The Ship Model Forum

Littoral Disaster: Navy Wants To Retire 10 Littoral Combat Ships According To Report
The oldest Littoral Combat Ship on the chopping block is just seven years old.
BY JOSEPH TREVITHICK MARCH 17, 2022
THE WAR ZONE

The U.S. Navy will reportedly seek to decommission between eight and 10 Freedom class Littoral Combat Ships, or LCSs, as part of its budget proposal for the 2023 Fiscal Year. This would despite the oldest example still on active duty being only seven years old. Last year, the service admitted that it would take years to implement critical fixes to the propulsion systems on all of the Freedom class vessels it has acquired to date.

Politico first reported this news today, citing three individuals familiar with the plans. The outlet said that the Navy and the Department of Defense had declined to confirm or deny that the 2023 Fiscal Year budget request, a public version of which is expected to come out sometime this month or in April, would propose decommissioning these ships. The Freedom class is one of two distinct types of LCS, the other being the Independence class, that the Navy currently has in service.

(...SNIPPED)

Navy Risks Blowback in Bid to Scrap $5 Billion of Troubled Ships
Bloomberg
Total Views: 0
May 11, 2022

By Tony Capaccio (Bloomberg) –The US Navy wants to scrap nine of 16 Littoral Combat Ships built by Lockheed Martin Corp. well short of their projected service lives in order to save a projected $4.3 billion in upgrades and maintenance over coming years.

That decision may get a hard look at hearings by House and Senate panels on Wednesday and Thursday.

While the ships were built to spend 25 years at sea, many of those on the water are in the infancy of their naval careers. That includes the USS St. Louis, now in its third year of service life; the USS Billings and USS Indianapolis, in their fourth years; and the USS Sioux City and USS Wichita, in their fifth, according to a Navy information paper for Congress obtained by Bloomberg News.

The Navy spent $5 billion in taxpayer money getting the ships built and outfitted. But in justifying the early retirement, the service says eight of the Lockheed-built “Freedom-class” vessels were meant to carry anti-submarine warfare equipment developed by Raytheon Technologies Corp. that failed in development. Promises to give the ships capability for anti-submarine warfare were 12 years late when the plan was abandoned this year.

The vessels are also seen as less capable than the “Independence-class” vessels built by Lockheed shipbuilding rival Austal Ltd. That’s in part because they were hobbled by a latent propulsion system gear defect caused by a subcontractor that requires removal and replacement.

One of the ships being retired, the 12-year-old USS Fort Worth, is a test vessel that is considered no longer necessary.

What Navy leaders originally touted as a 55-vessel fleet of littoral ships costing $220 million apiece has dwindled to a currently planned 35 costing on average $478 million each. The proposed retirement would reduce the overall fleet of LCS — designed to operate in shallow coastal waters — to 26.
(...SNIPPED)