The Shocking Strategy That Dooms the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS)

Over the years, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Program has overcome all kinds of threats. But now, with the Department of Defense (DOD) folding under the pressure of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation’s (DOT&E’s) constant anti-LCS hand-wringing, LCS haters may have finally seized upon a weapon capable of sinking the LCS Program–a test and trials “instrument” called a shock trial.

As Chris Cavas reported earlier this month, DOT&E’s friends at DOD ordered a cut to the LCS buy. Only after a direct appeal by the SECNAV did the DOD “relent”:

Reportedly, LCS is being put on something of a probation: The buy would be limited to 26 or 28 ships — the exact number couldn’t be confirmed by press time — but the ship will need to pass evaluation by the Pentagon’s Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) before further ship buys can proceed, according to multiple Pentagon sources, who stressed that no final decisions have been reached.

OK. Any casual procurement-watcher might believe that this deal was just another minor hiccup as the LCS program picked up momentum.

But that would be a mistake. If DOT&E is now the arbiter of the LCS’s future, the LCS is in real danger.

Exploitation of the shock trial should have been expected–after all, the anti-LCS GAO report from mid-2013 gave us all a real hint of where DOT&E was going when the authors, in a 56-page report, used the word “survivability” sixteen times and “shock” six times.  But now the gambit is crystal clear–DOT&E is setting the stage for a controversial spectacle that will likely kill the LCS program.

What’s a Shock Trial?

For those who don’t know, a shock trial is a live-fire test that, via a set of underwater explosions, evaluates ship resiliency in “near combat conditions” after, say, a mine detonation or “near miss”. Shock trials are important demonstrations of ship durability, and every new class of surface combatant (or major platform re-design) is mandated to endure a set of these ferociously expensive tests (The tests are quite costly–For DDG-53, shock trial expenses added five percent to the procurement cost)

So, after the boom(s), what happens?Well, things aboard usually break, so the ship goes into the yard for awhile to get fixed. Then DOT&E writes up a report, and ostensibly, the lessons-learned flow back into the ships or inform future building programs.

LCS Shock trials are set to be carried out upon mid-production LCS hulls–LCS-5 and LCS-6. Despite DOT&E’s oft-articulated concern that construction awards for the two ten-ship block buys will have already been granted before the LCS shock trials and survivability tests are complete, DOT&E did agree to put off testing until LCS-5 and LCS-6 were available.

But–as is somewhat typical these days–DOT&E likes to forget certain things.

First-in-Class Ships Are Rarely Shocked

For all the whining DOT&E has made over the Navy’s failure to shock LCS at an earlier stage of the program, shock trials are routinely delayed. Over the last thirty years, shocking the “first-in-class” ship has been the exception rather than the rule.

These days, standard operating procedure is to wait until most of the ships in a block production run are safely contracted (and, in some cases, under production(!!)) before subjecting a later-stage production model–a good representative of the class as a whole–to the tender mercies of some real, honest-to-goodness live-fire tests.

Subjecting a “first-in-class” ship to a shock trial is increasingly rare (For me, personally, the earlier the shock, the happier I am). The first FFG-7 was shock tested. So was MCM-1 in 1988 and the MHC-51 in 1995.  For the Navy, shocking the first ship has got to be a headache–a shock trial pulls the ship offline just when the service is struggling to debug the platform, the tests are expensive, jacking up the overall program cost, and program opponents, particularly when there are no other ships of the class out there to offer a counterpoint, can easily use the trial to beat up the Program Office and the Program’s supporters.

To avoid that messy situation, the Navy started testing later ships. The Nimitz Class “shock platform” was the fourth in the class, USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71). Those shock trials took place in 1987, some twelve years after the first-in-class Nimitz had been commissioned.

Type I Burkes were not shocked until the third ship of the class, DDG-53, was available. By the time that shock trial took place in June 1994, the Navy had contracted through DDG 75.

Representing the Type IIA Burkes–a substantial modification of an existing DDG-51 platform–was the USS Winston Churchill (DDG-81). It was shocked in May 2001. DDG-81 was the third of the Type IIA Burkes, and by the time the Churchill was shocked, we’d contracted some twenty ships–through DDG-101.

For the infirm LPD-17 Class, a worried Navy had already contracted up through LPD-25 and, heck, the keel of LPD-24 had already been laid before the Navy allowed LPD-19 to go through shock trials in August 2008.

It should be obvious to everyone that Shock Trials–as they are done today–offer little short-term benefit to the manufacturer. By the time shock trials are planned, completed and fully analyzed (a years-long process), production of the “Class” has advanced to a point where adding in all the Shock Trial “lessons learned” is impossible. Most shock trial fixes flow into the class incrementally, during refits, while major design changes–if needed–have to wait until a later production flight.

That’s certainly not an optimal solution for the DOD’s testing community, but it should put DOT&E hand-wringing about the absence of first-in-class LCS shock trials in some perspective.

But, as with many things regarding DOT&E, there’s more here than meets the eye.

 The Navy has never shocked a “one-hit-and-done” ship.

In a typical run-of-the-mill, old-school Level II survivable combatant, the post-shock performance goal was pretty simple–The platform should still be able to fight after the test.

That’s about it.

It’s a simple test: Either the ship can still complete parts of the ship’s mission (i.e. fight) or it can’t. With that metric in mind, and despite having a goodly amount of grey area available to eke out a favorable conclusion under the worst of circumstances, there still was a pretty clear, easily-identifiable line between a shock trial success and a shock test failure.

For LCS, the successful outcome of a shock trial is, well, somewhat murky.

Nobody really knows what it is.

Has anybody sat down and defined a successful outcome?

Take T-AKE–a logistical ship meant to be operating well outside the battle zone. DOT&E acknowledged that a shock trial would simply cause too much damage to be economically feasible to repair, and gave the platform a pass. So one might think LCS–given that it essentially shares a similar low survivability rating–would get a pass too, right?

No way.

   
 So what is DOT&E going to prove with LCS?  Remember…the LCS survivability goal is to avoid a hit or, if a hit is unavoidable, the stricken LCS–as a minimum–is meant to basically stay afloat long enough to let the crew evacuate, and maybe–just maybe–survive to be able to withdraw safely after.

How do you test that, exactly?

I’ll wager that DOT&E and the rest of the Navy doesn’t quite know either. That means the shock trials are going to be subject to a bit of a negotiation with the Program Office, which, I am sure, DOT&E will soon start screaming about to Congress, Bloomberg and whomever else.

How does one test the premise that the ship must save the crew?

Kinda hard to do if you think about it. Do you sink it? Disable it?

What’s the test?

In the end, DOT&E holds all the cards. Even if the shock trials are wildly successful and the LCS survives relatively unscathed, DOT&E can still make the LCS Program miserable. There are plenty of  options….DOT&E can simply reach into their grab-bag of recalcitrance to 1) downplay successful findings, 2) slow the trial analysis to a crawl to delay/prevent a second block buy, while, 3) leaking all the sensational negative tidbits they can.

Crew Growth Is A Killer:

But survivability is just one piece of the LCS-killer’s arsenal. By also screaming long and loud about crew size, DOT&E has, in essence, doubled down on failing LCS at the shock trial. Why? Well, it’s all in where you put the extra LCS crew.

First, if you grow the crew by 20-30 sailors, there are more opportunities for somebody to get hurt in a shock event. Second, some of those added sailors are likely to be assigned to do things that were, in the original LCS manning scheme, done by other means. Normally unmanned spaces may get a flesh-and-bone watch-stander. Things that were once done remotely now may get a flesh-and-bone sailor, who now must be granted a measure of protection. Finally, if the Navy demands to put a new crew member into a complex space, full of gear and pipes and so forth, then the taxpayer may be looking at a lot of (costly!) changes to shock-harden the space and protect that extra crewmember.

It’s one of those pesky consequences that flow from a big mid-production shift in requirements. And it certainly makes the shock trial harder to pass.

Conclusion:

DOT&E has gamed the LCS and the Navy quite well. By forging a temporary alliance with the Navy’s resident LCS-haters, DOT&E must be absolutely giddy about the prospect of strangling the LCS Program after the first block buy.

Nothing validates a tester more than a program kill.

But even though many in the Navy will cheer the DOT&E’s decapitation of the LCS Program, those who cheer now  will risk having to pay later for empowering DOT&E.

Do we really want to use LCS to fuel the DOT&E’s ascension in the Pentagon hierarchy? The Pentagon’s test and trials directorate is already out of control, and rather than being content with their vital and important testing mandate, DOT&E seems far too ready to move beyond mundane platform tests and begin dictating how the Navy is to be run by evaluating and testing–the Navy’s future strategies and operations.

Mark me. After a week of watching a perfectly-timed drip-drip-drip of DOT&E-sourced negative stories on the F-35, P-8 and LCS–all key platforms that enable the U.S. pivot to the Pacific–I cannot help but wonder if those leaks were indicators of how the DOD’s newly-empowered DOT&E is already positioning itself to influence the Navy’s operational strategies and stake a claim in approving–or just “testing and evaluating” the Navy’s larger strategic re-alignments.

If DOT&E’s boss, Dr. J. Michael Gilmore, is allowed to sink LCS, he will likely try to expand his directorate’s influence at the cost of the Navy. It is a path that could end up marginalizing both the CNO and SECNAV.

And that, my friends and readers, will be a real big shock to the system.http://nextnavy.com/