Summary
- The US Navy has commissioned the last of its 35 littoral combat ships (LCS), a program that has proved controversial.
- LCS ships are smaller than guided-missile destroyers but they’re faster and able to operate in more shallow waters.
- Detractors have criticized the program’s cost and say the ships have been plagued with issues since the first one was commissioned in 2008.
AI-generated summary was reviewed by a CNN editor.
The US Navy commissioned the last of its 35 littoral combat ships, the USS Cleveland, earlier this month at a pier in its namesake Ohio city.
“Steel. Strength. Power,” acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao posted on social media to mark the occasion.
Critics of the littoral combat ship (LCS) program had some other descriptions.
“Easy meat,” said one.
“An experiment that didn’t work,” said another.
And an expensive one. The price of the program is pegged at $60 billion, but a 2023 report from the investigative journalism site ProPublica said the eventual cost could top $100 billion.
“One of the worst boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and underperforming weapons systems,” the ProPublica report said.
The LCS are at what the Navy calls the “low-end” of its surface ship fleet. They’re smaller than its guided-missile destroyers, carry fewer crew, and have less firepower and defenses, but they’re faster and able to operate in more shallow waters.
But after the ships have been plagued by a range of mechanical failures and mishaps since the first one was commissioned in 2008, they’ve earned a derisive interpretation of the LCS acronym, “little crappy ships.”
After the Cleveland entered the fleet last weekend on the shores of Lake Erie, the big question became – what now for the LCS?
The LCS had its origins around the turn of the century, as naval planners looked for a smaller platform to work in coastal environments, where conditions might make larger warships like destroyers vulnerable, according to a 2017 Navy report.
The service was also facing the retirement of older, larger ships and was looking for ways to maintain its fleet size with smaller surface combatants that could be built more quickly and cheaply than bigger vessels, the report said.
Then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark decided to go with the LCS, a warship unlike anything the Navy had acquired before.
And that may have been part of the problem.
Critics argued “Admiral Clark first decided he needed a ship and only then turned to figuring out what the ship would do,” a 2014 report by then Undersecretary of the Navy Robert Work says.
In that report, written to explain the origins and complications of the LCS program, Work said the Navy got the shipped it asked for – “and in some key aspects a better ship than expected.”
But he acknowledged the ship’s development was “marked by constant change” that obscured its role and left it ripe for criticism.
The Navy acknowledged it was trying something different with the LCS.
“The LCS program marked a significant shift in how the Navy approaches shipbuilding and fleet modernization emphasizing flexibility, speed, and cost-effective construction,” a Navy fact sheet says, adding that the ships were to be rapidly reconfigured as missions – mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare or surface warfare – changed.
But the service didn’t settle on a single design, instead building two variants, the monohulled, steel-constructed Freedom class – like USS Cleveland – and the trimaran, aluminum-hulled Independence class.
A Navy fact sheet says it was expected there would be only one design chosen between plans submitted by builders Lockheed Martin and Austal USA, but two variants were chosen after competition between the two yielded “a highly efficient” shipbuilding process.
But two variants complicate logistics and supply chains, critics say.
The Independence class is the bigger of the two, 422 feet long and 104 feet wide, compared with 388 feet long and 58 feet wide for the Freedom class. The latter has the bigger displacement, at 3,450 metric tons to 3,200.
Neither uses propellor propulsion or rudders; instead, gas turbines power high-speed water jets. The design allows the LCS to operate in shallower coastal waters and avoid getting tangled in wires or cables, like those that might tether mines.
An LCS commander once touted the ships as “a military jet ski with a flight deck and a gun.”
In 2008, the first monohulled LCS, USS Freedom, was commissioned. In 2010, the first trimaran, USS Independence, followed.
The LCS was envisioned as a key component of US naval power in areas dominating current headlines, like the Persian Gulf, where the US and Israel are at war with Iran, and the South China Sea, where the US and its allies are defending freedom of navigation.
Early proponents of the ship called it a “streetfighter,” according to the Navy report, speedy and able to combat small-boat swarms, but with the versatility to hunt mines like those Iran is reported to have laid in the Strait of Hormuz.
But problems began to mount. In January 2016, USS Fort Worth suffered damage to its propulsion system in Singapore. Though the problem was later found to be caused by operator error, the then-4-year-old ship was out of action for eight months.
And the incident was one of four mechanical problems with the LCS fleet in a year, staining the reputation of the ships’ reliability.
As the LCS problems materialized, Navy leaders thought money budgeted for the program could be better spent elsewhere.
In 2021, it began decommissioning the oldest of the ships – totaling seven to date – including the USS Sioux City, which was decommissioned in 2023 after spending only five years in a fleet where ships are expected to last 25 years.
An eighth, USS Fort Worth, is expected to be retired in July, but Congress blocked plans to decommission even more, citing the service’s need for ships and a wish to protect taxpayer investments of billions of dollars.
So, the Navy is forging ahead trying to make the best of ships its leaders didn’t want just a few years ago.
The 2026 Navy shipbuilding plan released earlier this month calls the LCS “an essential low-end fleet capability … capable of complicating adversary decisions,” saying it can be an effective mine countermeasures platform and armed with the Naval Strike Missile for surface warfare action.
“The strategy for LCS is a transition from acquisition to sustainment and modernization to keep these ships relevant, combat credible, and reliable through their service lives,” the plan says.
Analysts are skeptical.
“What remains to be seen is how useful they would actually be in a combat scenario, as they have never been in one,” Emma Salisbury, a non-resident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s National Security Program, told CNN.
She said she’s seen no evidence that, in the current war with Iran, the three LCS deployed to the Middle East for minesweeping duties have done the job. When asked by CNN, US Central Command said it could not comment on what role the LCS have playing in the conflict.
When US Central Command announced in April it was beginning to set the conditions for mine clearing in the Strait of Hormuz, it was not LCS but destroyers that were the first to go through the waterway.
Since the war began, at least two of the three LCS assigned to the gulf for minesweeping have been spotted as far away as Malaysia and Singapore.
Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain, told CNN the LCS lacks enough anti-aircraft defenses for any real war-time role in contested waters.
Though the Navy said in 2025 it had begun upgrading LCS defenses to counter drones, Schuster is unconvinced.
“They are easy meat to a cruise missile, drone or aviation platform,” he said.
“They are all but helpless in any kind of threat scenario. Even anti-pirate patrols are too dangerous in areas where there is a hostile air, drone, missile or swarm threat,” he said.
The LCS is “an experiment that didn’t work as advertised, so the US Navy does its best to use the ships for what it can,” Salisbury added.
Both Salisbury and Schuster see the LCS as primarily stopgaps for the Navy, likely to give way to a new generation of frigates that was announced last December.
Those ships, known for now as the FF (X), will be based on the Coast Guard’s Legend-class national security cutters. They’ll be bigger than the LCS, displacing 4,750 tons, according to a Navy document presented at a naval symposium in January reported by Naval News.
A Navy announcement of the new frigate from December 2025 said the service hopes to have the first hull in the water by 2028. The Navy could eventually field 50 to 65 of the new frigates, according to Naval News.
Schuster doesn’t see a bright or long future for the LCS fleet.
“They will be kept until the new (frigates) enter service in 3-4 years … Then they’ll be quietly retired one or two at a time.”
