





On May 20, the US Navy took delivery of the USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000), the first of a class of destroyers designed to take on the role once served by battleships. As the Navy prepares to commission the Zumwalt, the first of three ships from the $22 billion (£15 billion) DDG-1000 program, the service is accelerating its plans to produce 14 smaller ships—frigates that were ordered to be built by the Pentagon instead of the last set of the Navy's Littoral Combat Ships.

The LCS program has experienced a number of glitches over its lifetime—canceled weapons systems, mine-hunting systems that can't pass acceptance tests, failures of gears aboard two ships that left them stranded, and the realization that no one asked for hull corrosion protection on one variant.

The biggest problem the LCS faces, however, is that its capabilities that do work match up against a very specific class of adversary: something on the level of 1990s-era Iranian Revolutionary Guard Navy patrol boats and suicide speedboats. And with the rise of China's blue-water navy and the growing tensions over claims in the South China Sea, the LCS is facing missions where the threat will be beyond its current capabilities.

The new frigates hope to give the Navy something more capable of dealing with multiple kinds of threats rather than just one at a time. But instead of being built to purpose, the new frigates will look a lot like the old LCS. Rather than picking an entirely new design or going with designs already being produced—including a proposed version of a ship already being built for the US Coast Guard—the Navy's Small Combatant working group chose instead to opt for a "stretch" version of the existing LCS designs. And now the Navy is pushing to select a modification of one of the two competing LCS designs by 2018, a decision that will have to be made before either Lockheed Martin or Austal (the LCS shipbuilders) can hammer out all the details or before Congress pulls the plug entirely.

The Zumwalt and LCS programs have both faced cutbacks for similar reasons, but they had very different starting points. The Zumwalt class was a technological stretch—a warship for the 21st century, designed to be a stealthy but heavy-hitting replacement for the Navy's retired battleships, carrying cruise missiles and two advanced gun systems that could lob guided shells 63 nautical miles (72 miles, or 117 kilometers) in support of troops on land. Its all-electric design is intended to make it capable of carrying the next generation of big guns as well—electromagnetic railguns and other directed-energy weapons still in development.

The LCS, on the other hand, was intended to be an affordable, flexible ship based largely on proven technologies from the commercial shipping world, with modular "mission packages" and weapons based on things already being used or developed by the Department of Defense for other roles. It would be relatively inexpensive to build, crew, and deploy. The class was designed with a very vague mission: dealing with "sea denial" forces in waters close to shore, taking on the role of clearing mines, hunting for shallow-water submarines, and dealing with swarms of small boats. And the lack of a defined mission was seen as a positive by its backers. "The notion that it doesn't have a mission, that it's a ship in search of a mission," Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said, "I think that's one of its greatest strengths."

If that's the LCS's greatest strength, that may explain why the Department of Defense decided it needed an upgrade.

Back to the drawing board, sort of

The concepts for both the Zumwalt and LCS designs originated in the mid-1990s. While both classes of ships are modern marvels of naval engineering and information technology, as initially designed they're the naval equivalent of bringing a really well-honed knife to a gun fight. It's not that the ships don’t do what they were designed to do (though the LCS has certainly had some trouble doing even that)—it's that the assumptions that the Navy's leaders brought to the table about the way the world would look when they arrived have not held up very well.

The Zumwalt has added more missile tubes for air defense but is still seen as vulnerable to ballistic anti-ship missiles in comparison to the Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyers that now form the backbone of the surface fleet. Originally intended to consist of 32 ships, the Zumwalt class was winnowed down over its development cycle to three, drastically raising the price tag of each because of the more than $9 billion sunk into initial R&D.

And the modular concept hasn't worked out as well for the LCS as was hoped, particularly as some of the weapons systems it was originally supposed to carry failed to materialize or failed in testing. Concerns about the survivability of the LCS and its underpowered weapons drove former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to order a freeze on LCS production and the formation of a task force to find a way to get a more capable ship into the construction pipeline. Still, the initial "block" buy of LCS ships has steamed ahead at full speed, with six delivered so far and another 20 already under construction (with four due for delivery this year).

On May 18, Capt. Dan Brintzinghoffer of the Naval Sea Systems Command's (NAVSEA's) Program Executive Office for Littoral Combat Ship (PEO LCS) Frigate Program Office gave an update on the progress toward that improved ship. Instead of having swappable mission packages—a concept that has turned out not to be as easy as the Navy thought it would be—the frigate-class version of the LCS will be a "multi-mission" ship, offering both anti-surface and anti-submarine capabilities with the addition of both Hellfire short-range missiles (the types fired by helicopters and Predator drones) and an over-the-horizon (OTH) missile system for attacking enemy ships. The ships will also carry a 20 percent larger crew as a result of all the new gear, and the survivability improvements will make it heavier as well.

The OTH system, which has not yet been chosen, would depend on what Brintzinghoffer described as "distributed lethality"—helicopters, drones, uncrewed surface vehicles, or other ships and aircraft providing the targeting information to aim them. The frigate design will also include improved radar and electronic warfare systems. The OTH missile system will also be retrofitted to the existing LCS ships to give them more firepower. That's a boost they desperately need, given that their current weapons systems are nearly outclassed by the Coast Guard's National Security Cutter—let alone the small combatant ships of potential adversaries such as China.