By Brad Lendon, CNN
(CNN) — 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?
How we got here
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