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Littoral combat ships were supposed to launch the Navy into the future.
Instead they broke down across the globe and many of their weapons never worked. Now the Navy is getting rid of them. One is less than five years
old.

In July 2016, warships from more than two dozen nations gathered off the
coasts of Hawaii and Southern California to join the United States in the world’s largest naval exercise. The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia,
Japan, South Korea and others sent hundreds of destroyers, aircraft
carriers and warplanes. They streamed in long lines across the ocean,
symbols of power and prestige.

The USS Freedom had its own special place within the armada. It was one of
a new class of vessels known as littoral combat ships. The U.S. Navy had
billed them as technical marvels — small, fast and light, able to combat enemies at sea, hunt mines and sink submarines.

In reality, the LCS was well on the way to becoming one of the worst boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and underperforming weapons systems. Two of the $500 million ships had
suffered embarrassing breakdowns in previous months. The Freedom’s
performance during the exercise, showing off its ability to destroy
underwater mines, was meant to rejuvenate the ships’ record on the world
stage. The ship was historically important too; it was the first LCS
built, the first in the water, commissioned just eight years prior.

But like the LCS program’s reputation, the Freedom was in bad shape.
Dozens of pieces of equipment on board were undergoing repairs. Training
crews for the new class of ships had proven more difficult than
anticipated. The sailors aboard the Freedom had not passed an exam demonstrating their ability to operate some of the ship’s most important systems.

As the day to launch approached, the pressure mounted. Top officers
visited the ship repeatedly. The Freedom’s sailors understood that theirs
was a “no fail mission” with “‘no appetite’ to remain in port,” according
to Navy documents obtained by ProPublica.

The Freedom’s Capt. Michael Wohnhaas consulted with his officers. Despite crippling problems that had left one of the ship’s engines inoperable, he
and his superiors decided the vessel could rely on its three others for
the exercise.

The Freedom completed its mission, but the accomplishment proved hollow.
Five days after the ship returned to port, a maintenance check revealed
that the faltering engine had suffered “galloping corrosion” from
saltwater during the exercise. A sailor described the engine room as “a
horror show” with rust eating away at the machinery. One of the Navy’s
newest ships would spend the next two years undergoing repairs at a cost
of millions.

It took investigators months to unravel the mystery of the engine’s
breakdown. But this much was clear at the outset: The Freedom’s collapse
was another unmistakable sign that the Navy had spent billions of dollars
and more than a decade on warships with rampant and crippling flaws.

The ongoing problems with the LCS have been well documented for years, in
news articles, government reports and congressional hearings. Each ship ultimately cost more than twice the original estimate. Worse, they were
hobbled by an array of mechanical failures and were never able to carry
out the missions envisaged by their champions.

ProPublica set out to trace how ships with such obvious shortcomings
received support from Navy leadership for nearly two decades. We reviewed thousands of pages of public records and tracked down naval and
shipbuilding insiders involved at every stage of construction.

Our examination revealed new details on why the LCS never delivered on its promises. Top Navy leaders repeatedly dismissed or ignored warnings about
the ships’ flaws. One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to
build more of the ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons systems failed. Staunch advocates in the Navy circumvented checks meant to ensure that ships that cost billions can do what they are supposed to do.

Contractors who stood to profit spent millions lobbying Congress, whose members, in turn, fought to build more ships in their home districts than
the Navy wanted. Scores of frustrated sailors recall spending more time
fixing the ships than sailing them.

Our findings echo the conclusions of a half-century of internal and
external critiques of America’s process for building new weapons systems.
The saga of the LCS is a vivid illustration of how Congress, the Pentagon
and defense contractors can work in concert — and often against the good
of the taxpayers and America’s security — to spawn what President Dwight
D. Eisenhower described in his farewell address as the “military
industrial complex.”

“There is a lot of money flowing through this vast ecosystem, and somehow
the only thing all these people can agree on is more, more, more,” said
Lyle Goldstein, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College who is
now investigating the costs of war at Brown University. “Unfortunately, I
just think it might be in the nature of our system.”

This year, the Defense Department asked Congress to approve a staggering
$842 billion — nearly half of the federal government’s discretionary
spending — to keep America safe in what the Pentagon says is an ever more perilous world. As House and Senate leaders negotiate the final number, it
is unlikely they will spend much time discussing ways to prevent future debacles like the LCS.

Such a conversation would cover hundreds of billions of misspent taxpayer
money on projects from nearly every branch of the military: The F-35
fighter jet, deployed by the Navy, Marines and Air Force, is more than a
decade late and $183 billion over budget. The Navy’s newest aircraft
carrier, the Gerald R. Ford, cost $13 billion and has yet to prove it can reliably launch planes. And the Army’s Future Combat System was largely abandoned in 2009 after the military had dedicated more than $200 billion
on a battlefield intelligence network meant to link troops, tanks and
robots.

The LCS program offers another clear lesson, one seen in almost every
infamous procurement disaster. Once a massive project gains momentum and defense contractors begin hiring, it is politically easier to throw good
money after bad.

Stopping a weapons program in its tracks means people losing work and
admitting publicly that enormous sums of taxpayer money have been wasted.
In the case of the LCS, it took an array of naval leaders and two
consecutive defense secretaries to finally stop the program. Yet even
after the Navy said it only needed 32 littoral combat ships, far fewer
than the more than 50 originally planned, members of Congress forced the Pentagon to buy three more.

Former Lt. Renaldo Rodgers remembered laboring in San Diego from sunrise
to sunset for months to ready the Freedom for a 2012 trial mission to San Francisco, only to have the ship break down during pretrial tests. Rodgers initially thought the futuristic ship looked like something out of “Star
Trek.” But he soon learned it was no Starship Enterprise. It became the laughingstock of the waterfront, with other sailors deriding it as “Dry
Dock One,” because it so rarely left port.

“It sucks,” he said. The LCS was “a missed opportunity.”

The Navy has tried to retire many of the littoral combat ships years
before they reach their expected lifespan. Ships designed to last 25 years
are being mothballed after seeing less than a decade of service.

In response to questions, the Navy acknowledged the LCS was not suitable
for fighting peer competitors such as China. The LCS “does not provide the lethality or survivability needed in a high-end fight.”

“The Navy needs a more ready, capable, and lethal fleet more than a bigger fleet that’s less ready, less capable, and less lethal,” the statement
read, saying the money would be better spent on higher-priority
alternatives.

The cost of the program has gnawed at John Pendleton, who for years was a
top military analyst at the Government Accountability Office and has
studied the rise and fall of the LCS as closely as anyone in Washington.

Now retired, but unable to shake what he views as one of the most wasteful projects he’d encountered in his nearly 35-year career, Pendleton reviewed budgetary documents and GAO reports for ProPublica going back decades. His conclusion: The lifetime cost of the LCS class may reach $100 billion or
more.

“In the end,” he said, “the taxpayers get fewer than 30 limited-
survivability, single-mission ships.”

Pendleton is hardly alone in his assessment. Many regard the tortured path
of the LCS as evidence of a damaging strain of hubris that runs rampant in
the world of military innovation.

“It’s this zombie program phenomenon where everybody knows deep down we
are going in the wrong direction,” said Dan Grazier, a former Marine Corps captain, who now works on Pentagon reform for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. “But because so much money is involved and so much political capital is invested, you can’t stop the train until the problems
are so overwhelming that no one can feign support for it.”

The two narratives of the ship — unstoppable in Congress, imperiled at sea
— intertwined alarmingly during one 10-month stretch beginning in December 2015. During that period, five of the vessels broke down across the globe,
each illuminating a new set of problems and effectively proving the
critics right.

The Freedom was the third ship to fail. Captured in a Navy investigation
more than 600 pages long, the incident stands out as a particularly
devastating and detailed example of the Navy’s plight.

The Problems With the Littoral Combat Ship

Minehunting Failures

Littoral combat ships were supposed to help find and destroy underwater
mines, but the remote minehunting system often returned false alarms
during testing, was unreliable, frequently broke down and was difficult
for sailors to control. The Navy turned to a new form of minehunting technology, which is still under development.

Survivability

Because of the emphasis on speed, the ships were originally built in part
on designs used for commercial ferries. The designs did not contain
protections that could prevent the flooding of critical systems when under attack. The Pentagon weapons testing department found that the design requirements “accept the risk that the crew would have to abandon ship” in circumstances where service members on other vessels would not.

The Anti-Submarine Warfare Package

Littoral combat ships were supposed to be equipped to hunt and destroy submarines with an interlinked package of sonar devices, helicopters and torpedoes. But the systems didn’t effectively communicate with one
another, the towed sonar couldn’t function properly in the vessels’ wake
and the Freedom class is considered too loud to hunt submarines. The Navy canceled that function in 2022.

Combining Gear

The Navy traced many high-profile breakdowns of the Freedom-class littoral combat ships to a design flaw in what’s known as the combining gear, a
complex mechanism that connects gas turbines and diesel engines to the propulsion shafts in order to help the vessels reach top speed.

Limited Endurance

The Freedom is considered a “gas hog” among Navy officers, meaning it
can’t go very fast for very long without running out of fuel. This creates
a logistical problem for the Navy because the ship can’t stray too far
from its gas supply.

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INSIDE THE PENTAGON
1

An Admiral’s Vision
In 2002, Adm. Vernon Clark stared down from the deck of a Danish warship
at a pier in Denmark and watched a demonstration that would shape the
future of the U.S. Navy.

A large deck gun sat below. On the orders of a Danish navy official, a
crane hoisted it off the pier and installed it on the ship. Within 40
minutes, sailors were rotating the weapon to prepare it for operation.

No American ship could swap weapons on and off deck like that. But the
Danes made reconfiguring a vessel to carry out different missions look
easy. Clark, the head of the U.S. Navy at the time, marveled at the
technology.

“This is it. Of course, this is it,” Clark remembered telling himself. “I didn’t know that they could do that.”

For Clark, the Danish demonstration crystalized his idea for a new ship
that would be different from anything the Navy had done before. It would
be small, relatively lightly armed and operated by about 40 sailors — far
less than the average warship crew size. The weapons systems would not be permanently installed.

Instead, he envisioned a sort of Swiss army knife for the Navy. Armed with
one set of weaponry, it could hunt and destroy submarines. But if the
threat shifted, it could be quickly outfitted to detect and clear
underwater mines or to fight other warships.

As Clark envisaged it, the new ships could be deployed in coastal, or
littoral, waters, where the Navy needed to expand its presence around the world: in the Persian Gulf to participate in the war in Iraq, in the
Caribbean to track down gunrunners and in Southeast Asia to help smaller
allied navies. They would be one of the fastest warships in the world —
able to fight near shore, outrun larger vessels or hunt down the small
ones increasingly popular with foes like Iran. The ships would be built quickly, in large numbers and at low cost.

The first red flags emerged here, at the conception of the LCS. As Clark
began sharing his vision, concerns began to brew among Navy shipbuilding experts, who feared it was overly ambitious and technologically
infeasible. Clark was unbowed.

He was an unlikely candidate to begin a revolution in shipbuilding. With
an undergraduate degree from Evangel College, a small Christian school in Missouri, and an MBA from the University of Arkansas, he hardly fit the
mold of a prototypical chief of naval operations who was groomed for
leadership from his earliest days at the Naval Academy in Annapolis,
Maryland.

A self-professed “radical,” at times irreverent and impassioned, he wanted
to run the Navy like a business, streamlining training, rooting out
misspent dollars, retaining sailors who shined and getting rid of those
who did not.

He believed the Navy needed a more cost-effective and technologically
advanced fleet. Many of the Navy’s ships had been built during the Cold
War. Massive carriers, destroyers, battleships and cruisers were facing retirement, in part because updating them with modern technology was prohibitively expensive, Clark said.

In keeping with his business background, Clark wanted as few people on the
new ships as possible. “What I really want is an unmanned ship that’s got
R2-D2 in it,” he said, recalling his thinking at the time.

Doubt dogged Clark’s dream from the start. Congress agreed to begin
developing the ship in 2003 — despite a House Appropriations Committee
report that warned that there was “no ‘road map’ of how the Navy will
achieve the system required.”

One former admiral who worked on plans for the ship said Clark’s
insistence on speed — up to 45 knots, or about 50 miles per hour — created immediate problems. A ship cannot go that fast for very long without
running out of gas, which meant it could never stray far from its fuel
supply. Its small size — many in the Navy joked that LCS stood for Little Crappy Ship — limited the weapons it could carry.

The former admiral said he raised concerns with his superiors but wished
he had been more vocal. “As a subordinate naval officer, when your boss
tells you, ‘Here’s a shovel, go dig the hole,’ you go dig the hole.”

The Navy pushed ahead. In May 2004, it awarded contracts to two teams of defense contractors to build up to two prototypes, each of their own
design.

Both teams had lobbied heavily to win the contracts. Lockheed Martin,
which partnered with the Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin, plastered
the Washington, D.C., Metro system with advertisements extolling the
ability of its proposed ship.

The other team, a joint venture between General Dynamics and Australian shipbuilder Austal, planned to build its version at a shipyard in Alabama.

In response to the Navy’s goals, the contractors both based their original
ship designs partly on high-speed ferries for cars or passengers, an
unusual choice for a vessel meant for war not transportation.

With an emphasis on speed and dexterity, the ships were not designed to withstand much damage. Clark saw them fighting under the protection of
larger, more lethal ships. To him, investing too much in protecting the
ship with extensive armor would make it too heavy to operate near shore.

“Show me a ship that can take a direct hit with today’s modern weaponry
and survive,” he said. “Why spend all this money pretending?”

This argument disquieted lawmakers. Toward the end of Clark’s tenure,
members of Congress began to ask whether this meant the Navy had deemed
LCS sailors expendable.

After Clark left the Navy in July 2005, the Navy responded to the
concerns, redrawing the blueprints for the ships as they were being built
to better protect sailors.

Costs began to rise dramatically. The ships were originally supposed to
cost no more than $220 million dollars each, which had helped sell them to Congress in the first place. But the final price tag rose to about $500
million each.

Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary who became a key proponent
of the ship, said many in the Navy thought the initial estimate was unrealistic. “The Navy never believed it, at least the people who had to
build the ship,” he said.

Despite the rising costs, the LCS soon gained a new champion so devoted to
its construction that he led a yearslong campaign to resist efforts by two secretaries of defense to scale back the program.

OUT AT SEA
2
A “Foreseeable” Disaster
On the morning of Nov. 23, 2015, the USS Milwaukee set out across the
frigid waters of the Great Lakes for its maiden voyage. The cost overruns
had made headlines, but with the fifth ship in the water, Navy officials
were hoping the vessel’s performance would lessen the growing doubts about
the project.

The Navy planned to sail the Milwaukee from the shipyard on the shores of
Lake Michigan in Marinette, Wisconsin, to its new home port of San Diego.
From there, it would eventually join its sister ship, the USS Fort Worth,
in helping to counter the Chinese navy’s expanding presence in the Western Pacific.

In a press tour days before the launch, Cmdr. Kendall Bridgewater evinced confidence, proclaiming that the enemy “would be hard pressed to find a
vessel that could come up against us.”

But the ship wouldn’t need a fight to suffer its first defeat. Its worst
enemy would be its own engine.

On Dec. 11, about three weeks into the two-month journey, a software
failure severely damaged the Milwaukee’s combining gear — a complex
mechanism that connects the ship’s diesel engines and its gas turbines to
the propulsion shafts, producing the power necessary for it to reach top speeds.

A Navy salvage ship had to tow it some 40 miles for repairs at a base near Norfolk, Virginia. The ship hadn’t made it halfway down the East Coast —
let alone to the South China Sea — before breaking down. If the Milwaukee
were a brand new car, this would be the equivalent of stalling on its way
out of the dealership.

Some former officers look back on the breakdown and those that followed as
a clear violation of a cardinal principle in Navy shipbuilding: to “buy a
few and test a lot.” But with the LCS, the Navy was doing the opposite. Commanders were learning about the flaws of the ships as they were being deployed.

“This is a totally foreseeable outcome,” said Jay Bynum, a former rear
admiral who served as an assistant to the vice chief of naval operations
as the ships were entering the fleet. “Just think about it, Toyota checks
out all of this before the car hits the showroom floor. What if the
engineering guys there said, ‘Well, we think this is how the engine will
work, but let’s just start selling them.’”

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INSIDE THE PENTAGON
3
“Do We Want This Ship to Survive?”

On a breezy Friday in March 2011, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus
addressed a crowd of sharp-dressed politicians and begrimed workers
gathered at a shipyard in Mobile, Alabama.

Mabus, tall and dapper, announced the names for two of the Navy’s newest littoral combat ships. One would be called the USS Jackson — a reference
to the capital of his home state, Mississippi.

As he looked out at the waters of Mobile Bay, Mabus lauded the new class
of ships that had emerged from Clark’s vision a decade before.

“It’s a drug runner’s worst nightmare, it’s a submarine’s worst
nightmare,” he declared, speaking in his soft Southern drawl. “It’s
anybody who wants to do harm to the United States of America or the United States Navy, it’s their worst nightmare.”

In fact, the LCS was on its way to becoming one of the Navy’s worst
nightmares — and Mabus was its biggest cheerleader.

Better known for his political acumen than his military experience, Mabus served three years in the Navy in the early ’70s, including time at sea as
a lieutenant junior grade on board the USS Little Rock.

Afterward, he rose through Democratic ranks to become governor of
Mississippi, an ambassador to Saudi Arabia and eventually the longest-
serving Navy secretary since World War I.

During his tenure as the Navy’s civilian leader, he put his stamp on the service by pursuing a range of progressive policies including gender integration and the use of renewable fuels. He also took advantage of a
unique perk: tossing out the ceremonial first pitch at major league
stadiums across the country.

His most transformative view on U.S. military strategy was his belief in
the need for more ships.

The fleet had shrunk to less than half the 600 it wielded toward the end
of the Cold War. China was rapidly expanding its navy and Russia was
investing heavily in new submarines.

Mabus, who became secretary in 2009, pursued a plan that would make him
one of the Navy’s most prodigious shipbuilders.

In an interview with ProPublica, he reiterated the “sheer importance of numbers” for the fleet. He backed the LCS, he said, because it would help
meet an array of the Navy’s needs as fast as possible.

Even as a growing number of senior officers began to criticize the ships,
Mabus expanded the program, drawing on his political connections and savvy dealmaking to defend the LCS against powerful opponents on the Hill and in
the Pentagon.

Mabus acknowledged that his support of the LCS project put him at odds
with some of the Navy’s top officers and the nation’s civilian military leadership. He recalled resistance from what he dubbed the “Alumni Association,” powerful former Navy officers who he said reflexively and unfairly disliked the ship because it was so different from anything else
the Navy had built. For Mabus, his key role as civilian leader of a tradition-bound military service was overcoming its hostility to change
and innovation.

Chief among the old-school critics, he said, was Sen. John McCain, a
Republican from Arizona and decorated Navy veteran whose father and
paternal grandfather had both been Navy admirals. He, along with Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, had emerged as skeptics of the LCS as leaders
of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Both were alarmed by the costs,
which had soared to more than $750 million apiece for the initial ships.

In response to such concerns, the Navy lowered the price by pitting the
two teams of contractors against each other in a bidding war. Austal and Lockheed Martin turned in two different ship designs with similar price
tags. Navy leaders dithered over which to select.

In the fall of 2010, Work, the Navy undersecretary at the time, said Mabus gathered senior naval leaders together to ask a blunt question: “Do we
want this ship to survive?”

When the group answered yes, Mabus proposed a politically adroit solution:
The Navy would select both companies to build the new ships in two
shipyards, one in Alabama and one in Wisconsin.

Mabus calculated that he would win the support of congressional
delegations from both places by delivering thousands of jobs and millions
in spending to each, Work recalled. Spreading the wealth would increase
the ships’ chances of survival. But it would also make the program harder
to kill when problems arose.

“He was looking at the problem in a different way than we were looking at
it because he was a professional politician,” Work said.

Mabus’ plan concerned some Navy leaders. The Austal ship, which was the
basis for the Independence class, would be an aluminum trimaran — a ship
with three hulls. The Lockheed Martin ship, which formed the basis for the Freedom class, would be a more conventional monohull forged of steel. The radically different designs meant that the ships could not trade parts or sailors, making them more expensive to maintain and crew. In addition, the contracts called for the contractors to build a total of 20 vessels, a
large commitment for a relatively unproven warship.

But Mabus and his team argued that those additional costs would be dwarfed
by the savings the Navy would enjoy in the long run — one top official
found that the Navy would save $2.9 billion by awarding long-term
contracts to both companies.

To Mabus, it was a win-win for all involved: each ship had its own
benefits, taxpayers would get a better price, the Navy would get more
ships faster and the shipyards would get more jobs.

He told ProPublica that keeping the shipyards active was always a “consideration, but it wasn’t the main driver” behind the decision. The
real incentive, he said, was price, not politics.

But the political payoff soon became evident.

McCain held a hearing, where he excoriated the Navy. “The story of this
ship is one that makes me ashamed and embarrassed as a former Navy person
and as a person who’s responsible to the taxpayers of my state,” he said. (McCain died in 2018.)

But in a last-minute budget bill to keep the government open in late
December, Sen. Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican, inserted language
to buy ships from both shipyards.

“He made sure it happened,” a Shelby spokesman said at the time.

And Levin, the Michigan Democrat once critical of the ships, now supported them. The Marinette shipyard is just over the Michigan border in
Wisconsin. Levin called the plan to build 10 ships there “a major boost
for the region’s economy” and applauded the Navy in its efforts to bring
costs down. (Levin died in 2021).

As one former vice admiral put it, “politics is king in the shipbuilding business.”

Just a month after the USS Milwaukee stalled in Virginia, the ship it was supposed to join in the South China Sea suffered its own embarrassing breakdown.

The USS Fort Worth was nearing the end of an otherwise successful
deployment. It had helped with a search-and-rescue operation following an Indonesian commercial plane crash and participated in joint exercises with several allied navies.

But the Navy had decided to frequently rotate the small LCS crews in order
to reduce burnout and, in November 2015, a new, inexperienced crew took
over.

Even the commanding officer, Michael Atwell, had “few opportunities to
gain valuable at sea experience” before his deployment, according to a
later Navy investigation.

On Jan. 5, hundreds of gallons of fuel spilled into the ship’s main
machinery room. The sailors had to spray chemical foam on the fuel to
prevent it from catching fire. Then, in grueling, filthy shifts, they took turns crawling into the tight compartment to clean it up with rags and
pumps.

The day after the spill, the Fort Worth pulled into a port in Singapore
for a week of scheduled maintenance.

There it became clear that the ship had been “ridden hard,” according to officers interviewed in the Navy investigation. Leaks had sprung out of
various parts, the engines were in bad shape, the electric generators
needed work and the crew was exhausted. There was “no break, no reprieve,
just increasing daily tasking,” one sailor said of their time on board.

The ship’s executive officer, the second in command, complained of a lack
of support from superiors.

“We ask for help, but there isn’t enough,” he said, adding that he was
told “they don’t have the bodies.”

The ship was originally supposed to leave by Jan. 12 for a “high
visibility” port visit in Hong Kong. Atwell and his executive officer
described a “tremendous amount of pressure” to make it happen, according
to the Navy investigation.

The crew took shortcuts as it scrambled to test the engine. One of the
sailors in charge of starting it skipped a routine step, failing to
properly lubricate the combining gears.

“I messed up everything because I was going too fast,” the sailor later explained.

The mistake damaged the ship’s combining gear, forcing it to sit for seven months while waiting on replacement parts.

Navy leaders deemed Atwell unfit for command and removed him from his
position.

Reached by phone, Atwell declined to comment.

The breakdowns on the Milwaukee and Fort Worth formed the beginning of a pattern that came to punctuate the life of the LCS program:

Ships were rushed to sea with faltering equipment. Shorthanded crews and captains without sufficient training or support tried to make them work. Breakdowns ensued. Then, the pressure to perform and restore the
reputation of the program intensified anew and the cycle repeated itself.

Soon it would be the USS Freedom’s turn.

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5
“We Were Essentially Telling a Lie”

In early 2012, sitting beneath the fluorescent glow of a Pentagon briefing room, Rear Adm. Sam Perez received a stern warning.

Weeks earlier, Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert had asked Perez
to produce a report that would help him figure out how best to use the
dozens of littoral combat ships that would be delivered to the Navy in the coming years.

The results were grim.

Discussing the details around a conference table, one fellow officer
raised a finger to his own temple and mimicked a gun going off: Perez, he signaled, was about to risk career suicide.

It was a pattern with the LCS. Officers who criticized the ships faced consequences. An assignment to an undesirable post. Even dismissal.

Perez had found that the crews were too small. Some were stretched so thin
that commanding officers had to spend time sweeping the decks, when they
could have been studying intelligence reports and focusing on navigating
the ship.

Contrary to what Clark observed in Denmark, the various weapons systems
would not be easy to swap out. The Navy hadn’t factored in the weeks it
could take for all the contractors, sailors and others who were needed to
fly in from around the world to help outfit the vessels for different
missions.

The two versions of the LCS complicated the problems. The designs were
vastly different: They could exchange neither parts nor sailors. Perez and
his staff worried that the ships would wind up sidelined because they
lacked either equipment or trained crew members.

Comparing the LCS to the fleets of potential adversaries, Perez concluded
that the vessels were only capable of fighting against lightly armed
small, fast attack boats.

A fellow officer warned him that painting this kind of damning portrait
for the highest ranking officer in the Navy, the chief naval officer,
could hurt his career. At that point, the Navy had already committed to
buying at least 20 more ships worth billions of dollars.

Perez had already shared some of his findings with Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mark Ferguson, the second highest ranking official in the
Navy.

According to a former senior officer familiar with the events, Ferguson
told Perez that he was looking at the vessels the wrong way. The small

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