PROCUREMENT BLUES: LCS Program ‘Broke’ the Navy.

In an era when other major-dollar acquisition programs such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Gerald R. Ford-class carrier have dominated headlines on account of delays and budget overruns, the sternest rebukes in Congress may be reserved for the embattled LCS program.

“The experience of LCS, it broke the Navy,” said Sean Stackley, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition. “… We have our program managers pretty much under a microscope right now, and we’ve taken things like cost and we’ve put cost into our requirements so that you don’t get to ignore costs while you’re chasing requirement. Just like speed, range, power and payload, if you start to infringe on the cost requirement that we put into our documents, you have to report to [Research, Development and Acquisition] and [the Chief of Naval Operations] just like you do if you infringe on one of the other requirements.”

In prepared testimony for the hearing, the Pentagon’s director of Operational Test and Evaluation, J. Michael Gilmore, gave a damning accounting of where the program stands, saying neither of the two LCS variants now being built by competing contractors is expected to be survivable in combat, a fact that undermines the whole concept of operations for the ship class.

Heads should roll.