US Navy Procurement Disasters - The Littoral Combat Ship and Zumwalt Class Destroyer

It's been said before that naval strategy is built strategy, and that the contest for influence and control on the world's oceans doesn't really begin at sea, but on the drawing boards and in the shipyards. Emerging as the world's foremost naval power with the end of the Cold War, the US looked for ways to literally build on its advantage. After some great ship building hits in the 20th century like the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the US invested billions of dollars in a new warship ge

neration in the 21st century. That meant a new destroyer, a missile cruiser and a small coastal combat ship. But designing and building next generation warships isn't an easy thing, and US efforts to transform their surface warfare fleet didn't exactly go as planned. The US would spend billions of dollars on a new destroyer, the Zumwalt class, only to put the old destroyer, the Arleigh Burke, back into production. While the smaller Littoral Combat Ships were so amazing that the Navy keeps

begging Congress to let them retire more of them. And so today I want to unpack the story of these programs, ask what happened, and what we can learn. So to do that I'll start with a little US Navy history, looking at the LCS and DD(X) programs asking what sort of ships were they intended to yield, what role were they meant to fill, what technologies were they intended to leverage and what are at least some of the things that went wrong in their development cycle. Because even if a ship do

esn't emerge as a top-tier combatant, it might function fine as a teaching aid. That will eventually lead into some broader reflections, but I promise to also inject some positivity. Looking at the potential redemption arcs for LCS and DD(X), and what the US Navy is trying to do with them now. In doing so I do need to inject a couple of caveats up front, saying among other things that out of necessity this is going to be a pretty bird's eye view of these programs and I can't possibly go i

nto all the relevant detail. I will link some relevant reports for those of you who want additional detail, but also keep in mind that parts of this story are going to be highly subjective. I've done the best I can with what I've reviewed, consulted fairly widely, but keep in mind in the end that every source I use is inevitably going to have at least some sort of slant to it. So please read the sources and the caveats, and let's get into it. OK, so every disaster story clearly has to have

a beginning. And for both the DD(X) and LCS programs, that beginning is probably the United States Navy's attempt to reinvent itself for a new millennium. In budgetary terms, the closing days of the Cold War were a really good time for the US Navy. There had been some pretty significant cutbacks in the post-Vietnam War era, but then Ronald Reagan came along. And with détente and disarmament being replaced by a new strategy of engaging the Soviet Union in a money-burning competition it cou

ld never possibly hope to win, part of Reagan's election platform became rebuilding the US Navy up to a 600 ship fleet. It's kind of hard to imagine a presidential candidate now running on a platform of how many F-35s or submarines they were going to build during their administration, but it was a different time. In order to build up towards that 600 ship target the Navy attacked the problem from basically all angles. Naval construction was expanded, existing ships were going to be kept i

n service longer, and some older vessels were reactivated and modernised. Most famously, 4 of America's Iowa-class battleships originally constructed for the Second World War, were brought out of mothballs, modernised with things like cruise missile launchers, and reactivated. The effort did achieve some milestones, like bringing the aforementioned battleships back from extinction, but it never did quite hit the 600 ship target. According to the US Navy's History and Heritage Command, the

fleet inherited by George Bush senior in 1989 hit a grand total of 592 active ships. Including 4 battleships, 14 aircraft carriers, 68 cruisers and destroyers, 100 attack and 37 missile submarines. Shortly thereafter however, the Soviet Union suffered critical existence failure, with the US Navy's modernisation and expansion budget following it into oblivion shortly thereafter. By 1994 590 active ships had become 404, by 1999 336 and in 2004 292. As an aside, I think those numbers might ill

ustrate why Saddam's decision to invade Kuwait in 1990 was such a Darwin Award worthy move. With him somehow managing to time his great strategic play so it happened when the US military was no longer distracted by the Soviet Union, but before it had time to get rid of all the forces that it had built up to counter the Soviet Union. But leaving that aside, let's get back to some naval cuts. Some categories were affected more significantly than others. In the 10 years from 1989 the service

cut about 40% of its attack and a third of its missile submarines. The carriers only dropped 2 ships out of 14, but the frigates dropped from around 100 to 37. And as for the great battle wagons themselves, the Iowa battleships which had just been reactivated at significant expense, were retired again by 1992. Probably for the last time until we need them to fight off an alien invasion. But in many ways while the fleet was shrinking it was also still modernising, because ship designs and p

rograms that had been stood up when the Soviet Union was still very much a going concern, continued to carry on and deliver ships in the late-80s and 90s. The first ship of the Arleigh Burke class for example, which is currently the US Navy's most important class of surface combatants began construction in 1988, being commissioned in 1991. And with advanced sensors, weapons and of course the Aegis combat system, you can argue these were some of the most advanced destroyers in the world as

they began to enter service. But in terms of core concept and design, this was still very much a late-Cold War ship that was entering service in a post-Cold War navy. The US Navy was always eventually going to be on the hunt for something new. The Quadrennial Defence Review of 2001 confirmed just how differently the US Navy and the other services now saw the world. The Soviet military challenge was gone, the US and its allies had handled that. And now the US military had to be prepared fo

r a new world of asymmetric threats, failed states, non-state actors, weapon of mass destruction proliferation, ballistic missile defence and many others aside. I also think it's worth noting this was an era of massive transformational and technological ambition in the US defence complex. Through the Future Combat System and other projects, the US Army of the future was meant to have a new generation of air-mobile universal vehicles, soldiers equipped with programmable air-burst grenade l

aunchers, clad head to toe in advanced electronics and equipment. The Air Force was busy trying to shoot down ballistic missiles with a laser turret strapped to a 747. The US Marines spent a couple of billion dollars to not build their next generation expeditionary fighting vehicle. And the Navy wasn't going to be left out. By 2001 announcements had made clear that the US Navy wanted at least three new future surface combatants. Firstly, a next generation destroyer, the DD(X), building on

a previous program, the DD-21, that hadn't yielded a production warship. This was going to be an advanced high-tech combatant. As the Under-Secretary of Defence for Acquisition and Technology put it at the time, "The DD(X) will be the technology driver for the surface fleet of the future." If DD(X) was meant to be the new Arleigh Burke, or rather some strange cross between the next Arleigh Burke and the next battleship, the program was also meant to yield technology and potentially a comm

on hull form for the so-called CG(X). This was going to be a next generation guided missile cruiser, essentially the next Ticonderoga class. But leveraging pretty heavily on what DD(X) came up with. CG(X) actually gets a bit of a pass from us today, because it was cancelled more than a decade ago before that much money could be spent. But then finally, alongside the very expensive spaceships that DD(X) and CG(X) were meant to be, there was also a third vessel, a much smaller, cheaper comba

tant optimised for fighting in coastal areas, or as navies call them, the littoral zone. This wasn't meant to be a successor to an existing ship class like the Arleigh Burke or the Ticonderoga, it was meant to be something entirely new. And, as you are about to discover, it had a heck of a story. The LCS concept was probably born out of a series of 1990s wargames held by the United States Navy. These weren't physical wargames with actual ships sailing around all over the place, it was a wa

rgaming process called the Joint Multi-warfare Analytical Game, or JMAG. This sort of computer-modelled exercise does mean you miss out on the opportunity to build experience with actual crews in operating their ships, but it allows you to experiment with more scenarios, more quickly, and in a more radical fashion. JMAG and other approaches like it also provide a method by which you can test systems that don't physically exist. If you want to wargame the impact for example of a whole bunc

h of carrier-based fighter drones might have on future wars, instead of actually building them and testing them, you can make some assumptions about how they would likely perform, plug in the carrier-based drone DLC and test with and against them. JMAG was testing a range of systems and platforms. Unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned surface vehicles, new anti-submarine sensors and sensor fields, cruise missiles, different weapons, the list goes on. The LCS also grew out of this exercise, b

ut in a slightly different way. As Captain Robert Powers later put it, "LCS was unique in it did not begin as a platform concept to be evaluated. Rather, it was a concept that emerged from JMAG insight, became a platform concept, and was further evaluated in JMAG and other methodologies." Basically the Americans were simulating different scenarios, like the closure of the Straits of Hormuz by some hostile power that may or may not be Iran. The US was then being given the objective of gett

ing into the region quickly to support a blue coalition nation before red force could achieve its objectives. To succeed, realistically American forces in the scenario needed to be able to force the straits. But in doing so, the traditional navy structure was encountering problems. Again to quote the Captain, "The scenario presented the Navy with difficult problems. Here it wasn't fighting a navy for control of the high seas, it was fighting an enemy with anti-ship missiles on the shore al

ong choke points, shore-based tactical aircraft, frigate-sized ships, missile-armed patrol boats and fast inshore attack craft." I mean, if you just add drones and helicopter pirates to that list, it sounds an awful lot like some other force that's been in the news recently. But we should probably give the planners from the 1990s a pass on not predicting absolutely everything. This enemy also employed modern diesel-electric submarines, an array of acoustic, pressure, magnetic and contact-a

ctivated mines. And the enemy could structure a complex layered defence that had to be peeled back. A very time-consuming process where each layer had to be peeled back under the threat of the other layers. One of the problems the admiral controlling the US force in that scenario faced was that the ships that he had available which could for example locate submarines, minefields etc. were his valuable Aegis destroyers and missile frigates that he had to continually send into the choke poin

t. There they could hunt submarines and gain air superiority, but they drew constant shore-based anti-ship missile attacks, were constantly attacked by suicide boats, and quickly discovered that while "Destroyers and frigates could deal with threats from the sea, the problem came from the littoral, shore-based threats." The exercise highlighted two problems. Firstly, there just weren't enough ships to do this operation quickly. And because the operations were taking weeks not days, logisti

cal bottlenecks developed, troop ships and supplies couldn't get through the straits, oil wasn't being transported into the global economy and things were generally terrible. Secondly, "The large Aegis destroyers and the smaller guided missile frigates were taking heavy damage in the armed reconnaissance patrols from mines, submarines, anti-ship missiles, some tactical aircraft, missile-firing gun boats, and the occasional fast attack boat." So having played through that painful scenario,

the players generated some insights. Firstly, they really wished they had a smaller, more expendable ship to exercise littoral control. One that meant they wouldn't have to expose their higher value Aegis ships in the earlier stages of the fighting. Secondly, it would be really good if the ships that were going into the Strait and doing armed reconnaissance patrols could also hunt and eliminate mines in a moderate threat environment. As well as potentially kill submarines and defend thems

elves against other threats from sea and shore. Thus, according to Captain Robert's account, was born the concept of the Littoral Combat Ship. And having been imagined, it could now be simulated and refined in future wargames. The Littoral Combat Ship, as the name implies, was going to be optimised for fighting in that close-to-shore region. It was conceptualised as being the size not of a modern destroyer, so 8,000 to 10,000 tons, but instead a World War Two destroyer, somewhere between 2

,000 and 3,000 tons. It would have to be shallow on the draft to enable it to go close to shore, stealthy to support its survivability, and then capable of doing a range of missions that otherwise would require a more expensive, larger combatant. By the early 2000s when the LCS began to be procured, those missions included "Countering enemy mines, submarines and attack craft in the littoral waters, with secondary missions including intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, maritime inter

cept, special operations forces support, logistical support for the movement of personnel and supplies." The obvious issue, which has probably already occurred to those of you listening at home, is how on earth do you get a small, cheap ship to do all of those missions? Or rather, how do you get it to do all of those missions without bolting so much stuff to it that it just becomes an expensive destroyer or a frigate anyway, albeit one with a slightly shallower draft. The answer was to take

some inspiration from one of the 20th century's greatest inventions: Lego. The LCS wouldn't be equipped with all of its crew or equipment full-time. There would be a regular crew operating the ship with some basic self-defensive and other equipment attached. But there would also be a space for a series of plug-and-play mission modules supporting different missions, If you wanted to go hunt mines, plug in a module with a bunch of mine-hunting equipment that came with a permanent crew ski

lled in that operation. Once the mines were clear, duck back to port and in a couple of hours you unplug the mine hunting module and replace it with something else. Maybe you want to go hunt swarms of surface drones and fast attack boats, so you strap on a Surface Warfare Module, which comes with a pair of 30mm cannon. That way you wouldn't need the ship to carry all the crew and weapons it needed for all of its missions all the time. You just needed it to be able to do costume changes wi

th Broadway level speed. On the right there you can see an early 2000s document with some CGI that really does date it, featuring an executive summary by Representative Ander Crenshaw, who was on the House Appropriations Committee at the time. And he described modularity as a key feature of the LCS, "Like a set of children's building blocks, a modular ship consists of one or two basic hulls or seaframes and common ship systems, a range of mission modules, and a common information system w

ith standard interfaces. In principle, modules are interchangeable in a plug-and-play format." The document also talked about the way modularity had revolutionised the business world with things like the invention of the standard 20ft cargo container. It also predicted the LCS would change how the Navy mans its ships, trains its personnel and sustains its forces. Which I guess is technically true, although the document probably meant it in a positive fashion rather than what's actually ev

entuated. But getting back to the ships themselves, you did just hear me say two seaframes, not one. This is one of the great twists of the LCS saga, because there isn't one Littoral Combat Ship, there are two. The original plan was for two shipyards to produce prototypes, which would compete against each other and the better design would ultimately be chosen. The Independence class you see on the top right there is an aluminium hulled trimaran manufactured in Alabama. While the rather mor

e conventional looking Freedom class you see on the bottom right there is straight out of Wisconsin. Two ships of each class were originally built, they did compete against each other. And then, for reasons we'll go through in the second half of this piece, in the end when it came time to choose one, the Navy basically shrugged and said "Why not both?" And so the original plan to build a lot of one version of the ship became a plan to build a middling quantity of two versions, with very, v

ery little in common in terms of spare parts, training and support requirements. But hey, at least they'd be very fast multi-purpose ships enabled by those mission modules. Or at least they would be, if the mission modules worked as advertised, were as easy to swap as advertised, and actually existed. But as it was developing the program had issues on all three counts. When deliveries of the Freedom and Independence class ships began, the mission modules for them were (for the most part)

just not ready. If you go back to a 2014 CRS report, you can see indications that the Navy expected the mine counter-measure package to be ready in 2014, the ASW package to be ready in fiscal 2016, and the Surface Warfare Module being available a little earlier. However in the years and months that followed, some modules were shelved, others were delayed. It was discovered that hot swapping modules would probably take much, much longer than originally modelled. And in some cases the module

s just didn't deliver useful functionality. To quote the US Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Mike Gilday, in 2021 (in this case talking about that anti-submarine warfare module that remember was meant to be operational many, many years ago at that point), "The ASW modules just didn't pan out. The variable depth sonar didn't work as it should, the LCS is as noisy as an aircraft carrier. And so there are some big challenges there that we should have picked up on way earlier. And for me it

got to the point where I've been looking at the data on the ASW package for the last year and a half to 2 years, and it got to the point where a decision needed to be made that I wouldn't put any more money against it. And that left the future of those ships open." The Surface Warfare Module was much more successful. It got an initial operating capability in 2019, but was pretty widely criticised for being tremendously undercooked. It gave the ships two 30mm cannon and 24 Longbow Hellfire

anti-tank guided missiles, which is a comparatively short-ranged system that you'd more often see fired from helicopters. Now that armament, which remember is meant to represent the LCS in its up-gunned configuration, is probably sufficient if your primary target is going to be small boats and fast attack craft that have to get really, really close to you. But if you want to be a Littoral Combat Ship engaged in that ship-to-shore fight, you probably don't want to be fighting anti-ship mis

siles with ranges in the 100s of kilometres with a system that might, with a favourable wind and some luck, just make it to the double digits. Fortunately, we can only assume that everyone was mercifully distracted from the problems with the mission modules by all the problems with the ships themselves. The usual trifecta of delays, technical issues and increased costs all reared their heads. As you can see on screen there, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost blow-out for

the lead ships in the LCS program were far beyond those of many of the Navy's other high-profile ship building programs. With LCS-1 blowing out by 149% and LCS-2 by 155%. And even once the production lines were well and truly rolling, costs were still very high. When the Navy procured three additional LCS, I think in fiscal year '19 from memory, it did so at an average cost of more than half a billion dollars per vessel. That was also the year where we started to see the Navy get more val

ue out of LCS with things like the deployment of LCS 10 and 8 out of Singapore. But deployability was still seriously limited because the things seemed to break down all the bloody time. Some ships in the Independence class had to deal with serious structural issues, including cracking in the hull, noting that cracking is generally frowned on when it comes to objects that one hopes to remain watertight. But at least the Independence-class ships were moving, sometimes the Freedom class didn

't manage even that. There were multiple incidents of the ships having to be towed back to port. Such as when the USS Detroit reportedly required a tow when returning from a deployment in South America. The driving force for those issues was often the vessel's combining gear. To meet their performance goals, LCS uses both diesel and gas turbine propulsion to drive water jets. Making those engines work together required a combining gear to combine their output. And if that went, as it often

did in the case of the Freedom-class LCS, the ships were basically back to the age of sail. It got to the point where the Navy said that the problem was so bad it wouldn't accept new Freedom-class ships until the problem was resolved. Which might say something given the Navy was still happily operating the Independence class, you know, the ones with the cracks in the hull. That were in some cases so bad that reportedly the USS Omaha was ordered by the US Navy to limit its operations to 15

knots or slower in sea state 4 or lower. The sea state codes go up to 9 by the way, with 4 being characterised as "moderate". All the while, even when they were working, there was the question as to whether the Littoral Combat Ship would actually be suitable for combat. In its default configuration the only armament for these ships was a 57mm gun, a close-in weapon system for self-defence: a couple of .50 cal machine guns. And then if you attached the Surface Warfare Module two additional

30mm guns and some Hellfire missiles. Notably absent from that list is anything capable of engaging for example air targets that don't get very, very close to the vessel, surface targets that aren't within spitting distance, or ground targets that aren't kind enough to sit within gun range. Partly linked to that, many sources attacked the ship for its limited perceived survivability. In their 2017 report, the director for Operational Test and Evaluation observed among other things that,

"Both LCS seaframes had limited anti-ship and missile self-defence capabilities. The Navy has not fully tested these combat systems, and the Navy does not plan to conduct further air warfare operational testing of the Freedom seaframes 1 through 15 in their current systems configuration. The Navy has accepted the risk of continued operations with a combat system that is not operationally tested." It went further to say, "Survivability testing and preliminary analysis on both LCS variants

continues to demonstrate that neither LCS variant is survivable in high-intensity combat. As designed, the LCS lacks redundancy in the vertical and longitudinal separation of vital equipment found in other combatants. These features are required to reduce the likelihood that a single hit will result in the loss of propulsion, combat capability, and the ability to control damage and restore system operation." So when all was said and done, if you checked in on the LCS program a couple of yea

rs ago you can argue that what the Navy ultimately got was a cheap ship that was actually expensive, a fast ship that would sometimes struggle to outrun a World War Two freighter, a coastal warship that would struggle to survive against many coastal threats, a modular ship that was barely modular, an easy to maintain ship that was actually very difficult to maintain. And a revolutionary next-generation littoral combatant intended to fight against coastal targets it couldn't reach, submarin

es it couldn't find, mines it didn't have the equipment to clear. All while manifesting a level of mechanical reliability in their early versions that made the Admiral Kuznetsov look like an incarnation of reliability. The LCS won no shortage of critics in the Navy, some actually took to calling it "the Little Crappy Ship" instead of the Littoral Combat Ship. And the Navy repeatedly went after the program with the world's biggest razor trying to cut the number of ships to be constructed,

retire or reserve some of those that had already been completed, and steadily shedding mission modules for a more mono-mission concept. All with the goal of saving some money while the service desperately pivoted back to building some more conventional frigates. So of course Congress intervened repeatedly to make sure that the ships kept being built. Meaning the US Navy now finds itself in the bizarre position of retiring ships like the Freedom-class Sioux City less than 5 years after it

been commissioned. The slightly older Detroit and Little Rock commissioned 2016 and '17 respectively have both been put up for sale. However all three are due to effectively be replaced by new Freedom-class LCS 27, 29 and 31, with the newest of them, USS Cleveland, only being launched on the 15th of April 2023. At time of recording, 13 Freedom-class LCS have been built, 5 have been retired, and yet 3 are still in construction. A figure that I hope neatly rounds out this opening story of th

e LCS. And so now that we've discussed what went wrong, let's start touching on the why and what we might learn from it. And as I look at a sample of the issues that LCS and later DD(X) faced, I'm going to try and provide examples from across the different parts of the program life cycle. From the initial strategic scan and requirements generation process, where you are asking what the problem is and what you want the system to be able to do. Through to the points where you start deciding

how the system will do it and go about actually building it. For those of you who want more information on how that process can go wrong in general, I'll link my video on procurement in the description. But for LCS I want to start with a decision that was made relatively early in the process, when the military was still deciding what a Littoral Combat Ship was and what it needed to be able to do. For the two LCS classes, one of the most impactful costly requirements was probably that the

ships be fast: really, really fast. An Arleigh Burke-class destroyer is fairly quick and agile, being capable of more than 30 knots. But with the Independence and Freedom class, the push was for something that could do more than 40. Now as most of you listening probably know, when you are trying to push an object through the water as a general rule: the faster you go, the harder it gets to go even faster. You have to add more and more engine weight and volume until progressively you are spe

nding a lot of your engine power propelling your engine power. And unlike America's supercarriers, or some of the Soviet Union's very fast submarines, with LCS there wasn't going to be a nuclear reactor on hand that could just solve that engineering problem by just throwing more and more energy at the issue. In the end, in order to get the required performance in a shallow draft vessel, the LCS designers ultimately went with relatively complex water-jet propulsion systems that took up a lo

t of space, were maintenance intensive, could often only be serviced by contractors - not the ship's crew. Which was in some ways an extension of a broader problem with the LCS in that they were highly dependent on contractors for servicing. And in some cases I'm told the ship's crews weren't even given the PIN numbers necessary to fully access the ship systems, instead being reliant on a vendor to come out. Which is already a model that a lot of militaries have somewhat soured on. But yo

u could argue the drawbacks of that model were potentially compounded in the case of the LCS when you had components or systems like the combining gear on the Freedom class, with a tendency to break. We talked about the design flaw in the combining gears earlier. But it seems unlikely the propulsion system would have looked like that in the first place, if the requirement didn't say this thing needed to be able to play tag with speedboats. But of course the Navy didn't really have a choice

, because we've not yet invented any other piece of technology that is capable of moving quickly over large areas of ocean and engaging small under-armed targets like speedboats. Helicopters and naval aviation aren't real, citizen, move along. Next, I want to move to an issue that was less focused on the question of what the ship had to do, but rather how it was going to do it. In the past I've called this the concept phase, but it's basically where you move from the big picture question o

f "what problem am I trying to solve" to "how am I going to try and solve it?" It is entirely possible to get an early conceptual decision wrong and as a result to screw yourself utterly later on. To take an extreme example, if I decide my troops need new generation communications equipment that is very difficult for my opponent to jam, that's one thing. But if I jump the gun and issue a requirement for little harnesses that will allow carrier pigeons to carry USB sticks as my nominated a

nswer to that broader need, then I've probably pre-selected a very bad conceptual solution to the problem. For the LCS one of the concepts, one of the features built in from almost the very start, was a multi-mission capability that was enabled by modularity. If the Navy was dealing with a submarine warfare threat the LCS could quickly duck into port, say "I choose you Anti-Submarine Warfare module", and off it went. The concept was always going to be attractive for at least two reasons. F

irstly, as a savings measure, you didn't need as many hulls, you could just invest in different mission modules and use the ships across missions as required. And secondly, because it helped with the basic engineering challenge of how to fit a lot of equipment and capability into a small vessel. Namely, by making it removable and not having all of it fitted at the same time. Notably, the concept wasn't an entirely new one, at the time LCS was being conceived the Royal Danish Navy was alrea

dy using a system called StanFlex. Danish StanFlex modules can be changed within half an hour using a 15 ton capacity crane. And allowed ships to quickly bolt on everything from quad packs of Harpoon missiles, to anti-submarine warfare torpedoes, to command and operation equipment for mine-clearing drones. So the concept wasn't new, and I think it has potentially huge relevance for naval developments going forward, but it was new for the US Navy. And as we'll discuss in a moment, that nove

lty coupled with the length and breadth of what the Navy wanted the mission modules to be able to do, introduced a significant degree of technical risk basically from the start. It also introduced some of the risks you will almost inevitably get when you decide to invest in trying to make a particular platform multi-mission capable. And hearing that, you might be thinking "Hey, Perun is about to go on a rant about how specialised tools are usually better than multi-mission or modular ones

." And you know what, sometimes but not always that is true, but it's not what I'm going for here. Instead the issue is a basic physics problem, that no matter how many missions a single platform is capable of doing, it can only really be doing one of them at a time. If I'm on a building site and one bloke needs a hammer, one bloke needs a screwdriver and the other one a saw, I can't solve the problem by giving them one multi-tool. Because if screwdriver dude is using the tool, then hammer

guy is going to be left figuring out if he can use a brick as an acceptable substitute. At present the United States Navy finds basically all its ships pretty heavily tasked. There's demand for just about everything, and the Navy just isn't big enough to answer every request from every combatant command. And so you have to ask the question: by engineering all of these additional capabilities and modularity into the LCS, were you making a more expensive, more complex ship than you needed t

o do a lot of the jobs it was going to be required to do? Do you need your Anti-Submarine Warfare ships to be able to quick swap into being mine clearers when you are going to need both mine clearers and ASW ships basically all the time? And do you need the ship in either of those roles to be able to do 45 knots? Ironically, in some respect this is the problem that LCS was intended to solve. The Arleigh Burke destroyers are so multi-mission capable that they are massive overkill for a lot

of the jobs that they are constantly required to do. So it's an interesting hypothetical to pose, what would have happened if instead of getting two very similar, modular, multi-mission, very fast LCS ships from two different shipyards the US had instead ordered two specialised non-modular designs from the same. Say for example, a next generation mine hunter on one hand, and a small surface combatant on the other. Which is an interesting hypothetical that starts to touch on one of the big

decisions that was made in the actual program, building two classes of LCS rather than down-selecting to one. On its face, that might sound like an interesting decision from an efficiency perspective. Two sets of spares, two training programs, two different crew cohorts, and half of the economies of scale for either ship class despite them both being designed to answer the same basic requirement. So in terms of the Navy trying to get the best possible ship at the best possible value, this

was an interesting call. But perhaps one of the biggest lessons and potentially warnings for future procurement programs is not that this was a stupid decision per se, but rather that in context it did make a degree of sense. As one of the articles I'll link in the description notes, there have been plenty of times where the LCS program has been under significant political pressure. In the summer of 2004 the House Armed Services Committee attempted to remove funding for the program from t

he FY 2005 defence budget, "citing a number of substantive concerns about the program." The head of the Projection Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee at the time, Roscoe Bartlett, basically said the concept was "immature" and pushed for funding for additional Arleigh Burke-class destroyers instead. But doing that was going to pose a significant threat to the shipyards that were now heavily invested in the LCS program. That meant potential layoffs of skilled labour a

nd an uncertain future. So there was some significant push back from program supporters. Companies literally "blanketed the Metro stations serving Capitol Hill and the Pentagon with posters pushing for the Littoral Combat Ship as a program with slogans like 'Littoral Dominance Assured'." Now personally I've never found myself waiting at a train station, looked at an advertisement, and suddenly found the urge to impulse buy a fleet of warships. But I guess Washington is a very strange place

sometimes. And it may be that by going with two designs the program was engaging two shipyards, protecting two workforces, and deliberately broadening the stakeholder base. As the article put it: "In choosing two teams to build Flight 0 prototypes, the US Navy widened its base of support within the industry, an incentive that was directly acknowledged in comments made by anonymous Pentagon sources at the time." The Navy may not have wanted both the Freedom and Independence class ships to

be built, but in military procurement, industrial policy and political incentives are usually going to get a vote. And so to an extent there's probably a policy question here, of how those concerns should be considered, how they should impact the decision-making process, and how future instances of this dilemma should be handled. As for the result in this situation, if you go back to the authorisation bill we were just discussing, well it "actually ended up fully funding the construction o

f the two Littoral Combat Ship prototypes at a higher level than had been proposed by the US Navy, the House or the Senate in the original authorisations." As well as the decision to build both classes of ship, there's also something to be said for the decision to build them both relatively quickly. Multiple LCS would be launched before all of the technologies that were intended for integration into them (particularly the mission modules) were completed and tested. That decision may actual

ly have complicated the process of getting mission modules functional. Instead of designing the ship and the module in parallel and building both once they both worked and integrated properly, the design of the modules (and the process for swapping them over) had to fit the ships as they were already being built. That meant a) for years the Navy was paying to maintain multi-mission warships without the ability to fit the equipment they needed to do multiple missions. And that even then, t

he gun was probably being jumped on some of the modules. As the DoD Inspector General report on the modules put it, "The Navy declared initial operational capability for the three MCM mission package systems reviewed prior to demonstrating that the systems were effective and suitable for their intended operational uses." It's important to stress that this phenomenon, where a system is pushed into production before all of its components or technologies are mature and ready to go is not a ph

enomenon unique to this program. You would struggle to find a major military that hasn't pushed out more than a few products with more bugs than your average Bethesda release. Yes, this can be dangerous, and remediating problems later is often going to cost more than fixing them pre-production. But one of the issues here is even though the decision might seem stupid on its face, there's a lot of incentives that push basically everyone involved to do so. Shipyards, their workers and polit

ical representatives don't want yards to be idle, they want them to be building ships. Naval planners, desperate to try and meet the needs of combatant commanders are often going to want more hulls sooner. And political and military leaders alike are often going to have an incentive to be able to show some progress. So you might have a range of incentives acting on people in the system to basically say, "She'll be right, mate, just get it built and we'll fix it in post." But if there's a

lesson here it might be that rigorous testing and getting your fixes done up front might save you a heap of resources later. Now there are plenty of other elements about LCS that we could interrogate here if we had infinite time, everything from the crew and maintenance models to certain design decisions. For example, it would be interesting to explore more why the development of the mission modules went the way it did, when systems like the Danish StanFlex which was already used on a numb

er of warship classes was available as a potential starting point. But by now I'm hoping you've got a pretty good sample, and we can move on. Now after all that, and especially if you are a US taxpayer, you are probably interested in whether or not these ships had a sort of redemption arc. What happened to the hulls that weren't cancelled or decommissioned, and what is their future in the US Navy? Because while it's all well and good to play armchair admiral and say the Navy should have de

signed and built different ships over the last few decades, defence procurement is not a game where you can just load a previous save if you've made a suboptimal decision. Ultimately you operate with the ships you have, not the ships you wish you had. There is a reason for example, that when the Moskva was sunk the Russians sent, among other things, a salvage ship which was more than 110 years old. And it's probably not because the products of Tsarist shipyards were considerably better th

an modern manufacturing. Yes, the US Navy is actively trying to decommission ships, especially of the Freedom class, and trying to sell off others to any ally brave enough to take them. But 23 active ships is a lot of active ships, and the Navy's got a lot of jobs that need doing. The LCS may or may not deserve the title of Little Crappy Ship, but in the end the Navy's got a lot of little shitty jobs for them to do. And every low-end task they can do that doesn't then require an Arleigh Bu

rke still realises a savings and utility for the wider force. In short, and this is a point I really want to make here, it seems that part of the reason the Navy has gone after the LCS program isn't because the ships are useless, they are not, in fact they are quite heavily tasked, it's just that they are sucking away resources from other things that the Navy might think it needs more. For now though, the Navy has plenty of LCS hulls and is trying to make them as useful as possible. In ord

er to get the LCS to that point, the Navy is making some pretty big changes. All those old ideas about constantly and flexibly swapping mission modules, yeah, those are mostly gone. Instead each LCS hull will generally focus on a single mission. With the Independence class being focused on mine counter-measures. The maintenance model, which was reportedly placed under significant pressure during Covid, has continued to evolve, and a lot if not all of the old technical bugs have been sequen

tially squashed. So in theory the LCS of the future should be more mechanically reliable and more readily available for specialised tasks like mine counter-measures. And trust me, the US Navy could really use a new generation of ships to handle mines. For mine clearing duties at the moment, the US Navy currently relies on the so-called Avenger class. Although personally I'd prefer it if mines were cleared first rather than as an act of vengeance after they had already sunk ships. The Aveng

ers entered service in the 1980s, are beginning to retire, and have just a couple of issues and limitations. They are old, very slow as in 14 knots slow, have a World War Two level self-defend capability, which is limited to 4 manually operated .50 cal machine guns. A hull made of the cutting edge composite material known as wood. And no aviation facilities, which is a problem given just how useful helicopters and drones might be in the mine counter-measure role. So yeah, on the Avengers

power level scale, very much more towards the Hawkeye side. And while an LCS may not be as survivable or well armed as a destroyer or a cruiser, it's going to be a heck of a lot faster, more survivable and better armed than this thing. There have also been a lot of efforts focused at addressing the perceived firepower deficit, particularly when it comes to the Independence-class ships. All of those Independence-class vessels have been receiving lethality and survivability packages. You can

see a before and after of the USS Charleston here, with its original Wikipedia photo on the left, and a much more recent shot taken February 5th 2023 on the right. Those box-like structures they've managed to squeeze in behind the other armament are 8 tubes for NSMs. The Naval Strike Missile is a modern anti-ship cruise missile with a range past 200 kilometres, with a secondary ability to attack land targets, giving the LCS some much longer claws. Some vessels, including USS Savannah, hav

e also been given an ability to fire SM-6 and potentially Tomahawk cruise missiles, giving them something to shoot down aircraft, missiles, or potentially ground targets thousands of kilometres from the launch platform. The somewhat hilarious aspect of those tests is that after all the effort to develop seamlessly integrated mission modules for the LCS, what they basically appear to have done for these tests is taken a US Army Mark 70 launcher, which is a fancy name for 4 VLS cells in a 40

foot container, and just dropped it on the back of the ship. It's certainly not going to win any awards for technical complexity, and one has to wonder if the next step will be to park a couple of HIMARS on the back of this thing and say it's got shore bombardment capability. But in the end more firepower is more firepower. And with the ships currently patrolling the Red Sea so reliant on these sort of missiles, it'll be interesting to see where this concept goes with the LCS in the futu

re. But that's enough improvement stories for the moment, because we have another ship class to talk about. This is the DD(X), aka DDG-1000, aka the Zumwalt class. As we established earlier, the US Navy was already probably onto a bit of a winner with the Arleigh Burke class, the DDG-51. But it's arguably a pretty basic tenet of military research that you always want to be giving at least some thought to what comes next. Whether that be something to complement your existing system, or sup

ersede it. In the 1990s that meant programs like the Surface Combatant for the 21st century, SC-21. That program studied a wide array of designs, but eventually spawned concepts like the 21st century Land Attack Destroyer, the DD-21. And while the program was eventually cancelled, it spawned a lot of the ideas we'd later see in the Zumwalt class. A tumble-home stealthy design, an advanced gun system, the use of automation technologies to significantly cut down manning requirements and a s

hit ton of missile cells. As noted previously, DD(X) was announced in 2001. And I've got a CRS report from 2004 on the right there that gives some indication as to what the plans were for it at the time. According to the report, DD(X) was going to be a multi-mission destroyer with an emphasis on the land attack mission. The ships were intended to be "Equipped with two 155mm Advanced Gun Systems for supporting Marines ashore, not less than 600 shells for those guns, and 80 missile tubes fo

r Tomahawk cruise missiles and other weapons." Due to automation, the report suggested the ship would have a crew of between 125 and 175. Compared to about 300 on the other Navy destroyers and cruisers of the time. Plus these space-age ships were intended to integrate a whole bunch of new technology, stealth features, composite structural materials, integrated electric drives, the Advanced Gun System and its ammunition etc. all while not completely breaking the bank. As the report noted, "

The Navy estimates that the first DD(X) will cost about $2.8 billion to design and build, including $1 billion in detailed design and non-recurring engineering costs for the class." And while I really want you to hold on to that figure for later, there's one other sentence of note that I want to flag on this page. And that was the claim that "in large part due to its reduced crew size, the DD(X) is to cost substantially less to operate and support than the Navy's current cruisers and destr

oyers." Because a sci-fi technology test bed displacing thousands of tons more than previous more conventional designs absolutely screams "cost saving". And it's not just me raising an eyebrow there, I can find evidence of the CBO questioning some of the Navy's estimates as early as 2005. But quibbling over sustainment cost is probably partly beside the point. Because in order to maintain something, you first have to buy and build it. And at least early on, the projected procurement costs

were high to be sure, compared to previous ships like the Arleigh Burke, but you could argue they did align with the size and complexity of the vessel. By the time it got to the 5th or 6th ship, the Navy estimated that it would be procuring each hull for between 1.2 and 1.4 billion fiscal year 2002 dollars. The Congressional Budget Office, assuming that 24 ships would be built at a rate of 2 per year, estimated an average procurement cost per hull of $1.8 billion in fiscal 2003 terms. But

for reasons we'll come back to in a bit, both of those estimates ended up being very wide of the mark. By the late 2000s different factors were all pushing against the DD(X) program. The Navy was reportedly telling Congress that what the service really needed were more Arleigh Burkes, not more of these super ships. The ships were dogged by technology readiness issues, claims that they might be vulnerable to a wide array of threats and of course cost blow-outs. Spiralling costs would trigg

er a legal trip-wire requiring the program to re-justify itself essentially. And while overall program costs were cut, the biggest means of doing so was reducing quantity. At one point there had been discussion of building more than 30 ships, that CBO cost estimate from before assumed 24. But eventually the number of ships to be built was sliced all the way down to 3: DDG-1000, 1001 and 1002. That meant the considerable R&D and other fixed costs had to be spread over a smaller and smaller

number of hulls. By the time of the Navy's fiscal year 2024 budget submission, the third and cheapest ship in the class was estimated to have had a procurement cost of 4.3 billion US dollars. While the sources that try and spread R&D and other costs over the three hulls come up with a figure north of 7 billion. Pro tip: if your destroyers end up in the same rough cost category as your allies' aircraft carriers, say the UK's Queen Elizabeth class, something might have gone wrong. And unlik

e those aircraft carriers, these destroyers also had questionable offensive potential. The key to Zumwalt and its sister ships being able to do the shore bombardment mission was specialised ammunition for their Advanced Gun Systems. These weren't regular 155mm rounds, they were specialised guided hyper-velocity projectiles. So specialised in fact that, like a fancy sports car that will only take the most expensive gas possible, the ship's guns couldn't actually fire regular 155. But in pa

rt because of the reduction in the number of ships to be purchased, the average cost per round of that specialised ammunition spiralled upwards towards somewhere between 800,000 and 1 million US dollars per shot. Now the Team Fortress 2 heavy does like to brag that it costs $400,000 to fire his gun for 12 seconds, but at a sustained fire rate of one round every 10 seconds the two guns on Zumwalt would have him comprehensively beat, firing nearly $4 million worth of ammunition in those sam

e 12 seconds. Even the US Navy is going to struggle to justify those sort of shipping costs for the warhead you can fit into a 155mm shell. So procurement of those specialised long-range land-attack projectiles was ended reportedly at just under 100 rounds. Meaning that as of 2003 the US Navy, for all of its expenditure, was ultimately left with 3 destroyers (two operational and one still fitting out) each of which cost comfortably more than a nuclear attack submarine or a small aircraft

carrier, that were proudly capable of cruising the world showing off those Advanced Gun Systems for which they had effectively no ammo. The GAO also noted that four critical technologies aboard the ships had not yet matured. Noting that "Three of these immature technologies, which involved the ship signature, computing and radar capabilities were planned since program start." All of which combined I'd argue, meant these ships ended up considerably more expensive than they were meant to be,

considerably less capable than they were meant to be, and as for those operational savings they were meant to offer compared to the Arleigh Burke, well, according to one source I found they actually ended up costing about twice as much. So to move on to the "why" part, there are so many decisions and factors we could look at to help explain the Zumwalt's journey. But if you want to talk about one (just one) that shaped the way the ship evolved and performed then I think we have to go back

to the original requirement that said the Navy had to come up with something that could do naval gunfire support. Now at least in part, this was probably because there were some in Congress who were very nervous about the phase out of the old Iowa-class battleships. The US had reactivated four of them during the Reagan years, given them Tomahawk cruise missiles, and then also given them a chance to throw 16 inch shells at things during the Gulf War. In that respect the ships had performed

, a 16 inch shell represents a lot of bang. But with a post-Cold War budget, keeping a World War Two-era hull with a crew complement close to 2,000 in service just so occasionally you could throw 16in shells at something wasn't really going to win any prizes for responsible financial management. That was a niche supposedly that a land-attack destroyer could fill. And by mandating the "how", by saying that Zumwalt had to be able to provide gunfire support (as opposed to any other sort of

support) to amphibious operations while being packaged with a range of cutting-edge technologies, a fair amount of risk (arguably) might have been baked into the effort from the start. Now the lazy thing to do here would just be to exploit the fact that hindsight is 20/20, say the gun ultimately did not work and didn't prove economical and therefore was obviously always a bad idea. Instead I think it's a warning of the potential for a series of logical decisions to result in an illogical c

oncept that ultimately doesn't deliver anything militarily useful. The AGS arguably made sense in the context of the requirements we discussed earlier. You start with Congress setting a requirement that basically says you only get cash if you build a ship with a bunch of guns that can help the Marines. Now navies consume funding faster than even diesel and grey paint, so they probably didn't want to get cut off, so guns it is. But the Navy doesn't also want to get its very expensive destr

oyer killed by things like shore-based anti-ship missiles, so it needs a way to make the ship doing the naval gunfire survivable. Stealth might help, but not if you are parked within visual range of the coast. So now they might add the requirement that the gun has to be able to fire at stand-off distances. And the danger at this point is that by asking engineers to combine two separate, individually reasonable requirements: gunfire support and stand-off distances, is that you start by taki

ng a gun system, the advantages of which are usually going to be the fact that you have a lot of magazine depth and that the rounds are relatively cheap compared to missiles, and then you start adding missile-like features like range and precision guidance, without adding one of the missile's other redeeming qualities, a larger warhead and greater destructive potential. So instead of spending 1 to 2 million dollars to send a 450 kilogram warhead 2,000 plus kilometres on a cruise missile w

ith an accuracy of a couple of metres, you can now spend almost a million dollars to send perhaps 10 kilograms of explosives maybe 150 kilometres in a less accurate fashion. At this point some of you might be saying, "Hey Perun, what about long range and specialised guided ammunition for regular cannon artillery? Are you trying to say that doesn't make sense?" To which I'd say those are usually very specialised, valuable tools that give flexibility to cannon artillery because the guns can f

ire both regular dumb rounds and smart rounds. With the Zumwalt AGS, the premium option was the only option. One of the great rivalries in many navies, supposedly, although I think it's often quite hammed up, is between missile and gun people. Both tend to acknowledge the importance of the other system, but viciously defend the capabilities of their own. For my part, I have absolutely no inclination to take a side in that great debate of our time, but I do want to advance one humble sugg

estion. Every time someone puts forward a proposal to try and make a gun do missile things, or a missile do gun things, can we please just look at it twice before we green-light the project? All the more so, I'd argue, because the AGS might have been trying to fill a niche that didn't really exist. For relatively short range targets that need to be engaged in an affordable way, guns already exist. And even the swishest programmable ammunition for your average naval gun is going to come nowh

ere near the cost of those initial long-range rounds for Zumwalt. Meanwhile, if you want to provide support to troops ashore, potentially in a very dangerous environment with a lot of stand-off anti-ship munitions, there's already an answer for that too. And it has something to do with all those suspiciously flat-topped vessels that the US and other navies insist on cruising around in. In a low-threat environment you might use helicopters and naval guns, in a high threat environment you c

an deliver a lot of payload a long distance, very precisely, using naval aviation. The Marines even have their own F-35s which can carry a lot of bang a long way into some pretty dangerous environments. And for when you really, really, really need to hit something over the horizon, there's always Tomahawk. The need to support troops and engage targets ashore is probably a very real requirement. But as a conceptual answer to that problem so far, super guns don't have a particularly good rec

ord. OK, so let's just pretend for a moment that you spend billions of dollars per ship buying advanced gun-armed destroyers that can't fire their guns. No worries, I'm sure it happens to the best of us, the question is: how can you make the best of the situation? We've already established that maybe the super-expensive stealth ship doing shore bombardment with million dollar rounds isn't the most coherent and useful concept, but there are still some features of the Zumwalt class that admi

ttedly make it special, and which might be useful in a different role. Those stealth features that might not be enough to keep you alive if you are close to a shore doing bombardment where everyone can just see and kill you anyway, might actually add a lot to your survivability if you are out in a crowded blue-water ocean environment. The ships have decent on-board power generation, meaning they can potentially support technology upgrades, and perhaps most importantly, due to their massive

size and the presence of an absolutely useless weapon system, these ships have something that most of the US Navy's other surface combatants don't have: a lot of spare internal volume. By ripping out the AGS modules, it's reportedly possible to create enough room on these ships to fit some very large missile tubes for 16 Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missiles. Conventional Prompt Strike is a very expensive, very long range weapon using a hypersonic glide vehicle. And by fitting it

you're basically turning Zumwalt from a wannabe battleship into a wannabe stealth bomber. It will become a stealthy stand-off surface warfare and ground attack platform, operating at distances long enough that its stealth features actually add meaningfully to its survivability. And survivability is probably really relevant there, because the threat the ship poses to its opponent is no longer a magazine of cannon rounds, but instead carrying a dense concentration of multi-million dollar we

apon systems that by definition are only going to be used to target the most valuable opposing targets. Something which might just kick them up a few spots on any red force's target priority list. The whole thing admittedly has a bit of a "just as planned" vibe to it. The Navy co-develops a revolutionary new weapon system, and it just so happens that they have already developed a surface ship with a lot of the traits you'd probably want in a hypersonic missile carrier. Which means the Navy

has a way to quickly introduce hypersonic weapons into the surface fleet, gain experience in operating them, and doesn't have to wait for a new generation of surface combatants that can carry the missile to be designed and built. Or even worse, rely on the Air Force, the Army or the bubbleheads. "OK, so Perun," you might be thinking, "surely that means this story actually in the end has sort of a happy ending? The LCS may have had a rocky start, but hey, now it's a warship with actual we

apons on it and apparently a clear mission set as well. Meanwhile, the Zumwalts might become a factor that enemy war planners actually have to consider. And they'll bring a capability to the surface fleet that, at least for the moment, no other surface warship in the US Navy is expected to have." But I think there's a lot of good reasons not to write this off as some big brain manoeuvre, give everyone promotions, and say that all is well that ends well. However, there really is a cost to t

his sort of "she'll be right, mate" approach of building a system and then saying you'll just fix it later. There are going to be limits in how optimised the final design can be. If you're bolting new systems to something post production, it's probably never going to be as efficient as if you'd integrated them from stage one. While another cost is likely to just be - cost. It is generally going to be much, much more expensive to chop a ship open and upgrade it after it has already been bu

ilt than to do so during construction. And that financial cost can quickly become an opportunity cost, where all the resources you are expending doubling down on this system and trying to make it useful, as well as shipyard time and inputs, could have been directed towards literally anything else. For example, the US Navy probably doesn't want to think too long and hard about how many Arleigh Burke destroyers, or new submarines, or shipyard upgrades you could afford with the significant in

vestments that were made into LCS. Or the funds which went into DD(X), which probably could have bought another aircraft carrier, a couple of submarines, a fleet of destroyers from Korea, or about half the DLC for your average EA game. But for me perhaps the greatest opportunity cost, the greatest missed opportunity, of the Zumwalt and LCS stories is the loss, not just of money, but of a generation's worth of time and focus. The US Navy of the '90s was pretty cutting edge in terms of desig

ns compared to many of its competitors. And while the two ships proposed to do it in very different ways, both Zumwalt and LCS offered the Navy an opportunity to jump even further ahead. To move into an entirely new generation of designs at the time that other powers were still trying to catch up with the Arleigh Burkes and the Ticos. However, because particularly the Zumwalt effort performed an Icarus manoeuvre and flew too close to the sun, instead the US Navy has had to fall back. Bolti

ng more and more upgrades on the Arleigh Burke while basically starting again on the next generation. Meanwhile, in the many years and billions of dollars it has ultimately taken the US Navy to go from Arleigh Burke to Arleigh Burke, allied and competitor ship builders alike have considerably narrowed the capability gap. The Japanese and Koreans both introduced new generation warships that were heavily armed, capable and affordable. And as for the People's Liberation Army Navy, they've in

troduced a suite of new warships running the gamut all the way up to aircraft carriers and the heavily armed Type 55s. That obviously doesn't mean the US Navy surface ships are no longer competitive, the latest Arleigh Burkes are very capable warships, but the gap just isn't what it once was. A consequence perhaps of missing the proverbial boat on a warship generation. Which brings us to the final section of this video, and here I want to really zoom out and focus on a single issue, a singl

e imperative, that arguably afflicted both of these programs. And that's the importance of making sure that all of your assumptions about your understanding of your future strategic environment and as a result your objectives and requirements, are as robust, accurate and well tested as possible. It can be tempting to be drawn into debates more about the final technical details of a product, as opposed to some of the basic questions that should have been asked before it was designed in the

first place. But there is a very general and not at all perfect rule that the earlier in the design process you make an incorrect decision, the more punishing and difficult to reverse it will ultimately be. And few questions come earlier in the process than assessing your environment, your objectives and your requirements. And if you do travel back in time by reading the Quadrennial Defence Review from 2001, some of the content seems very far removed from our present reality. It notes the

re might be opportunity for cooperation with Russia, and that Russia doesn't pose a conventional military threat to NATO. While a lot of the threats being emphasised emanated from weak or failing states and non-state actors. Meanwhile, the possibility of large scale combat operations against a peer opponent was being actively downplayed. It also observed that the United States "Will not face a peer competitor in the near future." Which would be a much more controversial statement if made

these days, but you have to remember this was a different time. In 2001 the entirety of the People's Liberation Army Navy's carrier component consisted of a rusting Soviet-era carrier getting ready to be towed to China ostensibly to serve as a theme park, not as a tool of training and power projection, or a first step towards the People's Liberation Army Navy as we know it today. The ships were being conceived in a context where a lot of the threats out there could be (for lack of a better

term) bullied by an appropriately designed warship. The Russian Navy's budget had been cut so deep it was struggling to fight rust, let alone the US Navy. No opponent at the time really possessed the means to find and kill a stealthy quiet destroyer slinging shells over the horizon. And Iranian forces in 2001 were separated from those of today by more than 20 years of drone and missile developments. So while I'm not saying that's what happened here, maybe in that scenario you assume your

opponents are relatively weak and so you can build accordingly. But the dangerous assumption that can creep into that sort of analysis, and the lesson that might need to be learned in the future, is that in the real world opponents aren't NPCs. They don't exist solely to provide a loot piñata or a reason for your military to exist. They have objectives of their own, they want to win, and if their capabilities are behind, they are going to want to evolve their capabilities. And so by the t

ime these new generation American ships start entering service, they discover a world that looks very different than the one they were built for. So if there's a potential reminder here, it might be that even before we get to the stage of requirements, when you are trying to understand your strategic environment, it's vitally important to avoid optimism bias and remember that your competitors are unlikely to stand still. Then having done that, let's talk requirements. A lot of what I've d

escribed with LCS and DD(X) to an extent feels like it is almost inevitable. You could say they were a product of the assumptions of their time, and they were always going to end up as what they were. But at least with LCS, I think there's some evidence that that isn't necessarily true. And it all goes back to those 1990s wargames I described right at the start that helped birth the LCS concept. You know the one, the exercise where blue force was trying to force the Straits of Hormuz aga

inst totally not Iran. And that as a result, those fighting the exercise decided that what they really needed was what became the LCS: a super-fast, minimally crude, attritable, multi-mission modular platform. Except they didn't. Simulated exercises enabled multiple versions of the LCS concept to be tested. And that in turn generated some insights. And many of those frankly align more with what the Navy is trying to make the LCS into now, not what it was originally built as. For example, th

e mission modules were simulated with a 24-hour turnaround time, which is pretty optimistic, but even with that turnaround time the people in the exercise still observed that it resulted in ships being out for a long time because they had to go back to port in order to swap out their module. The red force in turn knew how important the mission modules were, knew they had to be at one of the ports close to the theatre, otherwise what was the point? And as a result repeatedly attacked the po

rt where the mission modules were stored sometimes even before the main fighting had started. And so the blue force commander was actually pretty cold on the idea of swappable modules. Instead they wanted something a little bit bulkier, a little more expensive, with more capability baked in. As the Captain Power's article put it, "The operational commander preferred a single multi-warfare capable LCS that had ASW, surface warfare, and counter-battery capabilities, as well as a forceful s

elf-defence capability that made it reasonably survivable in moderate to high threat situations." "But OK Perun," you might be saying, "they were never going to get that if they also wanted a ship that could do 44 or 45 knots." Which again might be true, but it also wasn't what the exercise was suggesting. "Speed was considered a desirable characteristic, but not at the expense of a complete war-fighting suite." The exercise would also generate other insights and recommendations that must

have been lost somewhere along the way. It was noted that maintenance must not suffer because of reduced manning concepts, something which you could argue very much did happen in the final LCS and DD(X). And it was stressed that crew had to be sufficient to support multiple watch standers for extended periods at a high condition of readiness, or for the performance of several missions simultaneously, including damage control. It was also said to be the vision of the wargame players that t

he LCS should have an ability to react quickly to threats emerging from littoral land areas, such as a quick-reaction weapon that would enable them to deter shore-based mobile anti-ship missiles firing at the LCS. You know, like the cruise missiles that the Navy would start strapping to the things more than two decades later. That article, written by Captain Powers in 2012, made some predictions about how the LCS program would eventually evolve. It predicted that, "The module concept wil

l prove to be unsupportable from both a financial and operational point of view." And that what was instead likely to evolve was single-mission ships, for example a mine counter-measure ship to replace the wooden hulled minesweepers. While consideration needed to be given to new weapons for any warfare-centric version of the LCS, including capable anti-ship missiles, or a counter-battery missile for striking land targets. Something which, a decade on, the ships are now getting. I bring all

this up to illustrate two points. Firstly, procurement disasters are not pure RNG, these are not some impossible to predict acts of god that exist to strike the budget from the shadows. Rather, there's usually going to be evidence of the danger long before the point of no return. So a question there might be how organisations can make sure that they see those signs, avoid potential group think risk, and chart the right course early. Rather than be stuck making more expensive changes later

. Reportedly for example, the shipyards building the first two LCS prototypes were instructed to change construction and survivability standards mid-build. But the importance of survivability in the LCS concept had been flagged many, many years earlier. Again, building warships and advanced military equipment is not an easy thing to do. And the focus of industry is often going to be on delivering to government what government says it wants. So one major way to try and bring down cost and r

isk would be to try and make sure industry has the best possible brief and understanding of what they need to build, as long as possible before they actually have to build it. The second point is there might sometimes be real value in using wargames and simulation to guide procurement decisions. The simulated environment allowed teams (for very little investment by the taxpayer) to take different versions of the LCS concept and test them aggressively against a scenario and a red force. An

d indeed if you get the assumptions and parameters right, there's no reason you can't use wargaming to test different potential procurement priorities against each other. From my perspective, some of the most interesting wargames I've ever read about are those where two teams are given a scenario, and are handed their nation's existing force structure as well as a budget and a list of procurement alternatives. Basically a points buy system for interstate warfare. They might be handed 100 b

illion dollars in additional procurement funding and told to pick items from a very long shopping list. Do you want more carriers? Do you want more cruise missiles? Do you want to invest in information warfare? Maybe you want air defences and hardened base infrastructure, maybe you want as many angry Marines with as many fixed bayonets as possible. Or maybe these days you get some smart-arse who decides he wants to spend it all on 200 million FPV drones. The point is you can then run diffe

rent force structures with roughly equivalent investment values against each other and the scenario again, and again, and again at relatively low cost until potential lessons and observations emerge. It might help prevent the question being "does this investment perform well in a certain scenario?" To "What sort of investment performs best in this scenario?" I have no idea what sort of classified wargames or simulations took place looking at concepts like LCS before it went into service.

But I do think it's an open question as to whether the requirement and the final ship would have looked different if decision makers had been given an opportunity to competitively test different versions of the concept against each other in a simulated environment. If the maxim for the active duty force is along the lines of "train hard, fight easy", a procurement equivalent might be "simulate early, buy smart". And when it does come time to produce a next-generation system, keep your proj

ections grounded, your eyes on the mission, and do what you can to avoid flying too close to the proverbial sun. And with that, it's time for a channel update to close out. This topic has long been a patron favourite, and it came as a runner up in the recent general audience poll. So trust me when I say it feels pretty good to finally be able to release it. I do need to thank all those who helped make this episode a thing. And in particular those with knowledge of one or more of these pro

grams who were willing to provide unclassified insights and personal opinion on background. For me, even though a fair bit of work goes into them, the chance to do a procurement topic is always a bit of a treat. And so I genuinely hope that you enjoyed the episode, can take something potentially useful out of it, and of course that I'll see you all again next week. Sunday for those of you following here on the main channel. And as for you on Perun Gaming, I know you all have been waiting

for a video for a couple of weeks now as I travel around unable to fit a gaming PC in my suitcase. So I hope to see you a little earlier, on maybe Monday or Tuesday. But whatever the case, many thanks to all of you, and see you next week.