The above fails to explain why other navies are able to build similar ships, far more heavily armed, with mission packages, for roughly half the cost of an LCS - but are still built to take a punch and keep fighting.

Whoever is responsible for the designs of these ships (or specifying the parameters under which they should be constructed) seemingly didn't bother to re-read any WW2 history where there was a lot of littoral fighting (what these battles lacked in size, they more than made up for in intensity).  And the reason the US won (most of them) is because we were building ships that could take a punch and keep fighting.

The current LCS designs have no way to protect themselves from a serious adversary at a distance - there is nary a box of harpoons to give a serious adversary any pause, and the Independence class (from what I've heard) doesn't even have the room to upgrade the gun from 57mm to something larger.

I also take note, that when the notion of the LCS was first surfaced, a number of other nations were very interested - yet all of them have since walked away.   That implies that the other navies of the world that were interested came to the same overall conclusion as the critics did, or the Pentagon's own director of weapons testing.  And last I heard - none of the LCS variants have been shock-tested, due to fears it would destroy the ship.

From what I've seen other navies offering for less money, the US would seemingly save a lot of money, and get to 300 ships, if they simply dropped this program and bought someone else's design.

The United States acquisition system needs to be extirpated and replaced with one similar to that used by the British.  They use a panel of experts (civilian and military) that perform threat analysis, and determine the force structure and weapons necessary to defeat those threats.  This removes a huge amount of redundancy, all but eliminates interoperability problems, and removes governmental meddling because all they do is appropriate the required budget.  The US currently gets little for its defense dollars, partially because our military leadership cannot seem to stay out of changing designs all the way through the construction phases - which also explains our project management and per-unit cost explosions.





 

  

The comment by PolicyWonk clearly points out weaknesses in the attributed statements of Robert Work. Between the lines of Mr. Works comments are some of the real issues of this ship class. When I see "reasonable performance requirements" I still focus on the 45 knot speed clearly bought at the price of armament and protection. Surely Mr Work knows this has been  and will be a bad trade off. When I see "a stable design and ruthless attention to change orders" listed as things not present in the project, I see a project out of control. Many of the other things Mr Work does and does not say are equally damning of the program. American naval architects are just as good or better than anyone else - see the Arleigh Burke class for high end performance at a high price. Mr Work knows the Navy needs low end performance at a low price but the performance requirements are all out of balance on this design.

I would have to agree.  The US DoD somehow seems not to look at foreign competitors' designs, which I know is untrue because a lot of guns and weapons systems in the U.S. Military are indeed foreign designs (HK MP5 and 416 guns, Bofors 40mm and 57mm, Delta Forces' Pandur APC, FN Herstal's M249 and M240, FMTV design, AT-4, Buffalo and RG-31 MRAPs, etc.).

But geez, when it's obvious that foreign nations have had good well-armed fast attack crafts, corvettes, and frigates for years, the US DoD and Intel Agencies should know this.  The US Army has been using foreign-designed EOD vehicles for many years now.  Even the SOCOM FAV competition could look overseas and see that Europe has many Special Forces FAVs and vehicles purposely-designed AND with ARMOR along with the same armament that the SOCOM contenders have (plus smoke grenade launchers which SOCOM entries do not have).

The US DoD is now running the risk of being underarmed and having inferior equipment compared to foreign counterparts.  A classic example is the German PZH2000 SPH which beats the pants off the M109A6 "Paladin."  US's "Crusader" was supposed to be the answer to match the PZH2000, but that got cancelled so the PZH2000 is still King of SPH.  The notion that the US DoD has the best equipment in the world money could buy just isn't true when specs and facts and research show that it does not.  The LCS is a classic example of this...it's not even a Guided Missile Frigate because the darn thing now has NO missiles (EFOG-M got cancelled).  It's just a fast underarmed gunboat with 57mm, 30mm, and 20mm guns (and maybe some pintle-mounts), which rumor has it cannot hit anything at speed.  For Drug Wars or Coast Guard, the LCS may work.  But for naval work, a gunboat sure cannot beat the range of an anti-ship missile.

You can compare the LCS to a 274 ton patrol boat (skjold class) and it comes up wanting.  The has the bigger 76mm gun that the navy now wants but the trimaran LCS can't support, it has a missile with a range of 185+km rather than 6km, and surface to air missiles.  It's faster than the ludicrous 50 knot 3,000 ton, half billion dollar LCS, it has a crew of 15, and it'll save billions in operating costs.  The navy does not need an obscenely large, fast, heavy, and costly floating helipad to screen our carrier groups from shore based threats.  If you want to go crazy and plus up a skjold type craft to handle a lamps 2/3 'copter, heck, even a hanger for one too if you want to go crazy it's not going to cost half a billion dollars.  And why does it need to go 50 knots?

As for the over priced, underarmed, junk pile called LCS, I've got two words: Visby Class.

Until the USN gets away from big-deck air and starts to work around concepts that (like the French 'Fast' class UAV) combine jet speed and ceiling with long loiter and VTOL recovery as _unmanned_ weight/cost savings; it will be impossible to generate a network centric (aka Cooperative Engagement Capability aka Theater Wide...) small forces that don't rely on the cost of the CVSF to justify their presence in any high threat warfighter environment.

Once you have your persistent, displaced, network ISR, you need to pair it with cheap fires and thus the USN need to look into cheap bus platforms which can combine various payload and seeker/submunition sections with fixed compression path turbine designs and variable (gel) propellant alternatives to master the 0-200km range point from a VLS that can flip between Land Attack and AShM capabilities without a visit to a naval yard to switch out the ordnance.

A second class of (more expensive) weapon that uses aeroballistics to take rounds to 1,200km at Mach 8-10 with scram systems like those of the X-51 and XTV-2 technology will then provide the majority of 'reactive' deep strike capability, rendering the big decks largely unnecessary.

THERE is where you save costs folks.

Finally, for local defense, you need to take the plunge on EML and directed energy technology (and pulsed power to feed same).

Anything which leaves the barrel at 10-15,000fps with shock hardened electronics for guidance is a better solution for mid zone AD and OTH, Anti-PCI, work than costly and shortranged (Griffin, SPIKE, Nemesis etc.) PGM alternatives while if a laser can destroy an inflight artillery or MRL round, it's time to admit it can also put paid to manned airpower, 'through the canopy', as well.

Doing so would ALSO save a ton of money we don't have to waste on a followon Gen-6 FAXX program.

Unfortunately, I look at this floating expression of modern cubist art and don't see the baselines for any of this.  Because Hollywood rather than Naval Engineers were the consultant source for the specification drivers and nobody bothered to ask what the future of the USN should be total-force structured around in 2100.

It's always the weapons systems that determine your platform volumetric as force construct and with the LCS, we are looking at distinctly boghammer beater class capabilities from the last millenium rather than something that can effect the 21st century inshore battle without having to go slugging it out in the shallows.  This is how you defeat the mine as much as ASBM threat, by never entering a target predictor zone which saves the enemy from sanitizing the cube of deep blue nothing that is the other 200,000 square miles around their coastline.

If you are stood off, you have to acknowledge that projecting power well inland for a Chinese threat which has 2,500nm of rear area industrials to hostage is just beyond the capabilities of manned naval airpower on a subsonic conditioned transit cruise of 12-15 hours (see OEF).

The entire fires concept and how much we influence from what position is as much dated as it is wrong.  The USN needs to look at controlling entire sea basins from minimum A2DA entry and basing points.