Disparaged, Discontinued… And Indispensable? Littoral Combat Ships Take On Real-World Ops

The battle-tested LCS has moved past its reliability problems, surface-forces leaders said.

By Meghann Myers for Defense One

The Navy may have capped its fleet of much-anticipated—and much-maligned—littoral combat ships at 28 for now, but their commanders haven’t stopped trying to squeeze every last ounce of capability out of them.

LCSs deployed to the Persian Gulf and the waters off of South America in the past year, the commodore of Littoral Combat Ship Squadron 2 told an audience at the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium on Wednesday, including a 22-month deployment executed by two crews assigned to the Indianapolis.

“You don’t think you can maintain these ships and operate long periods of time?” Capt. Mark Haney said. “Indianapolis proved them wrong.”

The ship also received a Combat Action Ribbon, the first for an LCS, after shooting down Houthi drones and missiles in the Red Sea.

Meanwhile, the St. Louis traveled south, doing anti-submarine operations with its helicopter detachment and helping to interdict $111 million worth of marijuana and cocaine headed for North America.

“LCS is ideally suited for this type of interdiction operation,” Haney said.

But while the Navy has been putting its young LCS fleet to work, its future is still uncertain.

Like a number of previous ship types, the LCS was originally conceived of as a nimble option for counterinsurgency operations But the program ran way over its original budget and took so long to come online that by the time ships were ready to get underway, the Pentagon’s focus had shifted away from low-tech extremist groups to China’s increasingly capable forces.

Then came the readiness problems. By mid-2016, four of the service’s six operating LCSs had suffered some sort of mechanical failure, a trend that continued over the following few years.

A 2021 study by Naval Surfaces Forces prescribed 32 fixes to address LCS’s reliability and sustainability, among other issues, many of them stemming from the ships’ complex systems that in some cases were being maintained and repaired exclusively by contractors, preventing the ships’ crews from being able to make repairs underway.

“These are great warships; we just need to be able to sustain them properly,” Rear Adm. Ted LeClair, Naval Surface Forces’s deputy commander, told the audience.

Though the force began implementing those fixes, the Navy has since decommissioned seven of the ships, with two more proposed for decommissioning.

The Navy also stopped buying LCSs, halting production at the current 28 ships, most recently commissioning Nantucket and Beloit late last year, rather than moving forward with the 52 originally planned. 

“The decommissionings, at this point, have halted. And those are decisions that are made above my level. We inform those,” LeClair said. “The ships did have reliability challenges four to five years ago” but “the reliability issues are really a thing of the past.”

And with an “insatiable need” for surface combatants, LeClair added, the Navy can’t afford to let LCS go completely by the wayside. 

To that point, Haney mentioned in his remarks that Indianapolis was at times the only surface combatant in the Red Sea when Houthi attacks terrorized commercial ships.

“These 28 ships are workhorses, and they’re important, and we’re going to need them. We need them now,” he said. “But we’re really going to need them if we get into it in the next year or two.”

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