At the end of September, the Navy decommissioned the USS Simpson (FFG-56), the last Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate. The 51 Perrys were the most numerous class of U.S. warships built since World War II until the current littoral combat ship (LCS) program, and the retirement of the last Perry suggests that it would be appropriate to compare the two programs. When they were conceived, the Perrys were certainly as controversial as the LCS; they were derided as toothless and pointless, with a particularly ineffective hull sonar. The advent of towed arrays transformed their value for antisubmarine warfare, since with their gas turbine engines they were inherently quiet, compared to their geared-turbine steam predecessors (the Knox class, which was nearly as numerous).
The Perrys were also valued for their Standard Missile system, which seemed to offer a degree of protection against the pop-up missiles the Soviet navy deployed on board Charlie-class (Project 670A) submarines. With the end of the Cold War, the submarine threat declined precipitously. The Knox-class frigates were quickly discarded, but the Perrys survived because the Navy needed small surface ships for a wide range of miscellaneous roles and because they were inexpensive (by design) to operate. They were not, however, considered vital combatants, so the Navy did not invest in upgrading their missile systems. Instead the missile launchers were removed. Foreign navies operating these ships have considered them vital, even high-end, combatants, and in several cases they have seen extensive modernization.
Getting Over the ‘Hump’
The Perrys were part of a series of attempts to address a major U.S. problem, a “hump” in destroyer/frigate numbers which began during or even well before World War II. During the war the U.S. Navy built about 400 destroyers, and by the 1960s about 200 of them remained. By 1958 a major question was how to replace them at an affordable price. At that time the attempt to design a new low-cost destroyer failed (readers who remember that generation of ships will be shocked or amused to find out that it led to the Belknap class). The effect of this failure was to put the problem off until the mid-1960s, when a new general-purpose destroyer (DX/DXG) was conceived and then built as the Spruance class. By that time the onrush of technology suggested that perhaps the U.S. Navy did not need so many destroyers.
The main destroyer or frigate roles were twofold: protection of major fleet units (mainly carriers) and protection of convoys against submarine attack. By the 1960s it could reasonably be argued that there were better and less expensive counters to Soviet submarines threatening trade routes, mainly U.S. submarines operating at choke points and maritime patrol aircraft vectored by the new underwater surveillance system, SOSUS. Both of these solutions had what some saw as an Achilles’ heel: They relied on passive detection. At some point the Soviets would learn how to build quiet submarines rather than washing machines. What then?
In the 1960s the Navy produced regular reports looking into its future, called Long Range Objectives (LRO) studies. The last chief of the organization producing these reports was Captain Elmo Zumwalt, who would go on to become CNO. He argued in his final report that the Navy had to seek insurance against silencing (hence the collapse of the SOSUS-driven and submarine choke systems). It had to find some way to recreate the vast numbers of the past destroyer fleet. When Zumwalt became CNO, he regretfully signed the contract to build 30 Spruance-class destroyers, which he considered too expensive for the sort of mass production he had in mind. He ordered a new study for a surface combatant designed within an affordable price—the Perry class (Zumwalt also wanted a new breed of convoy carriers, which became the abortive Sea Control Ship).
Design to price was a trickier matter than might be imagined. It is possible to specify size and displacement and even crew numbers (though those latter numbers tend to be overly optimistic), but cost estimates are invariably inaccurate. Admiral Zumwalt did specify a price, and he sought to control cost escalation by limiting ship size and crew. There was later some embarrassment when it turned out that the displacement estimate was too low for what was to go into the ship. On the other hand, insistence on low price led to an innovative choice for the missile control system. The new ships were probably also the first to show the impact of shrinking computer size and cost, as they unexpectedly received computer-driven combat-direction systems.
It turned out that the Soviets were slow to silence their submarines, so Admiral Zumwalt’s vast number of convoy escorts was not needed as badly as he expected. Once the Cold War ended, specialized antisubmarine ships were discarded. It seemed that the best force the United States could have would be a high-end strike fleet that could project power into the Third World. To a considerable extent Navy planning followed the higher-level prescription that the United States had to be able to deal with two simultaneous crises (the usual language specified a holding action in one while the other was dealt with). Fleet numbers were largely determined by the need to operate a set (affordable) number of carrier battle groups and amphibious ready groups.
A New Demand
The 9/11 attacks changed everything. Until then, it was assumed that crises would take time to explode, and that relatively few could hit at one time. The Navy’s interpretation of 9/11 was that the United States might well be faced by several simultaneous and unrelated crises, all of which the service would have to react to at the same time. The Navy circulated a briefing that included a slide titled “A Bad Day in 2003,” which showed several such crises (one of them was a new attack on Kuwait by Saddam Hussein). How could U.S. sea power be redeployed to face this new reality? Nothing could be done suddenly to multiply the numbers of carriers and major amphibious ships. However, it might be possible to redeploy those ships. For example, instead of working with the carriers, the large amphibious ships could be made the cores of new formations (expeditionary strike groups). Separate surface action groups could be formed. All of this was possible only if the Navy suddenly produced a lot more surface combatants.
At the time, there was interest in a new frigate-sized surface combatant called the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). It was undefined, a rubber ship that could be shaped any way Navy leadership wanted. The studies on naval presence showed only that numerous such ships were needed, both to cover the new expeditionary strike groups and to fill out future surface action groups. As always, money was tight, so that initially the single most important defining characteristic of the LCS was that it should be about a quarter as expensive as an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, which meant about a quarter of a billion dollars at the time. This was a difficult demand, since about half or more of the cost of a surface combatant is its combat system (including weapons), and any ship would need a serious weapons suite to operate in the face of littoral threats.
The obvious solution, and the one reflected in the current LCS, was to detach as much as possible of the ship’s weapon system from the hull, which had to be bought for that quarter-billion dollars. That was very different from the choice made for the Perrys, although in their case the helicopter part of the combat system certainly was detached. Initially it seemed that the Danish StanFlex series, with its modular combat systems, was a good model. However, the boxes of weapons and sensors used by the Danes were rejected as too limiting.
Ultimately the choice was that the new LCS would become a carrier of unmanned systems, many of them a means of distributing sensors. For example, an LCS can launch unmanned helicopters that can distribute seabed sensors in a very precise way. Those sensors can track submarines moving above them, even in shallow water. At least in theory, the same unmanned helicopter can be vectored out to drop a lightweight torpedo on the submarine. The attraction of the unmanned-sensor approach is that the same hull can support so many different functions, so that in theory the LCS can replace many current special-purpose surface ships, such as minecraft.
This rationale, which is very different from that which produced the Perry class, is extremely attractive. It makes maximum use of the current U.S. advantages in command and control and in robotic systems. It offers, at least in theory, a valuable degree of commonality in hulls and the economies of series production. So why is the LCS derided by so many?
Unfortunately, the brilliant modular concept has been coupled to fascination with high ship speed. Advocates of the LCS often point to successful speed trials without any explanation as to why such performance has much to do with effectiveness. The past history of very fast warships is extremely depressing. Speed is expensive and often fleeting. In the case of the LCS, very high speed is bought not only by extraordinary amounts of power but also by very flimsy (lightweight) construction. For example, the ships have vast flight decks that might seem large enough for big helicopters and even VSTOL fighters, but aircraft that might seem to fit will likely fall through them. As in the Perrys, one element of cost control had been the ruthless limitation of complements, and it is certainly fair to say that people are the single greatest naval operating cost. Unfortunately, many unmanned systems include vehicles that require deck-handling parties; the LCS has elements of the aircraft carrier about it. Those parties require many more berths than the LCS was designed for.
Worse, the concentration on high speed and its inherent problems seems to have crowded out investment in the truly revolutionary part of the LCS concept, the modules. Surely it would be better to build a larger, slower, and less expensive LCS—and to spend on the modules that would make it a world-beater. Then we really can get the numbers we need, probably at a reasonable price.
Dr. Friedman is the author of The Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapon Systems, Fifth Edition, and Network-centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight Smarter Through Three World Wars, available from the Naval Institute Press at www.usni.org.