Littoral Combat Ship (LCS): Another Military Boondoggle, Waste of Taxpayer Money
On the heels of the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar commitment to the overrated, over budget, and under performing F-35 comes the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), a seven-year investment, now triple original cost estimates, that has negligible value to the Navy.
The LCS is fast on its way to joining the F-35, giant spy blimps, and the Medium Extended Air Defense System—another military-industrial boondoggle, wasting taxpayer money year after year.
From Time
The Navy’s New Class of Warships: Big Bucks, Little Bang
By JOHN SAYEN
The Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is not only staggeringly overpriced and chronically unreliable but — even if it were to work perfectly — cannot match the combat power of similar sized foreign warships costing only a fraction as much. Let’s take a deep dive and try to figure out why. The story so far: 
– Congress has funded the LCS program since February 2002. Its publically stated purpose was to create a new generation of surface combatants able to operate in dangerous shallow water and near-shore environments. – By December 2009 the Navy had built two radically dissimilar prototypes, the mono-hulled USS Freedom (LCS-1) and the trimaran-hulled USS Independence (LSC-2). – A year later it adopted both designs and decided to award block buy construction contracts for five more ships of each type. – Since neither design had yet proven either its usefulness or functionality it seems that the Navy’s object was to make the LCS program “too big to fail” as soon as possible. – It may be working: the 55-ship fleet is slated to cost more than $40 billion, giving each vessel a price tag north of $700 million, roughly double the original estimated cost.Both LCS designs were supposed to be small (about 3,000 tons displacement), shallow-draft coastal warships that relied on simplicity, numbers and new technology to stay affordable and capable throughout their service lives.
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