Inherent in all analysis is the requirement to revisit assumptions when these become questionable. While the problem of the littorals remains, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is no longer the correct ship for the Navy to use in that environment. Instead, the vessel that can pursue the mission in low- to medium-threat areas is a flexible, multi-mission frigate. Ideally, such a ship will present low or no technological or program risk and be capable of missions both independently and as part of larger national and international task forces. In the high-risk threat arena, the carrier strike group will remain the premier power-projection warfighter if outfitted with tailored, mixed air wings for near-shore missions.
Post-Cold War power projection, as the Navy and Marine Corps envisioned it, was analyzed in the 1992 Department of the Navy paper From the Sea. This was expanded and updated to include peacetime operations and regional situations in Forward . . . From the Sea (1994). Both documents addressed the changing world. The adjustment of doctrine included transitioning from sea lines of communication across the Atlantic in support of REFORGER (Return of Forces to Germany, to bolster U.S. ground forces in the event of conventional combat) to acknowledging that the littorals would be the preeminent challenge in a now-asymmetric world.
Unyielding Coastal Areas
The challenge demanded that highly variable courses of action be considered. Debate centered around whether to project power on land through penetration or domination of coastal regions, and a surprising divergence in the naval community arose.
Seeking to penetrate, and based on its 1980s analysis, the Marine Corps embarked on an aggressive acquisition strategy in which combatant vehicles, whether air or ground, would break through via speed and range. Both the tiltrotor MV-22 Osprey and the recently canceled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle were designed for this over-the-horizon littoral incursion. That approach now faces new questions about its viability.
The Navy was intent on not only operating occasionally in these near-shore battlefields, but dominating them decisively. The champion of this philosophy was the late Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. Working with Captain Wayne Hughes, he saw the diminishing ship count combined with the potentially high-risk littoral threat and developed a concept to keep the Navy relevant in a reduced budget environment. The carrier strike groups would remain the flagship power-projection capability, but a low end of small ships whose occasional loss would not risk overall mission success would allow the Navy to wade into shoreline areas with flexible combat power and mitigated, but acceptable, risk. Analysis of this concept, known as Streetfighter, led to several very different, creative, and viable courses of action.
One proposal envisioned four- to six-man boats deployed from a mother ship. Themselves incapable of self-deployment, they would be fast and, frankly, expendable. Other options included a Coast Guard-type cutter, an improved frigate, and a self-deploying, very fast, modular advanced combatant.
The Navy, flush with enthusiasm for a Republican-dominated government and a recovered and roaring economy, saw the opportunity to develop a generation of ships with as-yet-unseen capabilities: the LCS, based on the modular advanced combatant.
Initial Choice: The LCS
With a variety of networked and organic strike capability, the fast LCS would embark modular packages based on threat and mission, using undeveloped unmanned networking capabilities that would allow a small battle fleet of these vessels to enter, dominate, and maintain a wide swath of near-shore coastline.
Their crews of fewer than 100 would comprise more mid-grade petty officers than junior sailors, in a unique “diamond” concept. Roughly half the sailors would be dedicated to the mission modules and helicopters critical to conducting the missions. A group of 40 on a frigate-size ship of the line was clearly an audacious concept.
The LCS is surprisingly light on its actual ability to provide traditional support to forces, even though it was ostensibly designed to dominate the littorals, partly in support of follow-on ground or air forces. In lieu of a 5-inch, a 57-mm cannon is embarked. The LCS has only the SeaRAM system to provide a very limited air-defense and antimissile capability. Initially dependent on the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) missile, that program is gone—and with that cancellation, much of the LCS’s strike capability.
For its other missions, notably its intended minesweeping and antisubmarine warfare, the LCS currently depends on a package of unknown effectiveness and unavailable and unproven technology. Both missions are also highly skill-dependent and rely on the assigned aviation element. But in the absence of effective air defense, the ability of SH-60s or unmanned aerial vehicles to operate in the littorals with impunity is a thorny proposition. Consequently, most scenarios now see the LCS operating with more traditional surface vessels in all but the most permissive environments.
Projections and Changes
When Streetfighter’s LCS concept solidified, the Naval War College undertook a series of analyses to develop future tactics for the quickly advancing program. Navy Lieutenant Benjamin Abbott, using advanced computer-modeling techniques from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, ran 41,000 different scenarios in all the projected mission modules and against a wide array of threats. While computer simulations should be considered with caution, these results should surprise no one versed in the basics of land or sea warfare. In sum, 6-10 LCSs with various packages are needed for success in most combat scenarios.1
Moreover, casualties are assumed in any littoral fight. The more ships, the safer the task force will be. But to assume invulnerability is foolish. Littoral combat, even with the most advanced ships available, will be, borrowing from 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, nasty, brutish, and costly.
Shipbuilding is not an exercise in short timelines. Realizing this, the Navy took decisive action with detailed analysis, and the development of the LCS has been remarkable in its celerity. But events have now invalidated the Navy’s advanced concept. Budgetary assumptions in 2004 have not withstood the realities of 2011. The stagnation of our nation’s economy, the desire of both Republicans and Democrats to trim the Defense budget, and the progressive destabilization along critical sea lines of communication demands a Navy with flexible and multi-purpose ships capable of independent deployment and operations. Crew sizes must be able to conduct the complete range of missions, concurrently or simultaneously.
We cannot afford single-purpose ships, which still lack the mission modules to make even those single purposes executable in flotillas of six or more. We need to go back to the options first presented several years ago and find one that matches our current and future budgetary restrictions. We need frigates.
Save Money and Build Appropriate Ships
The idea of defense on a severely restricted budget may be somewhat new to the United States. Fortunately, other less-than-budgetarily-endowed navies have worked hard on this matter and can show us how it’s done. For example, the Royal Danish Navy has launched remarkably advanced designs, operating within wholly conventional concepts, to develop the type of frigate the U.S. Navy needs for its diverse set of operations. The Absalon-class frigates are not only capable of conducting all naval operations, they do so at a cost much less than that of the LCS. Indeed, while exact prices are difficult to estimate, a fair assumption is that two LCSs are worth the same as three Absalons, based on a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) per-vessel estimate of the LCS and publicly available information on the Danish Absalon program.2
The CBO, tasked with all matters budgetary, has further noted with alarm the diminishing Navy ship count. To counter this, the service is asking for more money. Yet all indicators point to fewer total DOD budget dollars, not more. If the Navy is to meet its requirements for ships and deployable mass, it will have to do so through less-costly ships.
The CBO report highlights a flaw of logic in the Navy’s 30-year plan, as Eric Labs, CBO senior analyst for naval forces, said: “The new plan appears to increase the required size of the fleet compared with earlier plans, while reducing the number of ships to be purchased.”3 This budgetary judo move was achieved by sacrificing logistics ships for combatants, while still asking for a substantial financial increase. The Navy has seen the trees—a lot of LCSs are needed to conduct missions—but appears to have missed the forest: We don’t need the LCS.
Even more troubling, as the number of logistic-support ships falls, the sustainability of the LCS fleet for which they were sacrificed falls as well. If the current LCS procurement continues, it risks trapping the Navy in a vicious spiral of fewer ships that are unsustainably deployed and incapable of carrying out their core missions. Yet based on current contracts, the Navy is beyond doubt committed to ten LCSs. This does not account for the modules that will make the ships useful for their primary missions, leaving only their secondary counter-drug and Special Operations Command support roles.
The single flotilla of LCS-based ships is an unavoidable contractual reality that accomplishes no primary mission. But this does not negate reconsidering less-expensive options that were viable in 2004, and that the future budget makes increasingly necessary. Littoral combat remains a real scenario for which we must be prepared. Yet we are in the position of having ships designed for combat that we dare not risk, because we lack the essential ship count to conduct it with the decisiveness required. Worse still, the LCS was not created for and cannot execute traditional frigate operations, yet it is currently being procured as an Oliver Hazard Perry–class replacement.
Fleet-size requirements to accomplish those missions have decreased to the point where we may not be able to cover our essential sea-lines-of-communication tasks. Our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers cannot conduct these missions. We have to fight for the peace that we tenuously hold now, while maintaining the ability to wage wars that we almost cannot risk at our current and proposed fleet sizes.
Fill the Roles We Need Now
Essential missions that we stand to sacrifice include humanitarian support, non-combatant evacuations, anti-piracy, and naval-presence patrols. All demand resources and deployed time. Minesweeping is another Navy core competency that we risk leaving gapped, due simply to a shortage of suitable hulls.
A ship that requires redeployment and reconfiguration to conduct two missions is an expensive luxury that we can no longer afford. To have so few LCSs that they become irreplaceable national assets, as is the pending reality, is to render the entire Streetfighter concept self-obsolescent. That these missions must be carried out by ships with real warfighting capabilities is unquestioned. The expansion of the Iranian navy alone testifies to this; it is now patrolling continuously in the Gulf of Aden and Mediterranean.
An LCS operating independently does not have the self-defense capabilities to counter even these rudimentary threats. But a basic frigate, based on cutting-edge but well-established and affordably robust capabilities, can. This vessel can do it cheaper while providing the necessary ship count. A brief look around the world shows it is the most desired and up-to-date ship for nearly all Western navies. The criticality of this class must remain unquestioned in any budget-restricted analysis.
A traditional frigate is not the optimum craft for the littorals when faced with high-intensity combat. Nor is the LCS, in its most likely fleet size and combat configuration. The mother-ship-with-Streetfighters remains. How we apply this concept without additional ships or massive expenditures demands thinking that is revolutionary but simple. The answer is our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships (LHAs).
Use the Mother Ship
The idea of a mother ship maximizes the usefulness of the aircraft carriers we already have. Recognizing our enemies’ usage of small boats, we looked, naturally, at countering them similarly. Seemingly lost in that wargaming was the understanding that those who counter us can never hope to overcome our mastery of the air, so they have developed equipment and tactics accordingly.
The United States has the ability to dominate almost anywhere ships can sail. But in high-threat surface coastal combat, we still need a Streetfighter that is small, fast, armed, and expendable. And we can have that—quickly and cheaply—by operating from the mother ships we already have.
A navalized OV-10X Bronco turboprop or the equivalent could provide the persistent coverage that could dominate the littorals. This would also provide the mass needed to do so continuously throughout the operation. The aircraft carrier could operate effectively if augmented with the suggested frigates and portions of the traditional carrier strike group. The F-35C joint strike fighter, as critical as its frame is, is not well suited to the missions addressed here and will likely be procured in numbers requiring augmentation regardless. It lacks the manning and persistence and expendability required of a Navy Streetfighter. The “hi-lo” concept, augmenting high-cost, high-tech with low-cost, low-tech mass is applicable in the air and on the seas and will become an essential approach for all services in the crushing upcoming budget realities.
Meanwhile, the LCS has devolved to a 400-foot expeditionary fighting vehicle, lacking only the armor and a useful gun. The vessel is fast, but has limited capabilities to conduct even its originally envisioned missions. The cancellation of key capabilities such as NLOS endangers the greater range of missions now planned to be sacrificed so that the LCS can continue to develop (very ironically). Surely the ghost of Captain John Paul Jones would concur that a fast ship incapable of fighting is not in the best interest of our nation’s Navy.
The Perry-class frigates, having carried out yeoman’s work for almost 40 years, have reached the end of their lifespan. The frigate is a design older than our Navy, yet remains as essential and viable now as it was during the Netherlands’ Eighty Years War (1568–1648) that won independence from Spain. The ship is small and fast enough, sufficiently armed, and available in the numbers needed. The Dutch-origin Absalon design remains one of many effective and low-risk replacements for the Perry class. We should use such a model, adjust it minimally, and build the ships here. We should not force unforeseen technologies onto a ship to meet known requirements.
Accepting shrinking budgets, the United States and its beleaguered taxpayers deserve a military that operates within the same budgetary restrictions. With such a huge procurement bureaucracy as ours, it is no surprise that events overcame the process. But now the Navy must adjust to the new realities. It is never too late to make the right decision.
1. Benjamin Abbot, “Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Mission Packages: Determining the Best Mix,” Naval Postgraduate School, March 2008, www.edocs.nps.edu/npspubs/scholarly/theses/2008/Mar/08Mar_Abbott.pdf.
2. Anthony Capaccio, “Lockheed, Austal Extend Prices on Littoral Ship Bids,” Bloomberg.com, 13 December 2010, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-13/lockheed-austal-extend-prices-on-littoral-ship-bids-update1-.html.
3. Micheal Fabey, “New Shipbuilding Plan Underfunded, CBO Says,” AW&ST, 4 March 2011, http://web02.aviationweek.com/aw/mstory.do?id=news/asd/2011/03/14/01.xml&channel=null&headline=New%20Shipbuilding%20Plan%20Underfunded,%20CBO%20Says.
Lieutenant Lawlor is a Navy Reservist assigned to Strategic Command. He works as an analyst for the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command.