GAO: Navy doesn’t have LCS data it needs - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

GAO: Navy doesn’t have LCS data it needs

A congressional report released Tuesday raised new doubts about whether the Navy can set up the crewing and training it needs for its planned fleet of 55 littoral combat ships, and revealed the service has not done full diligence in reviewing plans and costs for LCS.

The report, filed by the Government Accountability Office at the behest of House lawmakers, was also skeptical of the Navy’s plans for LCS maintenance, much of which is planned for contractors and sailors ashore — not the ships’ crews.

Overall, the Navy has not done many of the full analyses that would help its leaders and Congress, or it has only considered best-case scenarios in its plans and cost estimates, GAO found.

For example, investigators found the Navy didn’t have a lot of strong data to back its concept for the number of sailors that will compose LCS ship and mission-module crews:

“The current Navy plan for a 40-person core crew has not yet been validated by an analysis of the crew’s expected workload,” the report said.

The next Navy assessment of LCS workload won’t be finished until about 2014, when the littoral combat ship Freedom has come back from its first deployments, according to the GAO report.

It also found reason to doubt whether the Navy could execute its plans for the crewing of the shore support teams that will run the LCS class squadrons and maintain the ships and their equipment.

“Navy officials estimated that the number of people needed in a squadron organization to manage and support 12 to 15 LCSs might be about 170,” the report said. “The LCS squadrons are likely to be larger than squadrons for other surface ships since their responsibilities for the level of shore-based support required for the small core crew will be greater. However, Navy officials said that they will not know how large the LCS squadrons should be until they have experience with supporting deployed ships.”

GAO’s basic recommendation is that the Navy conduct the full range of inspections, assessments and analyses into its LCS concepts — including estimates from outside the Navy Department. The problem, according to the report, is that by the time the Navy concludes the current set of studies now underway, it already will have bought many of its planned ships.

In its official response to the study, the Defense Department concurred or partially concurred with all of GAO’s recommendations. But because the report was submitted to DoD before the Navy issued its Jan. 26 request for proposal for 10 fiscal 2010 littoral combat ships, DoD wrote it was “premature” to discuss some aspects of the Navy’s LCS plans.