USS Freedom, the first of the Navy's littoral combat ships, heads to the mothball fleet
Milwaukee — USS Freedom, a $537 million warship commissioned in Milwaukee less than 13 years ago, is headed into the mothball fleet as the U.S. Navy faces budgetary constraints and changing global threats.
The ship’s decommissioning ceremony is scheduled for Thursday in San Diego. Some of the crew members and Navy dignitaries are expected to attend, but the ceremony won’t be open to the public, the Navy says, citing COVID-19 concerns.
Freedom, commissioned in Milwaukee on Nov. 8, 2008, may soon be joined by three even newer sister ships — USS Fort Worth, Detroit and Little Rock — in “Out of Commission, In Reserve,” status that removes them from service even for training purposes.
The littoral combat ships were built at the Fincantieri shipyard in Marinette, Wisconsin, under a program that created thousands of jobs in Wisconsin and at least 30 other states.
Fort Worth, Detroit and Little Rock are scheduled for decommissioning next spring, according to a Chief of Naval Operations document, although Congress has the final say on whether that happens.
The newest of the trio, Little Rock, will have been in service less than five years when it’s sent to the mothball fleet. USS Coronado, a ship from the same program but of a different design and built in Alabama, would join its sister ship, USS Independence, in being decommissioned as well.
The average cost of a littoral combat ship is around $500 million including design work, construction and government-furnished equipment, according to the Navy.
Withdrawing warships well ahead of their expected 25-year lifespan is an embarrassment, said retired Capt. James F. Kelly Jr., who commanded three Navy ships in his career and more recently has been an instructor at Naval Base San Diego.
“Congress, as you might expect, is not pleased with these events. We are supposed to be building toward a 355-ship Navy, but we seem to be going backward,” Kelly said.
The Navy says the first four littoral combat ships were test platforms, and despite their initial cost, would require roughly $2.5 billion in upgrades for combat readiness.
“That was a tough decision to make, on whether to put that money towards those existing LCSs or retire them,” Adm. Michael Gilday, Chief of Naval Operations, testified at a hearing in San Diego.
The Navy eventually decided the money would be better spent on modernizing other ships, and it's winding down the LCS program at a total of around 31 vessels including 21 that will be in service after USS Freedom is decommissioned.
Challenges from China trigger changes
The plan to mothball up to six littoral combat ships also comes as the United States faces increased risks of open-ocean warfare with China.
That’s not a fight the LCS was designed for, according to defense industry experts.
"At the beginning of the last decade, when littoral combat ships were conceived, the U.S. was focused on low-end threats such as terrorists and Somali pirates," said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a policy research group in Arlington, Virginia, that studies military matters.
“But the threat changed, and all of a sudden it looked like LCS wasn't up to the challenge,” Thompson said.
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Originally, the ships were meant to have interchangeable mission modules that would allow them to fulfill various roles such as anti-submarine warfare, battling other ships and searching for underwater mines.
The Navy’s goal was to be able to swap out the modules in 72 hours so the ships could quickly respond to changing threats in a combat environment. But after years of delays and problems in the design and implementation, the concept didn't pan out.
“The United States has more capable multimission warships than LCS,” Thompson said.
A troubled program
Critics said the first vessels, especially, were lacking in firepower and armor, making them vulnerable should they come up against larger enemy warships from China or Russia.
They were also dogged with mechanical problems and breakdowns at sea.
Littoral combat ship USS Milwaukee experienced a major breakdown on its maiden voyage to Florida and had to be towed more than 40 miles to a Navy base near Norfolk, Virginia, for repairs. As the fifth ship in the series, it is scheduled to remain in the fleet and is currently on training assignments.
Freedom encountered problems with its jet propulsion system, a 6-inch crack in the hull, and a leak in the port-shaft seal that caused flooding. Fort Worth had a major mechanical failure brought on by the crew running the gear system without enough lubrication oil. The breakdown, in 2016, left the ship stranded in Singapore for months
That same year, Coronado ran into problems with its propulsion system during its maiden voyage to the western Pacific. By then, after multiple breakdowns, system failures, cost overruns and unmet goals, littoral combat ships had gained a bad rap for being unreliable and of poor design.
It's been a troubled program, said Shelby Oakley, who oversees the Government Accountability Office’s research on Navy shipbuilding.
"From the beginning, LCS proposed a lot of new concepts that were unproven and led to many different challenges,” Oakley said. Moreover, the Navy placed orders for 20 ships before even knowing whether they would be up to the task they were designed for.
The business case for LCS "quickly eroded," Oakley said, and the Navy was stuck with limited-capability ships that lacked a purpose and were difficult to maintain.
Navy ships often cost much more than expected and fall short of quality and performance standards, according to a GAO report from 2018.
“We have found that the Navy routinely accepts delivery of ships with large numbers of uncorrected deficiencies,” the report said, including serious problems to operations and safety.
The Navy accepted delivery of USS Freedom in "incomplete, deficient condition," according to the GAO, and subsequent corrections "were allowed to lag."
One deficiency on an LCS, the report noted, "concerned a radar system that did not work properly, which could have resulted in unintended countermeasure launches. This deficiency was not corrected until nearly four months after the ship was provided to the fleet."
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Navy defends the LCS program
The Navy dismissed some of the problems with the first littoral combat ships as ordinary for any new type of vessel and has continued to defend the need for small, speedy warships capable of reaching places that bigger ships could not go.
But at one point the Navy stopped taking delivery of Marinette-built LCSs because of a serious issue with a German-manufactured gear that connects the ship's diesel engines with its gas turbine engines to achieve maximum speed.
The Pentagon identified the drivetrain issue as a reason to decommission USS Little Rock and Detroit. It could take years for the necessary repairs to be implemented across the remaining LCS fleet, according to Naval experts.
The issue, which has been blamed for breakdowns at sea, is being resolved, said Capt. Brandon Burkett with the Navy's LCS Task Force in San Diego.
Freedom fought drug trafficking
Moreover, the Navy says USS Freedom was highly successful in missions where it partnered with the U.S. Coast Guard to fight drug trafficking off the coasts of South America and Mexico.
In April, a Coast Guard-Navy team aboard Freedom conducted a seizure of more than 1,500 kilograms of cocaine. Also, Freedom sailed with naval ships from El Salvador and Guatemala, strengthening military ties with those countries.
The fast, nimble ships with a small crew can augment a larger naval presence and extend the United States military's reach around the world.
"The Navy is committed to LCS," Burkett said, and is equipping the ships with a new Naval Air Strike Missile that has a range of more than 100 miles. It's also outfitting some of the vessels with an anti-submarine module and others with anti-mine capabilities.
"These ships can provide a challenge for our adversaries," Burkett said.
Pulling the early-production LCSs out of service wasn't unexpected, according to the Navy, because they were test vessels with a design that's since seen major improvements on the ships that followed.
"The reality is we have a limited amount of money for upgrades," Burkett said.
Marinette shipyard pushes ahead
In April 2020, the Fincantieri shipyard in Marinette won a Navy contract valued at nearly $800 million to build a guided-missile frigate that's a bigger, and arguably more capable, warship than the LCS.
The contract called for one frigate with options for nine more. In total, the deal could be worth up to $5.5 billion, according to Fincantieri. Construction of the first vessel is scheduled to begin next year with delivery in 2026.
Orders for frigates could result in decades worth of work at the shipyard that currently employs more than 1,300 people and will hire hundreds more to keep pace with Navy shipbuilding.
"We are in this for the long haul," said Fincantieri spokesman Eric Dent.
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One positive lesson from the littoral combat ship program was that it proved the Marinette shipyard was capable of building warships at a reasonable cost, and with the frigate, it has that ship, said Thompson, with the Lexington Institute.
"At least there's that silver lining to the LCS fiasco," Thompson said.
The Navy should focus on proven warships such as frigates and destroyers, according to Kelly from San Diego. "Stop trying to stick every bit of technology you can dream of and imagine into a ship and then just hope it works," he said.
The crews of USS Freedom and other decommissioned littoral combat ships will be reassigned to other vessels or shore duty. It's unknown where Freedom and the other decommissioned LCSs will be docked, but Kelly said the ships won't be missed.
"They may well be remembered as the Edsel of warships," he said. "But at least the Ford Motor Company's famous lemon had some appeal as a collectible."
Follow Rick Barrett on Twitter: @rbarrettJS.