He told the House Armed Services Committee: ‘I refuse to put an additional dollar against a system that would not be able to track a high-end submarine in today’s environment.’
Committee chair Rep. Adam Smith said: ‘Regardless of how old they are, that’s a lot of money to be spent to get pretty close to nothing.
‘They’re incredibly expensive, and they don’t have the capabilities that we expected.
‘We can’t use them, number one because they’re not ready to do anything. Number two, when they are, they still break down.’
The nine $3.2bn anti-submarine warships set for the scrap heap
USS Fort Worth (LCS-3), Sept. 2012
USS Milwaukee (LCS-5), Nov. 2015
Detroit (LCS-7), Oct. 2016
Little Rock (LCS-9), Dec. 2017
Sioux City (LCS-11), Nov. 2018
Wichita (LCS-13), Jan. 2019
Billings (LCS-15), Aug. 2019
Indianapolis (LCS-17), Oct. 2019
St. Louis (LCS-19), Aug. 2020
The youngest littoral combat ship (LCS), the USS St. Louis, launched in August 2020.
It will serve just three of its 25-year planned service life before it is taken for scrap.
The touted LCS vessels, which were thought to be the ‘future’ of the US Navy, are among 24 warships to be decommissioned in 2023.
They could sell them and make more money..............
I was the program manager on OASIS a system on LCS. The navy, at least the ones I dealt with, knew from the start that the program was a waste of money. When I asked why they were proceeding the answer was a highly placed admiral was behind it and the system would continue to be built up until he was gone. Apparently, he’s gone.
When you are playing poker, once you put chips in the pot, they aren’t yours anymore.
If the hand develops in a way that is not favorable to you, it doesn’t matter how many chips you have put in, or often, even what your hole cards are.
If it’s a certain loser, you have to fold and wait for a better situation.
Oh and they have a combining gear problem that limits them to 18 knots top speed.
The government boondoggle wouldn’t be as hard to believe if these worthless pieces of overpriced scrap iron had names like the USS Obama, USS O’Biden, USS Harris, USS Pelosi, and USS Schumer.
” they don’t have the capabilities that we expected.”
Have they have lost the expertise to properly test systems before deploying them?