The program serves as yet another cautionary tale for the insidious Pentagon practice of concurrency. Concurrency poses significant risks to taxpayers because weapons purchased before the development process is completed often require extensive modifications, at great expense, to incorporate design changes to correct problems discovered during testing. Sometimes, as in this case, the modification costs for underdeveloped weapons are prohibitive and the effort is abandoned. The weapons then become “concurrency orphans,” and are scrapped before providing useful service. While Navy leaders are right to decommission the four ships and cut the program short, taxpayers will still be stuck with the bill for the $2.4 billion worth of Littoral Combat Ship concurrency orphans and a fleet of underperforming ships that will never live up to the original hype used to sell the program.

Moving forward from the LCS program, the Navy plans to buy 20 new Constellation-class guided-missile frigates. The ships themselves will be based on an existing Italian design and built by Fincantieri Marinette Marine. Starting with a proven design will reduce some of the risks hazarded by the Littoral Combat Ship program, but others loom. The Navy designated Lockheed Martin as the program’s lead systems integrator and awarded the company a contract to outfit the new frigates with their actual warfighting systems.

The Congressional Research Service has warned that, in general, by using a private-sector lead systems integrator the government cedes to the contractor responsibilities it normally retains, reduces the program’s transparency, and erodes the in-house expertise of the services to manage their own acquisition programs. According to a 2010 Congressional Research Service report, “[Lead Systems Integrators] can have broad responsibility for executing their programs, and may perform some or all of the following functions: requirements generation; technology development; source selection; construction or modification work; procurement of systems or components from, and management of, supplier firms; testing; validation; and administration.” The arrangement creates potential conflicts of interest by creating a situation where the contractor could design requirements for the program that match its own products or those of the contractor’s own subsidiaries.

The Navy estimates the new frigate will cost $940 million per copy, but the Government Accountability Office has warned that the program is already on the wrong track because the estimate has not been subjected to an independent analysis. The new frigate may be a conceptual improvement over the LCS but it will likely be anything but a bargain for the taxpayers.

Zumwalt-class Destroyers

The ultimate shipbuilding flop in recent history is the Zumwalt-class destroyer. Navy leaders wanted to build a ship capable of shore bombardment, a role that battleships and their heavy guns once filled. In keeping with the Pentagon’s tendency to abandon proven technology for gee-whiz digital tech at every opportunity, the new destroyer would eventually be armed with laser cannons and an electronic rail gun straight out of a science fiction novel. But like many such efforts, the new technologies proved to be a developmental bridge too far and ended up bringing the entire program down with them.

The Zumwalt program began, much like the F-35 program, in the weeks following the September 11 terrorist attacks, when Congress threw open the budgetary floodgates for many military programs. The Navy launched the program that became the Zumwalt in November 2001, soliciting proposals for industry to design a ship that, as then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz put it, “supports assured access to littoral regions and also develops the capability to defeat the air and missile defense threats the nation’s naval forces will face in the future.” The Navy selected Northrop Grumman to develop the design in April 2002.

Since the last battleship went to the mothball fleet in 1991, naval gunfire has been limited to 5-inch guns mounted on its destroyers and cruisers. The Zumwalts were to take over the fire support missions as their primary role and were equipped with the Advanced Gun System for the purpose. The new gun has a caliber of 6 inches, about the same as the Army’s 155 mm artillery tubes. The Zumwalt’s guns could strike targets at a range of 83 nautical miles with the rocket-assisted Long Range Land Attack Projectile. These rounds were designed for the Zumwalt’s gun and so were a highly specialized item, which caused their costs to skyrocket. Each round cost a staggering $800,000 to $1 million, or about the same as the more versatile Tomahawk cruise missile. Because of the costs, Navy leaders stopped purchasing rounds for the Zumwalts in 2016. Suddenly, the destroyer’s role fundamentally shifted from using big guns to support troops fighting onshore to using missiles to kill enemy ships at sea, a role already filled by several existing classes of ships.

As we’ve seen time and again, the costs for the Zumwalt program grew significantly as the realities of building ships packed with underdeveloped technologies asserted themselves. Congress was sold on the program based on per ship cost estimates of $1.5 to $1.8 billion. But estimates of the costs to complete the ships nearly doubled in between 2004 and 2005, a full six years before construction began on the first ship.

The program fell into the Pentagon death spiral. Navy leaders attempted to salvage the program by cutting the 32-ship fleet they’d planned to purchase to stay within their budget, which drove the cost of each ship ever higher. What we are left with is a planned fleet of three Zumwalt destroyers with a mission vastly different from the one originally intended, at an estimated program cost of $7.8 billion per ship.

If the Navy were to follow the Zumwalt program’s path, it would take 100 shipbuilding programs to add the necessary 300 ships to reach the ambitious fleet goals. As a retired Navy commander said of the Zumwalt program: “So much wasted time for so little gain for the nation. I hate to say it, but this is also true—none of this should be a surprise to anyone. How as an institution did we go this far down this path?”

The Path Ahead

Beginning with the Obama administration’s “pivot” to the Pacific and current discussion of great power competition, or whatever the favored term is today, we are essentially on the cusp of a new Cold War. This will likely play out much like the first. The 546-ship fleet goal sounds very much like the Reagan administration’s 600-ship goal during the first Cold War. The Navy didn’t quite reach that goal, peaking at 594 in 1987 through a combination of new shipbuilding and recommissioning older ships pulled from the mothball fleet. The Navy can’t recommission many ships now, so the only way to reach 500-plus is to build. But the pursuit of overly complex, experimental designs will doom any such effort.

Navy leaders seem to be trapped in the mindset that they have to dazzle the world with transformative technology. This leads them to pursue programs that inevitably fail. The Navy’s decision-makers who gave the thumbs up when presented with glossy drawings and promises of technological masterpieces at a bargain knew they would be safely retired before the ships would put to sea, with many of them working for the very contractors who made the claims. They were aided and abetted by the members of the congressional delegations from shipbuilding states who were eager to send taxpayer dollars back home.

The shipbuilding failures of the last 20 years should drive home fundamental lessons for civilian and uniformed military leaders. Newer technology doesn’t automatically make for a more effective weapon. We should be pursuing the simplest possible tools to accomplish the intended task, and doing so reduces both risks and costs. If a promising new technology does emerge, it should be fully developed onshore and then tested on an existing ship to make sure it works at sea. We should stop spending billions of taxpayer dollars building new ships around unproven gadgets.

Of course, the idea of building simpler ships seems counterintuitive when Americans are almost daily presented with breathless reports of the imminent threat posed by China. These reports are accompanied by urgent demands for ever greater defense expenditures to purchase weapons to meet the threat.

Before we break the bank even further to build new ships like the planned USS Constellation, we should closely examine China’s intentions. Much has been made of the numerous defensive systems the Chinese military has built to prevent the U.S. military from approaching the coast of Asia over the years. International security scholars Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich describe China’s A2/AD technology as “a series of interrelated missile, sensor, guidance, and other technologies designed to deny freedom of movement to hostile powers in the air and waters off its coast.” Creating such a network is inherently defensive in nature and a natural response to aggressive statements and actions by outsiders.

Even those moves that appear to signal a more aggressive Chinese naval strategy may in fact be a cover for a different goal. China has purchased and modified one decommissioned Soviet aircraft carrier and is now building three of its own. But Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes, authors of Red Star Over the Pacific (required reading for both the US Navy and Marine Corps), say the People’s Liberation Army Navy “is taking an unhurried approach to developing carriers.”

Navy leaders and Congress should consider the possibility that China may be building aircraft carriers as a means of convincing the United States to continue sinking massive investments in our own carrier force. At more than $13 billion a pop, plus another $8 billion for the air wing, an American aircraft carrier concentrates more than $20 billion of military capital in a single, and rather enticing target.

The Navy seems only too willing to take the bait. The commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Admiral Chris Grady, responding to a report of a new Chinese aircraft carrier in September 2020, said, “Good on ’em. It makes the argument that carriers are important.”

Conclusion

Taxpayers are right to question the need for a 500-plus-ship fleet. Rather than setting an arbitrary number of hulls, civilian and military leaders should conduct a thorough study of the capabilities needed to affect an overall naval strategy. Many roles and missions carried out by traditional surface ships could be performed by submarines and unmanned vessels. Submarines are much more survivable in the kind of contested environment created by China’s defensive network and are a credible deterrent to aggression on the seas.

If in the end the nation’s civilian and uniformed military leaders decide a 500-ship Navy should be a national priority, the Navy must change the way it does business for such a goal to be within the realm of reasonable possibility. Two of the three largest shipbuilding programs of the 21st century so far have been failures, with the future of the third very much in doubt. The Navy will have little choice but to build far simpler ships based on proven technology.

The Navy already learned the hard way that just because something is newer, that doesn’t mean it is better. Following two deadly ship collisions, Navy leaders decided to replace overly complex touchscreen control systems with more traditional physical throttle and steering mechanisms. But purchasing simpler ships overall would go against every demonstrated instinct of the Navy and the defense establishment as a whole. It is doubtful that anything short of enemy ships appearing off the coast of California could shift the entrenched thinking.

This article was first published by the Project for Government Oversight.

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