Navy Can’t Calculate Littoral Combat Ship’s Operating Costs, Says GAO Draft

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/05/07/navy-cant-calculate-littoral-combat-ships-operating-costs-says-gao-draft/



Navy Can’t Calculate Littoral Combat Ship’s Operating Costs, Says GAO Draft
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on May 07, 2013 at 5:25 PM

CAPITOL HILL: The Navy is 90 percent sure its current estimated cost to operate and maintain the controversial Littoral Combat Ship is off target, according to a draft Government Accountability Office report obtained by BreakingDefense.

According to the anonymous authors – whose diagnosis, we should emphasize, is not yet the official and fully vetted conclusion of the GAO, which won’t publish the final report until September – the Navy may go into a critical decision in 2015 about whether to contract for up to 28 more Littoral Combat Ships without enough understanding of the long-term costs, the evolving concepts to sustain the vessels, or even whether they have enough bandwidth to exchange maintenance data with support facilities ashore. As a result of this uncertainty, the GAO draft says the Navy’s own analysts have “only about 10 percent confidence” in the current estimate that it will cost $50.4 billion to “operate and support” a total of 55 LCSs over their 25-year service lives. While such long-term “life cycle costs” are notoriously hard to estimate accurately decades out, a normal program would have at least 50 percent confidence in its figures at this stage.

That’s a big question mark over a big part of the future fleet. While not as well-armed or well-protected as the Navy’s workhorse Arleigh Burke-class Aegis destroyers, the smaller, faster, and less costly Littoral Combat Ships play a crucial role in the Navy’s plans, replacing a host of aging frigates, minesweepers, and other smaller craft. Those vessels are what Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) referred to dismissively as “support ships” in a hearing he chaired this morning of the House Appropriations Committee’s panel on defense. The Navy is buying too many such low-end ships, he argued. “Support is one thing,” Frelinghuysen said, but with the Chinese military getting larger and more aggressive, he argued, the US needs “ships that are prepared for combat.”

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The problem is that the Littoral Combat Ship is so different from anything else in service that the Navy is still working out both combat tactics and day-to-day maintenance. The first of the class, LCS-1 Freedom, just arrived on its maiden overseas deployment to Singapore with seawater leaking into its lubricant fluid, the latest of a host of problems. Given the ship’s small size and crew, it relies heavily on shore facilities to perform repairs that larger ships would handle themselves at sea.