Analyst Says Pentagon ‘Walked Away From the 500-ship Navy’

By: John Grady

June 1, 2021 8:14 PM

USNI.org

Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Sterett (DDG-104) transits alongside the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN-68) on Jan. 19, 2021. US Navy Photo

The Navy’s modest shipbuilding request as part of the Fiscal Year 2022 budget shows the Pentagon has “walked away from the 500-ship Navy,” a senior defense analyst said Tuesday.

The Fiscal Year 2022 shipbuilding request is seeking $22.6 billion, a 3 percent drop from Fiscal Year’s 2021 shipbuilding total. The move from the Pentagon shows the department has walked away from the Trump administration’s plan for an expanded Navy, retired Army Maj. Gen. John Ferrari, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said on Tuesday.

Ferrari was referring to the Battle Force 2045 plan that proposed to expand the fleet beyond the Navy’s 355-ship goal set in 2016. The plan envisioned an aggressive shipbuilding program and added a range of unmanned vessels to the fleet’s size.

Todd Harrison, a budget specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said “Battle Force 2045 was not fundable” because it never took into consideration the budget impact on the other services.

The Biden administration’s request for the Navy is trading capacity for capability, Elaine McCusker, now at AEI and a former senior Pentagon budget official, said. “We need both,” she said.

She expected Congress to restore funding for a second Arleigh Burke-class DDG-51 destroyer and a Capitol Hill battle over divesting “legacy systems.”

She added the request also sends a mixed signal to the industrial base. “Are you going to be buying ships, what kind?” she said.

The FY 2022 request seeks money for two SSN-774 Block V Virginia-class fast attack submarines; one DDG-51 Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyer; one-FFG 62 Constellation-class frigate; one T-AO-205 John Lewis-class fleet oiler; two T-ATS 6 Navajo-class towing, salvage and rescue ships; and one new-design T-AGOS(X) ocean surveillance ship.

Without a five-year projected spending plan accompanying the request, exact spending priorities for the new administration are difficult to gauge. “Where is it leading?” Harrison asked rhetorically about the request.

He said some indication of how much money the Pentagon can expect in the future may be gleaned from the Office of Management and Budget’s projections. OMB shows 2.2 percent growth in nominal terms in coming years. “But nothing is set in stone,” Harrison said. The projections do not indicate whether the money in the future will be spent on payloads, sensors, or platforms, or put toward personnel costs.

Ferrari said the new budget did provide Congress with “a roadmap to add $20 billion.” The “roadmap” starts with blocking divestments of legacy platforms, like four Littoral Combat Ships; plussing up some services’ research, development, testing and evaluation accounts; and adding money to operations and maintenance accounts caused “by higher than expected rate of inflation.”

The panelists agreed it is going to take “heavy lifting” on the part of the secretary of defense to retire Navy ships and Air Force aircraft. Harrison said, “it’s just not clear the secretary of defense is going to do that.” In a way, putting the retirements of ships and aircraft in the request “could just be a punt” rather than actually forcing hard decisions. The Air Force is cutting 201 aircraft, including 42 A-10 Thunderbolt II attack aircraft, 48 F-15C/D Eagle strike fighters and 47 F-16 Falcons for $1.37 billion, USNI News reported on Friday.

The “unfunded requirements lists” the services and combatant commanders will send to Congress this spring and summer will have an impact on what systems are actually divested, according to the panel.

Harrison said the department and the services are “not divesting people.” There are modest service end-strength cuts, but a number of those are being transferred to the Space Force. In fact, the budget is asking to grow the Pentagon civilian workforce by 1.7 percent and award equal 2.7 percent pay raises to service members and civilian employees.

The Navy faces a different personnel challenge.

Aviation Ordnanceman 1st Class Sarah Minnick, a recruit division commander, marches alongside her recruit division at Recruit Training Command. More than 40,000 recruits train annually at the Navy’s only boot camp on March 9, 2021. US Navy Photo

In the Navy’s case, Ferrari warned it “has had challenges manning its ships” now with its “base of competent sailors.” The situation would be aggravated by increasing the size of the fleet without adding sailors.

“Really we need to be building end-strength” in the Navy, he added.

“Reforms really need to get at the administrative costs,” like the $54 billion ask for health care for service members, their families and retirees, Ferrari said. It could be “treated as a separate fund.

He also mentioned “offloading” part of the Defense Logistics Agency to the private sector to handle warehousing and distribution. These administrative/business side costs “are like a giant anaconda squeezing” the department’s budget.

In her opening remarks, McCusker said the $715 billion request shows “defense is not a Biden administration priority” when it includes a new emphasis on global health, climate and COVID-19 recovery in the budget sent to Congress.

While the increase in RDT&E spending was generally welcomed, the problem of moving these investments into programs remains problematic. Spending more money in this area is not necessarily the only answer to advancing warfighting capability.

Ferrari suggested inviting “the best of commercial enterprise” to put advances in artificial intelligence and other technologies onto current platforms and go from there in seeing what works best. By doing this, the department also would be training the work force in uniform and paving the way for future technological advances.

He added, “current readiness and modernization are inextricably aligned.”

Navy Tries to Cut Four Littoral Combat Ships to Save $186M in FY 22 Budget

By: Mallory Shelbourne

May 28, 2021 2:03 PM • Updated: May 28, 2021 6:03 PM

USNI.org

The crew of USS Little Rock (LCS-9) man the rails during the ship’s commissioning ceremony Dec. 16, 2017 in Buffalo, N.Y. US Navy Photo

This story has been updated to include comments from the Navy’s budget briefing.

The Navy wants to cut four Littoral Combat Ships from the fleet as part of a cost-saving measure that will net the service $186 million, according to the service’s latest budget request.

The request to cull the ships from the battle force inventory comes despite criticism from Congress over last year’s proposal to retire the first four Littoral Combat Ships early.

Budget documents call for cutting the second Independence-class aluminum trimaran USS Coronado (LCS-4) and three Freedom-class variants – USS Fort Worth (LCS-3), USS Detroit (LCS-7) and USS Little Rock (LCS-9) – that have struggled with problems with their propulsion systems.

The Navy commissioned Forth Worth in 2012 and Coronado in 2014. Detroit commissioned in 2016 and Little Rock in 2017.

The Pentagon and the Navy gave two separate rationales for cutting the ships.

Cutting the pair, “avoids the cost to upgrade these ships to the common configuration and capability with the rest of the fleet and allows for investments in higher priority capability and capacity,” according to a Navy document outlining the service’s FY 2022 request. “Also, LCSs 3 and 4 do not have mission packages (MP) assigned and the current MP procurement does not account for MP procurement for these two ships. Continued fleet operations would require purchasing an MP for each ship. The replacement capability is the FFG 62 Constellation class of ships.”

The first Constellation-class frigate is not expected to enter the fleet until the late 2020s.

The Pentagon said a Freedom-class wide issue with the combining gear that marries the ship’s gas turbines to the diesel engines on Detroit and Little Rock weren’t worth the effort to repair.

“LCSs 7 and 9 have experienced major propulsion train casualties (known combing gear issues) and will incur significant associated repair costs. Decommissioning these two ships includes a cost avoidance strategy, so that scarce maintenance funding can be allocated to the highest priority ships. The replacement capability is the FFG-62 Constellation class of ships,” reads the FY 2022 Pentagon budget highlights book.

Explaining the reasons for decommissioning Detroit and Little Rock, Rear Adm. John Gumbleton, the Navy’s deputy assistant secretary for budget, during a Friday briefing noted that USS Milwaukee (LCS-5) is gearing up for a deployment.

“So as they looked at LCS – LCS-5 happened to just have a maintenance availability. We’re putting a Naval Strike Missile on it and it’s getting ready for deployment,” Gumbleton said. “And so we looked at, for the total of four to reinvest those funds across the [Future Years Defense Program] and [LCS-]7 and [LCS-]9 were the most suitable ships for that reason.”

While the Navy has sought to justify its plans to decommission the first four LCSs early by arguing they are test platforms, the Navy bought the ships under the notion they would be part of the fleet, several sources familiar with the development of LCS have told USNI News since last year’s proposed cuts.

In the FY 2021 budget proposal, the Navy disclosed its intention to mothball the first four LCSs – USS Freedom(LCS-1), USS Independence (LCS-2), Fort Worth and Coronado – arguing it would save the service money it could then invest in new capabilities.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday has argued that because the first four hulls are not in the same configuration as the rest of the ships in the class, the Navy would need to invest a significant amount of dollars to update them.

Three littoral combat ships in various stages of construction at Marinette, Wisconsin during July 2015. The Navy is seeking to decommission USS Detroit (LCS-7), at right, and USS Little Rock (LCS-9), in the background. The ships were commissioned only in 2016 and 2017, respectively. USS Milwaukee (LCS-5), commissioned in 2015, is to remain in service. Christopher P. Cavas Photo used with permission

“We used those first hulls to test and we put no money into upgrading them like the rest of the fleet. So in order to put them on the same par as the rest of the LCS class, it would cost about another $2 billion over the FYDP,” Gilday said in March 2020 of the proposal to decommission the first four LCSs.

“So that was a tough decision to make on whether we wanted to put that money towards those existing LCSs or retire them, move on with the rest of the class, and then take that $2 billion and put it in the [shipbuilding] account for different capability.”

Earlier this month, Gilday said it would cost approximately $2.5 billion to upgrade the first four hulls to prepare them for combat.

The service has already set decommission dates for the first two hulls – Freedom and Independence. Independence will decommission on July 31, while Freedom will decommission on Sept. 30, USNI News previously reported. The Navy commissioned Freedom in 2008, meaning it will have served 13 years when it leaves the fleet. Independence commissioned in 2010 and will have served 11 years when it’s decommissioned. The LCS hulls were expected to each have a 25-year service life.

While Independence has never deployed and served as a test platform, Freedom recently deployed to U.S. Southern Command. Fort Worth and Coronado have each deployed once, but both experienced technical issues that forced repairs during their deployments.

Fort Worth and Coronado were part of the original quartet of LCS the Navy acquired ahead of the competition for the final designs. While Coronado is an Independence-class LCS, the remaining ships on the Navy’s decommission list for FY 2022 are Freedom-class hulls built by Lockheed Martin.

The latest proposal will likely meet opposition in Congress, which last year stopped the Navy from decommissioning Fort Worth and Coronado.

Lawmakers last year criticized the original proposal to mothball the first four LCSs. Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), a former nuclear-qualified surface warfare officer who became the vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year, balked at the proposal to decommission the early ships and the service’s struggle to understand how it would use the LCS platform.

During a heated exchange last year with former acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly, Luria questioned the Navy’s acquisition approach to the LCS.

The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) training ships JS Kashima (TV 3508), left, and JS Shimayuki (TV 3513), right, sail alongside the Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS-10) during an exercise, June 23, 2020. US Navy Photo

“I just wanted to point out the fact that, you know, we’ve had class after class after class of ship procurement and construction that has essentially failed. And it’s failed us in providing national defense, presence, deterrence overseas,” Luria said during a Congressional hearing in February 2020. “And it’s failed the sailors who are working on those ships. They’re the ones who are doing the right thing, but we’re giving them platforms that can’t do the job, that are not fully developed, that are not mature in design before we start building them.”

“We’re going to go through and we’re going to start decommissioning them when the oldest one is 12 years old,” she added of the LCS. “And I’ll quote Adm. Gilday, gave I think a good assessment of what they turned out to be . . . that they were just prototypes because we built them and then we figured out that they didn’t work. So, is this like a ‘we’ll build it and then they’ll come’ mentality that the Navy has?”

Modly at the time described the first two hulls – which were purchased using research and development funds – as ships that were never meant to be operational.

“Is that what was testified to Congress?” Luria asked Modly during the hearing. “When you came and ask us to pay a bill and the American taxpayer to pay for ships, you’ve told us you wanted to build two ships that weren’t going to be operational, that were never going to deploy and then you send sailors there and expect them to operate these and put all of their blood, sweat and tears into operating these ships that are never going to deploy?”

Modly at the time argued that they were research and development vessels due to how they were funded, but confirmed to Luria that the first two hulls are included in the Navy’s current inventory of battle force ships and were operational ships in the fleet.

“The LCS – the first two LCS ships were not designed to be operational ships. They were test ships,” Modly said at the time.

While the LCS has struggled to find its stride amidst a series of technological issues with the Freedom-class and delays to the Mission Package, the desire to mothball the early hulls comes as combatant commanders have recently turned to the ships to perform region-specific missions.

U.S. Southern Command has used the ships to conduct anti-drug operations in its area of responsibility. Freedom and Detroit have both performed counter-drug missions in SOUTHCOM within the last year and Little Rock’s first deployment in 2020 was to SOUTHCOM.

Meanwhile, commander of Naval Surface Forces Vice Adm. Roy Kitchener earlier this year said the Navy was evaluating the potential to use LCS for naval forces’ Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) – a concept that could be employed in any region, but that the services are currently experimenting with in the Indo-Pacific region – and Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment (LOCE).

Littoral combat ship USS Freedom (LCS 1) returns to Naval Base San Diego from her final deployment, April 12. Freedom returned after supporting Joint Interagency Task Force South’s counter illicit drug trafficking mission in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. US Navy Photo

“I talk a lot with [U.S. 7th Fleet Commander Vice Adm. Bill Merz] out here, a big fan of LCS. If you look at the things we want to do in the 7th Fleet warfight, and you look at LOCE (Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment) and EABO and things like that, that’s what he wants to use them for,” Kitchener said at a January conference. “And there’s a lot of capability there. Every LCS now is getting NSM, the (naval) strike missile, so that’s a capability that we’re really excited about. … In the fight out here, that’s exactly what we’re looking at, is integrating there in the littoral, bringing that strike capability.”

Speaking at a conference this week, Merz made a case for using the LCS in the Indo-Pacific region. He pointed to USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS-10), which was deployed in the Pacific last year and has test fired a Naval Strike Missile, and said the Navy is committed to outfitting every LCS in the region with that weapon.

“Gabby pretty much owned the southern South China Sea when I had [USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71)] down… with COVID,” Merz said, referring to the COVID-19 outbreak aboard the carrier in the early days of the pandemic. “She just kept out there pounding away, blowing up every Chinese operation. It was pretty impressive work.”

While the latest budget proposal shows the Navy for the second year in a row attempting to retire LCSs, Congress will ultimately have the final say.

The final FY 2021 appropriations bill prevented the Navy from decommissioning Fort Worth and Coronado, but did not include a stipulation for Freedom and Independence, paving the way for the service to decommission the first two hulls.

Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), who is the vice ranking member of the House Armed Services committees and the ranking member of the seapower and projection forces subcommittee, and Luria have both recently said they don’t support the Navy’s divest-to-reinvest approach for ships.

“I just feel like this divesting is divesting of capability, leaving gaps where combatant commanders have needs, and we just need to use what we have where we can use it,” Luria told USNI News in a recent interview.

7th Fleet CO: Deployed LCS USS Gabrielle Giffords ‘Pretty Much Owned’ South China Sea

By: Sam LaGrone

May 27, 2021 8:56 PM • Updated: May 28, 2021 6:07 AM

USNI.org

The Independence-variant littoral combat ships USS Montgomery (LCS 8) and USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS 10) operate in the South China Sea, accompanied by an MH-60S Sea Hawk assigned to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 23, Jan. 28, 2020. US Navy photo

The Navy is now pushing the Littoral Combat Ships out into the Pacific in force after more than a decade of stops and starts and studies.

Today, there are two LCS deployed to the western Pacific – USS Tulsa (LCS-16) and USS Charleston (LCS-18) . By the end of the year there’ll be four and the end of 2022 there could be eight, the commander of U.S. Japan-based 7th Fleet said on Thursday.

“Before you start throwing darts, I’m a big fan of the platform,” Vice Adm. Bill Merz said on Thursday, speaking at the Mine Warfare Association International Mine Technology Symposium.

“Once you put it in its own environment, it does extremely well. It does better than a [destroyer] in that environment. And it, has the added benefit of freeing up the DDG to do DDG stuff.”

A decade ago, the Independence and Freedom LCS variants were designed to be low-draft, high-speed ships that would swap out a series of mission packages aligned to mine countermeasures, surface warfare or anti-submarine warfare missions.

However, delays in developing and fielding the mission packages on both classes have forced the Navy to rethink how it operates the LCS forward. For starters, Merz is pushing the Singapore-based platforms to do more with the Marines and their emerging Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations concept.

“That is [LCS] upfront combat mission, as a naval [surface warfare] platform largely in support of the Marines in the [Expeditionary Advanced Base] world,” Merz said.
“It’s a great high-speed connector. It’s got a big flight deck, big mission bay.”

Vice Adm. Bill Merz addresses Carrier Strike Group 9 warfare commanders on the pier in Naval Base Guam on April 5, 2020. US Navy Photo

To that end, USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS-10) left San Diego in 2019 for 7th Fleet with a variant of the surface warfare (SUW) package that marries up twin 30mm cannons and a 57mm main deck gun with eight anti-ship Naval Strike Missiles.

The Navy pushed to add the over-the-horizon anti-ship missile to make the Independence-class hulls headed to the Pacific more relevant against a peer threat.

“I’ve gotten great support from [U.S. Pacific Fleet] on making sure every LCS comes out here with the Naval Strike Missile,” Merz said.

With Giffords’ deployment with the Naval Strike Missile, LCS may have finally found its groove in the western Pacific, Merz said.

“We’ll always be operating in and around the archipelagos, probably Ryukyus, the Philippines and areas into the Philippine Sea behind it. It turns out it is highly survivable and highly effective when operating in the environment it was built for,” Merz said.
“It is not blue water ship by any means but when you put it in the archipelago and you combine low signature and high-speed, it turns out it’s very hard to target, very hard to kill and it’s very effective with a thousand places to get gas.”

Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS-10) launches a Naval Strike Missile (NSM) during Exercise Pacific Griffin on Oct. 1, 2019. US Navy Photo

While the Navy was struggling with a COVID-19 outbreak that sidelined carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) for three months last spring, USS Montgomery (LCS-8) and Giffords were put to work, Merz said.

“Gabby pretty much owned the southern South China Sea when I had TR down… with COVID,” Merz said. “She just kept out there pounding away, blowing up every Chinese operation. It was pretty impressive work.”

Defense officials familiar with the deployment told USNI News the People’s Liberation Army Navy paid particular attention to the Independence-class ships when they operated in the South China Sea.

While a U.S. destroyer operating in the region typically draws a PLAN warship as a tail, Montgomery and Giffords drew three Chinese warships to observe operations. In the last several years the Chinese have announced the development of their own trimaran with similar characteristics.

While Merz is a self-avowed LCS fan, there are problems.

“The mission package we’re most concerned with the LCS is the mine warfare package,” Merz said.

The U.S. MCM assets in the western Pacific are nearing the end of their lives and the mission package that was envisioned to replace the 1980s era Avenger-class wooden MCM ships and the MH-53E Sea Dragon MCM helicopter has suffered embarrassing delays.

In 2016, the Navy was forced to retool the MCM package after canceling the unreliable semi-submersible program that was supposed to tow the AQS-20A mine detecting sonar.

The Navy is now in the process of certifying individual pieces of the MCM package for an initial operational capability and mixing and matching MCM capabilities inside the fleet.

Upcoming MCM package components. Navy Image

“We still have a series of tests to come on the mission package but what gets often lost in the conversation is that each of the systems is being tested by itself and then being tested with LCS,” Rear Adm. Casey Moton, the program executive officer for unmanned and small combatants, said earlier this week at the same conference.

“This end all be all test for the mission package – it’s certainly important – but the capability is actually tested and fielded long before we get to that spot.”

The end-to-end test of the first increment of MCM capabilities bound for LCS is tentatively scheduled for fiscal year 2023 or 2024, USNI News understands.
Merz expressed concerns over the current contractor-based model of maintenance and sustainment for LCS.

“I’m [not] okay or happy with the sustainability of LCS. That has to be fixed,” he said.

The Navy is pulling away from the original concept of fly-in contractor maintenance for the ships in forward-deployed bases like Singapore and shifting toward more sailor-led repairs.

The crew of Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS 10) and embarked U.S. Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment (LEDET) transfer suspected contraband while conducting enhanced counter-narcotics operations, Dec. 5, 2020. US Navy photo.

Merz went on to say that while the maintenance portion needs work, the hulls were more rugged than advertised.

“What you don’t hear about LCS is the ship is built with a tremendous amount of redundancy,” he said.
“When I cross red lines with water jets and diesel engines and turbine generators that I don’t think in any cases ever resulted in an inoperable ship. They maybe can’t go 50 knots, and now I’m down to 25 knots, but in the environment I use it they typically just stay on the field and fight through it like everybody else.”

In the long term, Merz wants more of the ships in the western Pacific to expand what LCS can do.

“We’re very much looking forward to the critical mass of LCS, and we’re very much looking forward to that critical mass carrying the mine warfare package. So we can start moving around and seeing what it can do,” Merz said.

Navy Issues $554M Contract Modification for Second Navy Frigate

By: Mallory Shelbourne

May 20, 2021 6:51 PM

• USNI.org

  Rendering of USS Constellation (FFG-62). Fincantieri Image

  The Navy on Thursday issued Fincantieri Marinette Marine a $554 million contract to start building the next frigate in the Constellation class, the service announced.

  The award is for the future USS Congress (FFG-63), which is the second hull in the Constellation class.

  “The Navy Program Office is pleased to award the option for the USS Congress (FFG 63) to our industry partner Fincantieri Marinette Marine,” Capt. Kevin Smith, the program manager for the Constellation class, said in a news release. “As the second ship of the Constellation Class Frigate Program, the USS Congress will provide a highly capable, next-generation surface combatant that our Navy and Nation needs.”

  The design for the Constellation-class ships is based on the Italian and French navies’ FREMM multi-mission frigate.

  The frigates will be equipped with systems including the Aegis Baseline 10 combat system, the Mk 41 Vertical Launch System (VLS), and Raytheon’s Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar (EASR), which is a variant of its SPY-6 radar, the Navy has said.

  “The Constellation Class Frigate will be an important part of the Navy’s future Fleet. It represents the evolution of the Navy’s small surface combatant force with increased lethality, survivability, and improved capability to support the National Defense Strategy across the full range of military operations,” the service said in the news release. “It will help conduct distributed maritime operations more effectively and improve the Navy’s ability to fight both in contested blue-water and littoral environments.”

  Last April, Marinette Marine won the initial contract to build the first frigate, the future USS Constellation (FFG-62). The shipyard, which is based in Marinette, Wis., and owned by Italian parent company Fincantieri, won the contract over multiple competitors, including Huntington Ingalls Industries, Austal USA, and a team of General Dynamics Bath Iron Works and Navantia.

  Marinette Marine is slated to begin building Constellation – the lead ship in the class – later this year, USNI News previously reported.

  Rick Hunt, the president of Fincantieri Marinette Marine, has said the shipbuilder included space and power margin on the frigates so they can evolve throughout their service lives as new equipment comes online.

  Smith, the Navy program manager, earlier this year noted that future weapons systems could include direct energy.

  “We have ample margin for this hull form. We also have in our requirements [the] space, weight, power and cooling margin to accommodate upgrades down the road over the service life of the ship,” Smith said earlier this year.
  “Some of those could lead to direct energy type projects and other capabilities.”

Navy to Decommission Littoral Combat Ships USS Freedom, USS Independence Later This Year

By: Mallory Shelbourne

May 17, 2021 6:45 PM • Updated: May 17, 2021 7:18 PM

USNI.org

Littoral combat ship USS Freedom (LCS 1) returns to Naval Base San Diego from her final deployment, April 12, 2021. US Navy Photo

The Navy will decommission the service’s first two Littoral Combat Ships later this year, USNI News has learned.

USS Independence (LCS-2) will decommission on July 31, Navy spokeswoman Cmdr. Nicole Schwegman confirmed to USNI News. Meanwhile, USS Freedom (LCS-1) will leave the active fleet on Sept. 30, according to a decommissioning memo reviewed by USNI News.

Both ships will join the reserve fleet upon their decommissioning, a Navy official confirmed to USNI News.

The Navy last year proposed retiring the first four LCSs early in its Fiscal Year 2021 budget submission. Seeking to justify the service’s plans to decommission those ships, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday has said it would cost about $2.5 billion to update the first four LCSs to the configurations of other ships in the class and that funding could be better spent elsewhere.

Freedom commissioned in 2008 and will have served 13 years when it leaves the fleet. Independence commissioned in 2010 and will have served 11 years. Both hulls were expected to have had a service life of at least 25 years.

When explaining plans to decommission the LCSs, service officials have noted that the first four ships in the class are test ships, a point rejected last year by one key lawmaker on the House Armed Services Committee.

Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), a former Navy nuclear-qualified surface warfare officer who is now the vice-chair of the HASC, last year rebuked former acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly for using that rationale.

In a recent interview with USNI News, Luria said she would not back Navy plans to decommission ships in the fleet to pay for new capabilities like hypersonic weapons.

“I’m not buying it because we need to look at what’s Battle Force 2025, we need to look at what we have today and how we can use it and how we can use it most efficiently. The idea of divesting of current platforms that still have usable service life in order to invest in something that we might develop the technology for in the future – paired with our poor track record on [developing new] platforms – just makes absolutely no sense to me,” Luria told USNI News.
“I agree with research and development into new technologies, I agree with a modest investment into developing capabilities for unmanned surface vessels; however, while that remains a technology that’s not mature, I do not agree with divesting of resources and assets that we have today that are desperately needed in order to deal with the issue we have with China, with Russia, and just around the world.”

USS Independence (LCS-2) sails in the eastern Pacific on Feb. 27, 2019. US Navy Photo

While the LCS program has struggled to find its footing in the fleet, combatant commanders have recently sought to use the ships for region-specific missions. USNI News previously reported that U.S. 7th Fleet had been looking at the LCS to conduct both strike and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) missions.

Meanwhile, USS Freedom (LCS-1) recently deployed to U.S. Southern Command for anti-drug operations.

“There’ve been some real bright spots with Littoral Combat Ship deployments. You cite Freedom – it was a very successful deployment. They had a high operational availability,” U.S. Southern Command chief Adm. Craig Faller told Luria during a Congressional hearing last month.

“I would also cite the USS Gabby Giffords’ recent deployment, where the [commanding officer] on his own initiative, made a video for his crew and for his families that went public about their high operational success,” Faller added. “So that capability has proven and the CNO [Adm. Mike] Gilday’s commitment to getting the maintenance right is making a difference.”

Wittman: Navy Needs Money in its Budget for Modernization, But Not From Cutting Cruisers

By: Megan Eckstein

May 12, 2021 6:30 PM • Updated: May 13, 2021 3:03 PM

USNI.org

Guided-missile cruiser USS Hué City (CG-66) was inducted into the Cruiser Modernization program on Oct. 3, 2019. US Navy Photo

This post has been updated to clarify that Rep. Rob Wittman would like to see a defense budget of $757 billion, which equals the Fiscal Year 2021 enacted budget plus inflation. In his spoken remarks, he mistakenly said $753 billion.

The Navy is facing pressure to find savings within its own budget to pay for investments in future technologies like unmanned vehicles and hypersonic and directed energy weapons – but those savings shouldn’t come from the early decommissioning of cruisers and amphibious ships, a key lawmaker said today.

Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), the top Republican on the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee, said that Congress needs to do its part in finding enough money for a sufficient defense top line – at the very least, last year’s budget plus inflation, or about $757 billion, which is more than the $715 billion the Biden administration has proposed. But the Navy needs to do its part in ensuring it’s spending wisely without taking drastic measures like retiring ships and creating a short-term readiness problem to solve a long-term modernization problem.

“Our service branches have to come to the table and say, these are places where we can save money. These are places where we can avoid duplication. And listen, as the Navy’s looking at reducing force structure, they’re looking at some things that I think we ought to question: the number of cruisers that they want to reduce, the number of missile tubes associated with those cruisers. The LSDs that they want to reduce. If they reduce the number of cruisers that they propose, we’re going to lose 1,200 missile tubes. 1,200. The question is, how does that get replaced? And if you’re going to completely remove those and then say we’ll wait four or five years before we get the capacity back, that’s not acceptable. The same with the LSDs: if you reduce by the full number immediately that the Navy-Marine Corps is proposing, we lose 25 percent of our forcible entry capability. Unacceptable,” Wittman said in his opening remarks at the annual McAleese FY 2022 Defense Programs Conference.
“I’m not saying that we shouldn’t retire those systems. I’m saying we have to do it the right way. We have to make sure that we have a transition plan; say, ‘okay, as we lose these number of cruisers, we lose these number of missile tubes, how are we going to replace them?’ How are we not going to have a slope that goes, loss of capability, flat spot, and then an increase in capability; and what happens is, our adversaries look at that flat spot and they go, wow, there’s our opportunity. Instead, what we have to say is, ‘here’s our transition: how do we have, as we retire older systems and bring into place newer systems, how do we make sure that those lines converge very, very quickly?’”

HASC vice-chair and former Navy officer Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) told USNI News recently that she would not support retiring the cruisers early because there were indications that China could decide to attack Taiwan within the decade and that the Navy had to be ready to fight China now if needed, rather than focusing all its efforts on being prepared to fight China in the 2045 timeframe.

Wittman acknowledged that balancing the current demand signal for operations and the readiness of the current force with investing in modernization for the future force would be an ongoing struggle, but he said the Navy has to find a way to self-fund some of its modernization by making cuts or reforms that don’t involve early ship retirements.

Asked where some opportunities may exist to find savings, he said the Navy needs to take a hard look at itself and figure that out quickly.

Whidbey Island-class amphibious dock landing ship USS Comstock (LSD-45) steams in formation during Valiant Shield 2020 off Guam. US Navy Photo

“All the service branches are going to have to find savings within their own budgets and be able to take those dollars and plow them back into modernization. That’s the way you’re going to be able to move the curve to the left of building new capability and to be able to properly transition in taking out the legacy systems,” he told USNI News during the question-and-answer session.
“They are going to have to do their job. Listen, Congress has to make sure that we provide that level funding, plus a factor of inflation; if we do anything less than that, then that erodes the capability to rebuild and modernize. But the service branches also need to go top to bottom and be really, really self-reflective on that, be self-critical, and say, ‘are these things we really need to do? Are these things that really add to the mission? Are these things that add capability? Are these things that we absolutely have to do?’ And then take those dollars and plow them back into the things that we see need to happen.” 

James Geurts, who served as the Navy’s acquisition chief from 2017 until January and is currently performing the duties of undersecretary of the Navy, said at the same conference that the Navy acquisition community had been able to achieve significant savings without sacrificing quality just by being more efficient in contracting: over the last two years, he said, the Navy put 20 percent more money on contract with 20 to 25 percent fewer contract actions.

He also pointed to the Super Hornet readiness effort – to bring the F/A-18E-F Super Hornet fleet from a mission capable rate of about 55 percent up to 80 percent through business process changes, rather than just throwing more money at the problem – as an example of how the Navy was approaching efficiencies.

The Super Hornet effort “was a lot less about buying new things or buying more parts. The old answer used to be, well of course its spares, let’s buy more spares. When we really looked at it, it was, how long is it taking us to do phased maintenance, do we have the experience and the skillset balanced the right way, do we understand the real maintenance degraders and have targeted programs that go after those? And what we found was a ruthless application of resources to the levers that had the most throw allowed us to get a much more rapid change,” he said.

An F/A-18E Super Hornet, assigned to the ‘Blue Diamonds’ of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 146, launches from the flight deck of USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) while conducting dual-carrier operations with the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group in the South China Sea on Feb. 9, 2021. US Navy Photo

Geurts said he’s been working closely with Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. William Lescher on “the notion of, let’s get real, and then let’s get better. Bureaucracies love to solve a problem before they fully understand it and pull levers to show that they’re making activity, not necessarily always understanding did those levers actually change the needle. So we’ve been on a campaign of, let’s get real, let’s really understand where is our cost, where’s our spend. I think of dollars, people or time; fundamentally understand that so we can fix the things that matter the most that will move the needle the most and not confuse activity with outcome,” he said.

He talked broadly about attacking “fundamental costs” that don’t’ contribute to warfighting power, but he added that ultimately, at some point leadership in the Pentagon or the White House will need to weigh in on how much money the Navy will be allowed to spend to create how large a fleet.

“I’m right now focused on, how do we maximize the output we can generate for the resources we have, and before I go shoot on someone else’s target, I want to make sure we’re doing everything we can,” he said.

He warned against taking the effort too far, though, saying that becoming too efficient can make the force too brittle. The Navy has acknowledged that in recent years, as previous efforts to create an efficient fleet – having fewer but larger supply ships to bring fuel and goods to aggregated strike groups at sea, for example – made the fleet less flexible.

“There is a point where, if you are going to get additional outcomes, it’s going to be an investment,” he said, saying that efficiencies will only go so far without the military investing additional funds to grow the fleet.
“And then it’s a frank discussion of how much capability do you want and what’s it going to cost to generate that capability.”

Geurts would not comment specifically on the budget proposal or what it might recommend in terms of decommissioning cruisers, amphibious ships or Littoral Combat Ships, all of which the Navy has tried unsuccessfully to do in previous years.

USS Freedom (LCS-1) departs a pier in San Diego under its own power on Dec. 10, 2018. US Navy Photo

He said the Navy is examining “what’s that right balance of keeping things while they’re still useful but not keeping things to the point where they’re not adding value to the missions we see going forward, and not falling in love with a product just because we have the product – it’s got to show that it can be lethal and add something to the fight.”

He said that, ultimately, the Navy wanted the best return on investment on the ships it bought, which could include finding new mission sets. For example, the service is kicking this idea around for the LCS program, which may not provide the high-end capability the Navy would want in a peer fight but could be useful in U.S. Southern Command or elsewhere.

Geurts noted that keeping a ship too long doesn’t just cost money to operate and maintain the ship, but also ties up manpower, training centers and more.

“The embedded cost of keeping a product too long can be debilitating,” he said, without specifically saying what he hoped would happen with the cruisers.

Overall, he reiterated, “my first priority is maximizing the return for every tax dollar the taxpayer gives me,” he said, adding that “what I’m dedicated to doing is ensuring I can, with confidence and credibility, say that we have maximized the dollars we’ve been given – and then it’s a decision, for the dollars you’re given in that output, is that enough? Or for the fight that you see going forward, do we have to change the balance? Again, I want to clean up my backyard before I talk about somebody else’s backyard, and that’s what we’re really focused on.”

NAVSEA: Navy Could Accelerate Some Public, Private Shipyard Upgrades If Money Were Available

By: Megan Eckstein

May 7, 2021 1:53 PM

USNI.org

Terrance Wells, from San Diego, ties straps for a containment project on the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) on Oct. 26, 2020. US Navy Photo

Support is growing within the House Armed Services Committee to accelerate Navy efforts to improve ship repair capacity at both private and public shipyards, and for funding that either through ongoing talks about a massive federal infrastructure bill or other means, lawmakers made clear during a Thursday afternoon hearing.

The HASC readiness subcommittee questioned three Navy leaders about ship repair efforts and how to both add capacity and make the existing yards more efficient. The general consensus among lawmakers seemed to be that more progress was needed on a quicker timeline.

The Navy has a plan to overhaul its four yards through a 20-year, $21-billion Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program (SIOP), though lawmakers earlier this year asked the Navy to look for ways to speed up the program. The Navy also has a lot of ideas for what it would like to see from private yards, though Naval Sea Systems Command head Vice Adm. Bill Galinis said during the hearing that the current fixed-price contracting strategy the Navy uses would make it difficult for the yards to finance large capital expenditure projects on their own.

HASC readiness subcommittee chairman Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) multiple times during the hearing asked the Navy admirals for a detailed five-year plan for public and private yard improvements, partly so that HASC could write some upcoming milestones and associated timelines into this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, and partly so that they could quickly jump on any opportunities to find funding for the items.

“One of the reasons that I’m driving so hard for the five-year – what are we going to do next year and the year after that and the next three years beyond – is, I’ll give you an example: last week, several billion dollars was returned to the Department of Defense for military construction programs” that had been diverted by the Trump administration to cover border security projects, he said.
“To my knowledge, none of that will be available for this particular purpose because none of the programs we’ve been talking about, none of the activities we’ve been talking about here, are yet in the military construction, MILCON, program; they’re not programmed. So I’m going to drive very hard through Adm. Galinis for detail for the next five years so that we can, every year, know what you need” and quickly act if there’s a chance to secure money for any of them outside the annual defense budget process.

Galinis said that, on the SIOP program for the public yards, there was probably some opportunity to accelerate planning efforts if money were made available. By the end of the year, he said, digital twin models of each of the four yards – Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility in Washington, and Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and IMF in Hawaii – would be complete, showing a computer model of the ideal layout of the yard to create the most efficient flow of people and material for ship repair work.

From there, Galinis said, “our ability to get the planning done upfront, which includes the area development plans and talk about the infrastructure, the foundational environments that we want to build these new buildings in, that’s probably a key part there” that could be accelerated.

Rear Adm. Howard Markle, the deputy commander of NAVSEA for logistics, maintenance, and industrial operations (SEA 04), said during the hearing that the actual process of overhauling shops and buildings at the yards may have some opportunity to speed up, but the Navy would have to be careful not to conduct SIOP efforts at the expense of actual ship repair work.

“As you look at the potential for acceleration, there’s obviously two very large constraints that would constrain that: those are funding, and those are the ability to accelerate those and integrate them with the ongoing maintenance, ensuring that we can meet our mission,” he said.
“Opportunities certainly could exist as we continue to study SIOP and perform our analysis on those mega-projects. Clearly we’re focused on the docks up front, you can see that in the previous president’s budget and you will likely see further commitment to that. But as we look to the broader optimization piece and those things that support that, those are certainly areas of opportunity for us to accelerate integrating (yard upgrades) with overall mission execution.”

On the private yard side, Galinis said he has a lot of ideas for how to help industry improve performance, but funding them can be difficult.

The private shipyards today can handle the current workload and are seeing better performance recently after a concerted effort by the Navy and industry to get the fundamentals right: the government awarding contracts early for better planning, both for ordering materials and understanding workforce requirements, and buying government-furnished long lead time materials earlier; and industry investing in workforce training and ensuring they stick to the schedule.

Galinis said the issue is that the fleet is expected to grow, and there’s not enough capacity for the expected future ship maintenance workload. For that, the Navy needs to help invest in and support not only expanding current repair yards and incentivizing new ones to do business with the Navy, but also in supporting smaller companies that focus on specific skillsets and often work as a subcontractor to a repair yard.

Rear Adm. Eric Ver Hage, the director of surface ship maintenance and modernization (SEA 21) at NAVSEA, said during the hearing that “I would like to see a CAPEX-like approach, things focused on training, things focused on maybe dredging or expanding drydock capacity; those things will give us some flexibility and surge capacity, both during normal operations and more kind of emergency situations.”

Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) said during the hearing that he viewed these kinds of investments in private yards and industry as both critical infrastructure and national security issues and would like to see them addressed in the upcoming American Jobs Act from the Biden administration, an idea that’s been pitched on the Senate sideof the Hill by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).

Galinis told Golden that there are plenty of ways this federal money could be used to support private industry in a way that would directly benefit the Navy and lead to increased repair capacity and options.

“There are potential dredging projects that would help in one port; the addition of maybe a ship lift system to better utilize the capacity within the shipyard, maybe another project; I think as Adm. Ver Hage talked about, the development of the workforce is always high on my list anyway in terms of ensuring we have a well-qualified and trained workforce. So those are a couple of projects that we have, kind of shovel-ready type efforts, if you will,” the NAVSEA commander said.
“We certainly get a lot of input form industry as well, and if that opportunity were to present itself, sir, I feel pretty confident we can provide a pretty good, detailed list in relatively short order.”

Interview: Elaine Luria Says Navy Needs to Build ‘Battle Force 2025’ Instead of Divesting to Prepare for a 2045 Fight

By: Megan Eckstein

May 5, 2021 5:26 PM • Updated: May 5, 2021 10:09 PM

USNI.org

Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Monterey (CG-61) transits the Mediterranean Sea on March 24, 2021. US Navy Photo

The vice-chair of the House Armed Services Committee does not support the Navy’s “divest to invest” strategy of ridding the fleet of aging and expensive-to-maintain ships and systems to free up money for the development of unmanned platforms and other new technology, saying the sea service needs to focus on getting ready for a near-term battle instead of looking too far out into the future.

When the Navy began planning its future force design in 2019 and into 2020, it was looking at a 2030 timeframe – what the threat from China and other actors might be, and what kind of a fleet would be needed to deter a fight or win if one broke out. The Pentagon stepped in and forced the service to change gears, creating a Battle Force 2045 plan that aimed to look at where China might go in a longer timeline and ensure the Navy could get well ahead of the threat.

Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), who sits on the seapower and projection forces subcommittee, told USNI News that the Navy instead needs to focus on what threat China could pose this decade.

“Of course it’s important to look to 2045 and look out in the future, but I don’t think that the Navy’s doing enough today to emphasize – we need Battle Force 2025. You had Adm. [Phil] Davidson, outgoing INDOPACOM Commander, Adm. [John] Aquilino, incoming – both testified to the Senate recently that it’s not beyond the realm of the possible that the Chinese could take action and invade Taiwan in the next six years. And so, although we should be looking out into the future, we need to make sure we have the navy we need today,” she said in an interview.

Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) posing for a photo in front of USS Vicksburg (CG-69) on a April 8, 2021, visit to BAE Systems’ shipyard in Norfolk, Va. via Twitter

While she said she supports a modest research and development budget for future technologies like unmanned platforms, she said the focus today needs to be readiness and fleet size – which, in a short timeframe, means keeping the ships the Navy has today in fighting condition, since new ship construction is such a slow process.

“China is a threat, and we need to take it seriously. And I can envision the day when we wake up and people are looking around saying, where’s the aircraft carrier, where are our ships and aircraft, because China has potentially just invaded Taiwan or taken other aggressive action against us or our allies – and it would be too late at that point, these are investments we need to make today,” she said of current readiness.

The Navy last year, in its Fiscal Year 2021 budget request, started down the path of a divest-to-invest strategy, asking to decommission the first four Littoral Combat Ships, four Ticonderoga-class cruisers and three Whidbey Island dock landing ships early. Though the FY 2022 budget request is still in the works, it is widely expected that the Navy will ask to decommission a larger number of cruisers early, given the challenges they’ve had in keeping the aging ships in operable condition and the challenges associated with an ongoing cruiser modernization plan.

Asked about the possibility of the Navy continuing to ask to divest of current ships to make room in the budget for new systems – unmanned, hypersonic weapons, directed energy weapons, high-end networks and more needed for the 2045 fight against China – Luria said she wouldn’t support it.

“I’m not buying it because we need to look at what’s Battle Force 2025, we need to look at what we have today and how we can use it and how we can use it most efficiently. The idea of divesting of current platforms that still have usable service life in order to invest in something that we might develop the technology for in the future – paired with our poor track record on [developing new] platforms – just makes absolutely no sense to me,” she said.
“I agree with research and development into new technologies, I agree with a modest investment into developing capabilities for unmanned surface vessels; however, while that remains a technology that’s not mature, I do not agree with divesting of resources and assets that we have today that are desperately needed in order to deal with the issue we have with China, with Russia, and just around the world.”

On the cruisers specifically, despite the challenges with the cruiser modernization program, she said she toured two of the in-repair cruisers recently and still believes in finishing the work and keeping them in the fleet.

“I’ll continue to say what I have: it’s a ship that we have, and the cost of modernizing and upgrading it for extending its service life 10 or so years is significantly lower than building a new ship,” said Luria, the former executive officer of cruiser USS Anzio (CG-68), adding that “the amount of time it takes to build a new ship, we just can’t decommission 10 cruisers faster than we can build replacements.”
“We have a real and proximate threat from China in the Western Pacific, South China Sea, East China Sea. We need to be present, and we need the capabilities that a cruiser brings, including its VLS cells. So the idea that the Navy’s longer-range plan in this Battle Force 2045 is to replace cruisers – who have two full [Vertical Launching System] launchers, over 120 cells – with a fleet of these Large Unmanned Surface Vessels with 16 VLS cells, a technology that’s not mature,” is not one she can support.

USS Freedom (LCS-1) departs a pier in San Diego under its own power on Dec. 10, 2018. US Navy Photo

She said her “jaw dropped” when the Navy asked to divest of the four LCSs last year, and she continues to support keeping those ships in the fleet even if mission module development lags behind schedule, in part because of testimony from U.S. Southern Command commander Adm. Craig Faller. He told HASC earlier this year that USS Freedom (LCS-1) and USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS-10) were able to do a lot for SOUTHCOM in terms of working with partners, providing naval presence and conducting anti-trafficking missions.

“A platform is a platform, and a platform can perform a mission,” Luria said, even if the mission isn’t a high-end one – and she said if the decision comes down to having more lower-end ships today or investing in new technology that won’t be fielded for years, she would pick keeping the ships today.

“I just feel like this divesting is divesting of capability, leaving gaps where combatant commanders have needs, and we just need to use what we have where we can use it,” she said.

The Navy has argued it needs to divest of certain items – older ships that are costing too much to maintain, ships like the first four LCSs that don’t have the right upgrades to where the Navy would want to actually deploy them to a contested waterway, or systems that are outdated and don’t reflect how the Navy would want to fight in the future – because freeing up money in the budget is the only way to create room for investments in new gear amid expected flat budgets.

The Marine Corps has taken a similar approach in its Force Design 2030 effort, though its divestments have involved shedding entire mission sets such as tanks and law enforcement, as well as reducing the numbers of some types of aircraft that would still deploy in traditional Marine Expeditionary Unit deployments but wouldn’t be used in the emerging Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations model with small, dispersed units.

The Navy, on the other hand, arguably isn’t giving up any missions wholesale but rather is shedding capacity at a time when some like Luria aren’t comfortable losing ship hulls and missile cells if a fight with China may even potentially be looming.

Broadly, Luria said she worries that the Navy is imposing restrictions on itself by asking for a flat budget it thinks it can get, instead of asking for the budget it needs and then working hard to make a convincing case for more money.

“I feel like in every opportunity they go in with these constraints they put on themselves, and the very first thing they say is, well we assume we’re only going to get this much so let me tell you what I can buy with what I think you’re going to give me, rather than something more in line with what John Lehman did in the 1984 National Maritime Strategy where it was like, this is the Navy that the nation needs and this is why: we need a 600-ship Navy, here’s why we need it, we need to defeat the Soviet Union, we need this many ships in the North Atlantic, this many in the Mediterranean, this many in the Pacific, and it’s an investment that we have to make to defend ourselves, deter the Soviet Union. And the entire country bought it and understood it and we literally built almost 600 ships for that effort,” she said.
“And I just feel like the communication from the Navy, it’s not clear and they’re not acting on the sense of urgency that’s necessary with regards to China and their current ongoing actions in the Pacific.”

Luria called for 3- to 5-percent real growth in defense budgets, with a higher percentage going to the Navy and the Air Force and less going to the Army, in acknowledgment that a fight with China would rely more heavily on maritime and air forces.

USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) transits the Suez Canal on April 2, 2021. US Navy Photo

Several sources told USNI News that the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office is likely to have an outsized role in developing this year’s Navy budget request, in part due to there not being any permanent civilian leadership at the helm of the Navy still after the Biden administration took over – so it appears unlikely that the Navy would make a bold request instead of sticking to the anticipated one-third allotment of a flat defense budget.

Luria told USNI News that she sees several troubling trends on Navy readiness, especially as it relates to the aircraft carrier fleet. First, she said, she worries that the Navy had been able to shed the requirement to have continuous carrier presence in the Middle East but has since gotten sucked back into that mission due to what she called malign activities by Iran.

“Here we are, continuously draining our readiness and our ability to put presence in the Western Pacific in response to China by continuously having a carrier penned down in the Middle East,” she said.

Second, she worried the Navy didn’t have enough capacity to maintain a fleet of 11 nuclear-powered carriers at just two public shipyards. She said the Navy used to have a few conventionally powered carriers and performed maintenance on USS Enterprise (CVN-65) at Newport News Shipbuilding, but since the fleet transformed to an all-nuclear fleet that’s solely maintained at Norfolk Naval Shipyard and Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility, availabilities have run longer and the backups have affected fleet operations.

Luria said she spoke recently with two Navy leaders overseeing ship readiness and maintenance and can see where data shows the service is on the right track when it comes to getting more maintenance done on time and on budget. But she said the Navy needs to convince industry to invest in more capacity to do private yard repairs, and proposals like decommissioning half the cruiser fleet send the wrong signals to industry.

“A lot of the challenges that I hear across the waterfront here in Hampton Roads … is that the lack of level-loading of the port, the ability of the yards that conduct this maintenance to plan long-term into the future, prevents them from making those investments to grow their workforce and to invest and increase capacity,” she said.
“These knee-jerk things like decommissioning cruisers kind of just puts that workforce in a tailspin again, and we could be looking at layoffs of hundreds of people across the waterfront in Hampton Roads because of those sudden changes.”

She summed up her hopes for the Navy simply: “A three-pronged thought I have on it is, we need to build more ships and we need to build them as quickly as possible; we need to both maintain the ships we have and deploy them as efficiently as possible; … and then stop decommissioning ships faster than we can build them.”

Navy Contracts May 3, 2021

Defense.org

Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems, Baltimore, Maryland, is awarded a not-to-exceed $15,560,859 undefinitized modification to previously awarded contract N00024-11-C-2300 for the implementation of configuration management changes on select Freedom-variant Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). The LCS new construction contract provides for the design, construction, integration, and testing of the Littoral Combat Ship, which operates with focused-mission packages that deploy manned and unmanned vehicles to execute a variety of missions, including anti-submarine warfare, surface warfare, and mine countermeasures. Work will be performed in Marinette, Wisconsin, and is expected to be completed by May 2022. Fiscal 2016 shipbuilding and conversion (Navy) funds in the amount of $4,426,941 (57%); and fiscal 2015 shipbuilding and conversion (Navy) funds in the amount of $3,353,488 (43%) will be obligated at time of award and will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, D.C., is the contracting activity.

Serco - IPS Corp., Herndon, Virginia, is awarded a $37,644,745 cost-plus-fixed-fee and cost-only modification to previously awarded contract N00174-18-C-0015 for professional support services in the areas of program management, administrative support, surface ship modernization, inactive ships, surface ships readiness, surface training systems, business and financial management, records management, and information technology support for Naval Sea Systems Command Surface Warfare (SEA 21). Work will be performed in Washington, D.C. (55%); Norfolk, Virginia (19%); San Diego, California (18%); Mayport, Florida (2%); Yokosuka, Japan (2%); Sasebo, Japan (1%); Manama, Bahrain (1%); Pascagoula, Mississippi (1%); and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (1%), and is expected to be complete by April 2021. Fiscal 2020 research, development, test and evaluation (Navy) funds in the amount of $80,128; fiscal 2021 other procurement (Navy) funds in the amount of $1,457,333; and fiscal 2021 operation and maintenance (Navy) funds in the amount of $21,380,463 will be obligated at time of award, of which $21,460,591 will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, D.C., is the contracting activity.

MQ-8B Fire Scout Crashes Into Littoral Combat Ship USS Charleston On Deployment

By: Megan Eckstein

April 27, 2021 4:26 PM • Updated: April 27, 2021 6:19 PM

• USNI.org

  PACIFIC OCEAN (March 27, 2021) Sailors charge the battery of an MQ-8B Fire Scout unmanned aerial vehicle aboard Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Charleston (LCS 18), March 27. Charleston is currently operating in U.S. Third Fleet. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Adam Butler)

  An MQ-8B Fire Scout unmanned aerial vehicle crashed into the side of Littoral Combat Ship USS Charleston(LCS-18) after taking off from the ship today, the Navy announced.

  The rotary-wing UAV was operating from the ship around 9:40 a.m. when the collision happened in the Western Pacific, according to a U.S. 3rd Fleet news release.

  The UAV fell into the sea and was not recovered, the release reads.

  “The mishap damaged a safety net on the ship and struck the hull. Damage to the ship is being assessed, but appears limited to an area above the waterline.”

USS Charleston (LCS-18) during acceptance trials on July 18, 2018. Austal photo.

“No one was injured, and the Littoral Combat Ship continued to safely operate after the incident,” the news release continues. The cause of the mishap is under investigation.

Charleston began its maiden deployment earlier this month with the Gold Crew aboard, conducting a live-fire event in early April that included a Rolling Airframe Missile (SeaRAM) launch. The training event was overseen by Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC), and shortly after completion of the SMWDC training the ship left San Diego. A Navy official told USNI News Charleston was operating on its way to Guam when the mishap with the Fire Scout occurred.

The Navy news release notes the MQ-8B Fire Scout is nearly 32 feet long and 10 feet tall. It is assigned to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 21, based out of Naval Air Station North Island, and operates as part of a manned-unmanned team of Fire Scouts and MH-60 helicopters as part of the LCS surface warfare mission package.