to do everything acceptably may do nothing well. The Swiss Army knife is a remarkable tool, but no one would choose it over a proper blade for serious cutting work. The Navy learned, expensively, that some missions demand specialized platforms—and that the flexibility of modular design exists more easily in procurement presentations than in actual naval operations.

The littoral combat ship was meant to be inexpensive, flexible, and revolutionary. It achieved none of these goals fully. But in its failures, it taught lessons about naval warfare, defense procurement, and the stubborn gap between concept and execution that will inform American shipbuilding for generations to come.