Austal USA celebrated the symbolic keel-laying Friday on what likely will be the last Littoral Combat Ship to enter U.S. Navy service, the beginning of the end for an ambitious, troubled, oft-criticized class that “made the company.”
. In recent years, Navy planners have presented several plans to decommission Littoral Combat Ships sooner rather than later, and these plans have tended to target the Freedom class more heavily than the Independence class. In spring 2022, it proposed mothballing nine of them “amid rumors the Navy might try to decommission the entire Freedom class,” according toIt has been tough for the Freedom class.
But just a couple of days later, the Naval Institute News reported that the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee. The report dryly noted that “This sets up a disagreement with authorizers over ship decommissionings.” That’s a reminder of the politically complex process involved.
It’s not the LCS’s fault that the world changed on it. Early supporters such as George W. Bush-era Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld envisioned it as being perfect for a era where superpower relations were calm and the U.S. Navy needed to mount nimble responses to smaller regional threats. But China has become a bigger headache, raising the prospect of heavyweight navies going toe-to-toe. A relatively small, lightly armed aluminum vessel doesn’t necessarily fare well in such a scenario.
“LCS-18, the Charleston, just returned from a 26-month deployment, the longest LCS deployment to date,” Ryder said. “Really positive feedback there. So it’s just good to see that that program is really performing well out in the fleet.”
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