Navy Sticks With LCS Despite Propulsion Troubles; Lockheed Races To Make Fixes

[CORRECTED] WASHINGTON: Two of the Navy’s newest Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ships will sit in port for months while Lockheed Martin develops, tests and installs fixes to a major propulsion issue found on all 16 ships in the class. 

The Navy said last week it would not accept delivery of the next two ships on the multi-billion dollar program until the company made the fixes. The decision means the two ships, slated for spring delivery,  will fall months behind schedule, another black eye for a program that has yet to prove its utility, despite the delivery of around 20 ships across two classes over the past decade.

The Navy and Lockheed are also working on a plan to determine who pays the lion’s share of the repairs and when and where they’ll be made.

This latest problem for the troubled LCS program has been brewing for years, but came to a head in October when the USS Detroit suffered problems with its combining gear, which connects the diesel engines to gas turbines that produce additional power. One of the signature elements of the LCS program was the high speeds the ships could sustain, though it was never clear to what end they would use that speed. Other LCS ships had seen similar issues with the same equipment, leading the Navy to shut down deliveries this month. The combining gear system allows ships to reach speeds of over 40 knots.

Putting LCS deliveries on ice will keep two completed ships — the Minneapolis-Saint Paul (LCS 21) and Cooperstown (LCS 23) pierside at Lockheed’s partner, Fincantieri Marinette Wisconsin, through at least part of the summer. The remaining four ships are in various states of construction, requiring new plans for how and when to make the changes as they’re being built.

Lockheed Martin “will be responsible for the repairs,” a spokesperson for the Naval Sea Systems Command said in an email. While the total cost and timeline for making the fix to the ships has yet to be determined, “the cost will be shared between the Government and Lockheed Martin along the provisions of the contract,” the statement added.

The thinking, sources familiar with the matter said, is that the ships already in the fleet will continue operating as long as they don’t try to stretch above 34 knots. They’ll receive the needed upgrades when they arrive in port for their next scheduled maintenance availability.

The combining gear was designed by the German firm RENK AG with Lockheed, and the team says they’ve developed what they believe to be a fix. But that technology will have to be tested on a land-based system in Germany this spring before being placed aboard a ship. Then the Navy will conduct its own testing.

Sources close to the program say if everything goes as planned — including a new way to lift the combining gear in place instead of slicing through the side of the hull to make the fixes — the first two LCS should be ready some time this summer. The company believes it will “be able to rotate it in place, remove the shaft and then only have to remove small interferences that were in that area,” the source said, which would mean the ships won’t have to go into drydock to make the fixes.

“Now that the root cause of the defect has been determined, our priority is to build and test the fix as soon as possible and to get that fix installed on in-service ships with the least operational disruption possible to the Fleet, and to ensure new construction Freedom-variant hulls are corrected prior to delivery,” Rear Adm. Casey Moton, PEO for unmanned and small combatants, said in a statement. “The planned redesign of the defective bearings will be rigorously tested both on land at the manufacturing facility and at sea on a new construction ship before it is accepted and installed in-service.”

But those solutions are months away, and are contingent on everything going to plan, something the Navy has struggled mightily with over the past decade.

The delay likely won’t have much of an effect on the Navy’s operations, since the 20 Littoral Combat Ships currently in the fleet have only made a handful of deployments over the past decade, a far cry from earlier plans to have the ships on near constant deployments doing everything from minehunting to presence operations, lightening the load of the destroyer fleet.

“In practical terms, [the delay] has almost zero impact because the LCS has, for the most part, not been deployed,” said Bryan Clark, an analyst at the Hudson Institute. “You’ve got 20-odd ships under commission or in commission. And you’ve done maybe a dozen deployments overseas in the last 15 years. So there’s just not a very good track record. In the end, it’s particularly ironic because the ship was intended to be the cheap ship that goes out and does a lot: it was going to be deployed using rotational crews and kept out on deployment for 16 months, you know, but that whole model has fallen apart because of the lack of endurance and the lack of reliability of the platform.”

Navy CNO Adm. Mike Gilday said earlier this month at a conference that he’s committed to LCS, and “in this decade we need to get those ships out there in numbers deployed.” 

He indicated that he had met with the team working on the combining gear fixes, and “we are going to fix those problems. LCS is our ship. We are going to get the most that we can get out of that ship and we’re putting lethality back into it so we can get the most we can get out of the ships going into the 2030s. I am not wringing my hands over LCS.”

Neither Gilday or Acting Navy Secretary Tom Harker would add to Gilday’s comments.

 

The story’s headline originally referenced “Engine Troubles,” but the problem with the ships is in the combining gear that links to ship’s different engines, and not in the engines themselves.