Littoral Combat Ship aka "Little Crappy Ship"

A steel-hulled vessel is being made in Marinette, Wisconsin, by a team led by Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT) (LMT), and an aluminum trimaran is being built in Mobile, Alabama, by a group led by Austal Ltd. (ASB) Lockheed’s first ship developed a crack in the hull, and Austal’s vessel had corrosion problems.

Nothing has haunted the LCS more than the perception that both variants are too lightly armed and may not survive an enemy attack. The Pentagon’s chief weapons tester has cited flaws with the ship’s guns and concluded that its helicopter isn’t powerful enough to tow mine-hunting equipment. Not ‘Survivable’ The ship “is not expected to be survivable in that it is not expected to maintain mission capability after taking a significant hit in a hostile combat environment,” Michael Gilmore, the weapons tester, said in a January report.

Littoral combat ships, known inside the Navy as little crappy ships, are too lightly armed to be effective on offense and too lightly armored to survive on defense according to information released by Bloomberg based on a secret memo written by the commander of naval surface forces, Vice Admiral Tom Copeman. The $37 billion ship program, developed after 9-11, has been beset with cost overruns and materials engineering problems including cracks and corrosion. The cost of the troubled sea turkeys has doubled to 440 million per ship since 2005. The objective was to develop a fast small ship for near shore action but, as the Navy should have learned from swift boats in Viet Nam, lightly armed boats near shore are easy targets to kill. Navy contractors are developing 2 different designs for the LCS, but both are failing. It sure looks like these are ships without a mission designed to keep the defense contracts coming. They are sea turkeys.All the money needed to cut the federal budget to target levels in the ongoing budget negotiations could be found by eliminating troubled defense contracts. The littoral combat ships are troubled defense program example number 1.