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Admiral confident of LCS despite setbacks

Despite major cost problems with the program and some skepticism about the design concepts, Adm. Gary Roughead remains convinced that Littoral Combat Ships are the ships the Navy needs.

“I’ve always believed in the LCS, believed in the need for LCS,” he said. “And that’s just reaffirmed to me that that is going to be a ship of the future for the U.S. Navy.”

Roughead, the new leader of Fleet Forces Command in Norfolk, Va., toured the ships on a recent cross-country trip that also took him to San Diego for the homecoming of the amphibious assault ship Boxer.

The LCS program has two different designs for fast ships, crewed by only 40 sailors, meant to operate in shallow water close to shore. Both ships have a large open bay for interchangeable combat modules and mission crews.

But Navy hopes for a fleet of 55 Littoral Combat Ships have been hampered by cost increases from $220 million to $400 million in the first ship — not including the warfare modules — and the cancellation of the another LCS due to price hikes. Likewise, the first LCS, built by Lockheed Martin, has been delayed.

Navy Secretary Donald Winter told reporters during a visit to the Hampton Roads area on June 6 that the Navy will be looking hard at the way it buys ships, partly because of the LCS snags.

“We have some pressurization on the shipbuilding budget. That’s evidenced, if you will, in challenges we’ve seen on programs like the Littoral Combat Ship,” he said. “We’re engaged in a very significant reassessment of how we acquire our ships.”

Roughead is taking a look at LCS, too, not as a program, but to ensure that Fleet Forces Command is prepared to man, train for and equip the new ships.

“Our responsibility here is the introduction of that ship and to make sure we doing the things here at Fleet Forces Command and in the surface force that introduces those ships to the Navy in the best way we possibly can,” he said in a recent interview.

Early in Roughead’s career, he served on Asheville-class gunboats — small, aluminum craft designed for coastal combat. In a precursor to the LCS, his small crew was made up of “hybrid sailors,” who filled several job descriptions aboard ship.

“Because of the size of the crew, we didn’t have the luxury of, ‘I’m an electrician. I do electrician stuff.’ Or ‘I’m an engineman. I do engineman stuff.’ All that is off the table,” he said. “And we, because of that, were an incredibly effective crew.”

As for the ship itself, Roughead says he found the innovative designs promising for the future LCS crews and the fleet.

He said LCS is “a great ship that I see can complement our more traditional formations — the strike groups — but yet a ship that can easily adapt to other operating environments because of the shallow draft, the speed, the reconfigurable nature of the mission capability,” he said. “I just see it being a very versatile, very effective and quite frankly, a likely workhorse of the Navy.”