The Navy continues to fail with the Little Crappy Ship. Some of these non-functional Navy floating welfare programs posing as ships are being retired five years into the alleged 35 year cruise life. As I have mentioned before, between the LCS and the Zumwalt and the Ford, the Navy has not commissioned a successful surface hull since 1991. Currently, the Navy is primarily focusing on decommissioning Freedom-class LCSs but they need to give it up and retire the entire class soonest.

The real littoral combat ship is the adoption of diesel electric submarines and taking advantage of the German Type 214 boats to jump-start the non-nuclear submarine revival that will inform the opening salvos of weighting naval warfare to underwater operations for the remainder of the 21st century.

Surface navies are on life support and the next peer war will prove that point.

The U.S. Navy had originally planned to procure about 55 Littoral Combat Ships. But as the challenges, cost overruns, and design defects inherent in the ship’s design became more and more apparent, the Littoral Combat Ship program was curtained dramatically, and the U.S. Navy only procured a paltry 35 Littoral Combat Ships. A number of the early ship builds have been retired early in order to save costs and better sustain other programs.