What Went Wrong With LCS? US Frigate Production (1969-2019)

Oliver Hazard Perry (FFG-7) under construction at Bath Iron Works in 1976

The United States Navy's Littoral Combat Ship program has come under extreme criticism from every side. Personally, I find much of the vitriol to be incredibly shallow and misinformed and believe that the program is actually a worthy endeavor. However, there is one clear failing of the program that I have seen virtually no comment on - it's glacial build rate.

I have touched on the topic of the slow procurement of modern systems before, in my post comparing the production of the F-35 Lighting and the F/A-18 Super Hornet, and I believe it is important to come back to it in regards to the LCS program. It is well known be anyone with even a passing familiarity with shipbuilding that protracted construction of limited quantities inevitably drives up costs. However, in all the discussion of the possible reasons behind the price tag of LCS (which I personally believe is far from being as outrageous as many claim), I have yet to see anyone lay blame on its minuscule procurement quantities and ridiculously long construction times.

For the article I will compare LCS to the USN's two previous small surface combatant classes - the Oliver Hazard Perry (FFG-7) and the Knox (DE-1052). While the two LCS variants measure 118m and 127m and displace 3400 and 3200 long tons respectively, the older ships measured 133m and 136m while displacing 4200 and 4100 long tons. But despite the LCS classes being noticeably smaller than the older ships, construction times have been far longer.

(Build times were measured from keel laying to commissioning)

As an aside, it should be noted that the average build times varied considerably depending on the yard the ship was being constructed in. For LCS, Austal averaged 41 months, while Marinette Marine averaged 48 months. With the Perry-class, Bath Iron Works was commonly building ships in less than 20 months while Todd San Pedro was closer to 30 months and Todd Seattle was often over 35 months. For the Knox-class there was a smaller spread, but the two Todd yards were generally taking several months longer per hull than Avondale and Lockheed.

While having an average construction time some 60% longer than previous classes should have already raised questions about whether the delays and cost increases with LCS were being caused more by programmatic than technical reasons, the rate at which hulls were being procured was even more alarming.

This figure shows the number of ships commissioned for each year of the program, beginning with the year the first ship commissioned (a final Perry, not shown, was also commissioned in year 13 of that program)

Over the 12 years since the commissioning of the first LCS, only five years have seen both shipyards produce a ship and three years actually saw no ships being commissioned at all. Indeed, in the time it took the LCS program to finally reach two ships per year, the Perry-class program had already begun to wind down and Knox-class construction had already been concluded for a full year.

The consequences of this slow production rate can perhaps be better seen in the following figure showing cumulative production over the course of the three programs. Although the Perry-class got off to a slower start than the Knox-class, it soon attained a very similar production curve. LCS in contrast has not, and continues to trudge along at a rate that most closely resembles the first few slow years of the Perry-class program. At this rate it would take over a decade to reach the production numbers of the earlier ships.


Now some of the delays of LCS were likely unavoidable given the much stronger Cold War industrial base, which meant that the Knox-class and Perry-class could take advantage of 3-4 established shipyards with long traditions of building warships, while LCS was the product of two relative new shipyards that had previously only worked on civilian craft and auxiliaries.

However, those differences can only go so far and most certainly cannot excuse programmatic failures such as the bungling of the transition from prototypes to serial production that resulted in hulls being canceled and reordered years later, or the apparent disinterest in ramping up production to useful quantities.

While many hasten to put the blame for the high cost and delayed introduction into service of LCS on the design itself, I believe that the above historical context reveals that there are much deeper issues at play than the ships being flawed. Worse, these problems are far from unique to the LCS program - they are simply easiest to see there because other recent USN shipbuilding programs have been severely truncated (Zumwalt-class) or are spread across such a large timespan as to be difficult to analyze (Ford-class). And they are not confined to shipbuilding either, as shown by my previous analysis of the F-35 program's nearly identical difficulties.

If future shipbuilding efforts such as the much hyped FFG(X) are to be successes, they must not repeat the programmatic failures of LCS and should instead follow the lead of earlier classes and commit to large scale full rate production as soon as practical. Unfortunately, this lesson appears to have been ignored in favor of taking the easy route and blaming the problems with LCS on it being a radical design. Thus, FFG(X) is emphasizing a conservative design, but its planned production rate follows the same trajectory as that of LCS. In fact, it is actually somewhat worse as it ramps up to a grand total of just 2 ships per year for the foreseeable future.

Popular posts from this blog

Missile Loadouts: Arleigh Burke (1991-2018)

Missile Loadouts: Ticonderoga-class (1983-2018)

Missile Loadouts: Constellation (FFG-62) (2026?)