Is The U.S. Navy Throwing In The Towel On The Littoral Combat Ship?

Jared Keller, USNI News: The Navy Basically Just Admitted That The Littoral Combat Ship Is A Floating Garbage Pile

After 16 years and billions of dollars, the Navy may have finally acknowledged that its Littoral Combat Ship program looks like a miserable failure.

The service “may not” deploy any of the dozen small surface combatants this year despite officials’ previous plans to deploy several to join the 7th and 5th Fleets in Singapore and Bahrain respectively, the U.S. Naval Institute first reported on April 11.

Given the embarrassing cost overruns and frequent mechanical failures that have plagued the program, the exquisitely-detailed report suggests that the Navy has run out of patience for the disappointment mill that is the Littoral Combat Ship, once the backbone of the future fleet that could have 355 ships.

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WNU editor: Mike Burleson's blog "New Wars" is where I got my education that the U.S. Navy's Littoral Combat Ship program was a failure. Mike no longer blogs, but it is sad to say that all of his predictions from ten years ago have come true. His list of LCS Acronyms always cracks me up (see below).

• Look! We’re Clueless about the Shallows
• Lavishly Crewed Speedboat
• Lousy Concept Ship
• Literal Cash Sin
• Littoral Cash Shocker
• Listless Crunchy Ship
• Leveraged Cost Ship
• Listing Capital Sink
• Littoral Combat Gyp
• Luxury Cruise Ship
• Less Capable Service
• Lickity Cwick Ship
• Low on Combat Systems
• Low Capability Ship
• Laughably inCapable Ship
• Lack of Common Sense
• Lockmart Capsizes at Sea
• Low Cost Ship (How’d that get there!!)
• Little Crappy Ship
• Look for Costs to Soar
• Looks Cool offShore
• Literal Crap Shoot
• Lockmart Cancels Sanity
• Lockheed Can’t be Serious!
• Loosely Constrained Swindle
• Literally Costly Swindle
• Lackadaisically Constrained Swindle
• LockMart’s Costly Swindle
• Little Crappy Showboat
• Literally Crappy Ship
• LockMart’s Cash Sucker
• Literally Corpulent Speedboat
• Likely to Collapse Suddenly
• Life onboard Could be Short
• Likely Can’t Survive
• Likely to Capsize and Sink in 1 minute
• Literally Collapsible Speedboat
• Literally Collapsible Showboat
• Literally Collapsible Ship
• Lickity Cwick Speedboat
• Lickity Cwick Showboat
• Loser Compared to Skjold
• Literally inComparable to Skjold
• Loses in Competition to Sea Fighter
• Laughably Compromised Specifications
• Larry Curley Shemp
• Lousy Capacity Speedboat
• Let’s Copy Swift
• Loquaciously Consumptive Speedboat
• Luxuriantly Crappy Speedboat