US Navy gives up the ghost on its failed ‘urban street fighter’

How do you build a ship without a mission? The littoral combat ship (LCS) is how.

It could not carry out its original mission because the ship is not survivable in combat. The billions wasted on the US Navy’s so-called “urban street fighter” ship could have been used to build additional missile defense AEGIS destroyers or give the Navy more firepower or finance a new generation of robotic surface and subsurface vessels.

Instead, the Navy chose to build ships it did not need and could not use. Even when they were deployed, they often broke down, deeply embarrassing the Navy and harming US prestige. Worse yet, the Navy worked hard to salvage the ships – to no avail – by improving their firepower without making them more reliable.

Neither version of the littoral combat ship (one of them is a steel-hulled ship with an aluminum superstructure; the other is an all-aluminum trimaran design) can perform the original mission, which was “envisioned to be a networked, agile, stealthy surface combatant capable of defeating anti-access and asymmetric threats in the littorals.”

Achieving a stealthy design on a big, high-speed ship is a non-trivial idea, particularly where the ship is supposed to operate in littoral areas that is close to harbors and close to enemy bases and infrastructure. Any half-competent lookout station can see them coming with the naked eye.

Along the coast, LCS ships would be vulnerable to enemy anti-ship missiles – such as old Chinese models including the C-802 (now rebadged as the YJ-82), which struck the Israeli Sa’ar V-class corvette INS Hanit, killing four sailors and partially disabling the ship. The Hanit was operating 10 nautical miles from Beirut.

The Hanit was a victim of a slow missile fired by the terrorist group Hezbollah. But against China or Russia, with supersonic and hypersonic missiles, the LCS would not survive.  The Pentagon said the LCS was “not survivable in a combat environment” – although the Navy disagreed.

China and Russia both have developed highly effective anti-ship missiles that can be launched from land or sea.

As designed, neither version of the LCS has much in the way of combat power. Each version has a rapid-fire 57mm gun and is equipped with the RIM-116 rolling airframe missile (RAM).

The range of the 57mm gun is limited and its performance in combat has never been tested.

It is reported that the 57mm, which is manufactured by Bofors in Sweden, is not effective against aircraft, helicopters or drones. That job, on the LCS, is left to the Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM).

RAM was designed in the mid-1970s and has been deployed from 1985 until today. It uses an infrared seeker. Because missiles often are flying on kinetic energy without engine burn as they approach their targets, relying on infrared signatures for target acquisition and destruction does not assure an intercept and kill.

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