Sea Control - Sea Control 309 - Lessons from LCS with Emma Salisbury

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

Links:Lessons from the Littoral Combat Ship , by Emma Salisbury, War on the Rocks, November 15, 2021.

Hey folks, Sherrod here. Today I'm joined by Emma Solsbury, and we're going to dive into the military-industrial complex, discussing her article for War on the Rocks on lessons learned from LCS. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling, and speaking of audio editors, we're looking to add to our team. If you're interested, please email us at ccontrol at simsec.org with your resume. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and Apollo of Iron Brew Bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimbersman.

Hello shipmates and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Emma Salisbury and we're going to discuss her piece for War on the Rocks, Lessons from the Littoral Combat Ships. So Emma, thank you for joining us. Would you mind introducing yourself to our audience, telling them a little bit about your background? Sure, thank you for having me on. My name is Emma Salisbury. I'm a PhD candidate at Birkbeck College, University of London, and my research focuses on the American military-industrial complex from 1979 to the present. And in my day job, I'm a senior staffer at the UK Parliament. Well, thank you very much. And as a reminder, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we may be otherwise associated. So we'll start. I didn't feel like your story was actually about LCS.

You can correct me if I'm wrong, but it was about what you said your primary research topic was, which was the military industrial complex. So what question were you trying to answer and why did you look to LCS to provide that answer? Well, part of my research is looking at periods of change within the military industrial complex. So times when things have shifted significantly. some of those big shifts happened in the 1990s after the Clinton administration encouraged the consolidation of the defence industry so Secretary of Defence Les Aspin and his then Deputy William Perry held a dinner at Pentagon which is called the Last Supper for the heads of the largest defence contractors and they told them that the falling defence budgets after the end of the Cold

War meant that the United States just didn't need as large of a defence industrial base as it had so the firms essentially needed to speed up the consolidation that was already starting to happen so by 1999 only eight big defence firms existed down from 36 in 1993 and they became what are normally called the prime contractors so that's companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop etc. So once this consolidation happened these primes began to win huge numbers of defence contracts particularly once the Bush administration took over and they had huge advantages over their smaller competitors when bidding for contracts they were able to leverage their size and their experience and that was particularly true given the range of companies that were absorbed so a

prime may now contain subsidiaries in wide ranging subfields so air service naval space and so on and they could use this to pitch for a similarly wide range of contracts a larger company could also afford to have a larger lobbying staff to put pressure on the military dod congress and having more laboratory or manufacturing sites under a prime's umbrella also meant more leverage with the congressional representatives of those communities. I used case studies throughout my work to illustrate shifts over time and the more I read about the LCS the more I saw that it perfectly exemplified the military-industrial complex in the early 2000s so it became one of my central case studies for that period. How did the LCS initially appear in the Navy's budget

some missions? So the disappearance of the threat from the Soviet Union meant that the US Navy lacked a clearly defined naval mission in the 1990s and it needed a new purpose. This initially came in the form of the doctrine of network-centric warfare which gave key roles to the Navy in maintaining a global presence via sea basing and ensuring access to contested regions. It gave prominence to the idea of small light and fast nodes that connected together in conflict scenarios and this meant that the navy needed to move away from traditional platforms so the huge complex multi-purpose ships and network centric warfare also focused on projecting power shore so the navy needed ships that could operate in coastal waters but the problem was that even

though the us wasn't facing an adversary with substantial naval forces anymore the navy couldn't just focus on presence and power projection for example the mine damage caused to the uss Tripoli and the USS Princeton during the Gulf War showed the need for mine countermeasures vessels particularly given the unreliability of the Avenger class minesweepers. This was also coupled with the impending retirement of the Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates which were small general purpose escort ships that made a significant contribution to American maritime presence. So during the new British administration's quadrennial defence review process in 2001, the Secretary of Defence at the time, Donald Grumsfeld, made clear that the

military needed to improve its ability to tackle anti-access area denial threats and to protect power in contested theatres. So his office quietly informed Navy leaders that they needed to include a small surface combatant in any plans that they put forward, and they did. So that November, that november the navy announced its new ddx future surface combatant program so that included three new classes of ships the ddx which was a destroyer for a precision long-range strike the cgx a cruiser for missile and air defense and the lcs so rather than being a multi-mission ship like its larger brethren the lcs would be equipped to perform one primary mission at any given time, but the ship could have its mission orientation changed by swapping out a

modular mission package. So this meant that the LCS programme promised, in essence, to solve every single one of the Navy's problems. It could be tasked to perform a wide range of missions, surface warfare, mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, while adding to maritime presence, while projecting power, assisting with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, all in coastal waters and all with fewer personnel per ship. So the Chief of Naval Operations, Muldoon Clark, declared it to be his top priority and Rumsfeld approved the request for inclusion in the DOD's budget submission in fiscal year 2003. The service initially planned a down select to a single haul, but then ran into issues with the prime contractors

and you identified the beginnings of the LCS program as an example of prime contractor influence. So what happened during that down select process? Well, in May of 2004, the Navy awarded contracts for the LCS to two teams, one led by Lockheed Martin and the other by General Dynamics. So each team was headed by a prime contractor, but also included some smaller shipbuilders. So General Dynamics were in Austal, USA, and Lockheed Martin brought in Bollinger Shipyards and Maranet Marine. So essentially, each team would complete a final system design called a Flight Zero ship and build a prototype of that. Lockheed Martin team would design and build the LCS-1, the Freedom class, and the General Dynamics team would do the LCS-2 or the Independence class. The Navy initially expected to test one prototype of each design and then down select to a single variant for the Flight 1 production after that.

But both Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics argued that building a single Flight Zero prototype and then idling their design teams and their production lines until the decision was made would be excessively expensive for them so this led to the addition of another flight zero prototype each before the down select however that plan only allowed a very short time for the navy to comparatively test the two designs as the time needed for the production of the second prototype pushed the construction too close to the plan date for the transition to the flight one production So the final budget submissions, after all, in the NDAA's 2005 and 2006, called for more flight zero C-frames to be built before the final down-select decision, with the option to put both designs into production. In the summer of 2004, the House Armed Services Committee attempted to remove funding for the LCS entirely, citing a number of substantive concerns about the programme.

For example, the head of the Production Forces Subcommittee, Roscoe Bartlett, argued that the LCS concept was immature and convinced the House to make the cut in funding. But the Navy argued that any cuts to the DDX programme at all would be disastrous for the defence industrial base. one naval acquisition executive john young gave evidence to the committee and he warned that any funding cuts and acquisition delays would lead to substantial layoffs at the shipyards leading to a loss of skilled workers that could come back to haunt the navy when shipbuilding resumed so this threat of funding removal came at the same time as the navy's planned announcement of the results of the competition for the flight zero prototypes the navy argued that they couldn't fully make the case for the programme's maturity until the two finalists had been announced

and the contractors launched a lobbying campaign. So this was intended both to tilt the composition decision in their favour and to rally congressional support for the LCS as a whole. Lockheed Martin in particular ran a bunch of ads in newspapers and defence magazines and also blanketed metro stations serving Capitol Hill and the Pentagon with posters with slogans like literal dominance assured. So the House's threat caused a small showdown in Congress as the Senate had voted to keep the LCS programme fully funded. In the end, the Congressional Authorisation Conference Committee report simply noted the concerns that Barlett had expressed. And interestingly, the final spending authorisation bill actually ended up fully funding the construction of the two LCS prototypes at a higher level than had been originally proposed by the Navy or the House or the Senate.

What are the tensions between the military contractors and Congress when we look at the acquisition process? So the military industrial complex is not a bad thing per se, despite the almost exclusively pejorative use of the term. Because if the services, the contractors and politicians can all work together, that can make the whole acquisition process smoother and allow the military to get capabilities it needs with fewer snags. in the eyes of their constituents congressional representatives are doing their jobs when they push for production contracts in their areas given the amount of jobs and money that flows into communities surrounding sites like shipyards but problems do arise when the influence of the primes over the policymakers leads to the acquisition of platforms that are unnecessary or simply don't work so this not only wastes money that could be better spent on other

capabilities but also impacts on the efficacy of the american military in general the beginnings of the lcs program provide a very clear-cut example of prime contractor influence so lockheed martin and general dynamics were able to successfully argue first for additional flight zero prototypes then for both designs to be put into production and finally for the program to not only continue to be funded but to receive even more money the structure of the prototype competition required such a large level of expenditure that the contractors could easily claim their businesses would be significantly undermined if they didn't get a production contract out of it and furthermore the program exemplifies the practical workings of the military

industrial complex so in choosing two teams to build flight zero prototypes navy widened it at its own base of support within the industry and this incentive was directly acknowledged at the time in comments made by anonymous pentagon sources each of the shipyards involved could call on its local congressional representatives to keep the job flowing in their communities so more involved shipyards means more pressure on congress also not only did the primes and their partners in each team want to ensure the program survival other shipyards like bar fine works did as well so they had received other contracts in the 2005 defense budget but they could also anticipate the possibility of LCS construction contracts further down the line

if the winning seaframe cannot be produced solely at the sites of its designers. I'm going to go off script a little bit with this next question. I've been thinking about this a little bit. Are ships unique in the acquisition process in that the Flight Zero prototypes weren't even constructed before we're making a decision on final purchase? and i cannot imagine that building an aircraft functions the same way i have to believe that there are actual flying prototypes that can be tested um before but is it just a matter of the size of the ship that drives that uh that drives that decision making process and how quickly or slowly it moves i think this is why the lcs is such an interesting example because

it does become very different from this kind of of prototyping in other areas so building prototypes is not unusual when it comes to big platforms like planes ships and so on and lots of aircraft manufacturers have constructed prototypes we saw prototypes for the joint strike fighter and and other planes and ships have that kind of process but where the lcs was different was that although the two prototypes would normally have gone through that kind of testing process because of the pressures from the Navy

and from the contractors they just built them and put them both into service and that is just very very different from what we see in other areas What are some other examples of the military acquiring I'm going to use the phrase

unnecessary platforms due to outside pressure oh there are so many uh in all of the services um i'll just give you three um as we don't have hours and hours so congress uh stymied the air force's attempts to retire parts of the c-130 fleet uh this was despite the air force insisting that its plans would retain more than sufficient airlift capability but the problem was that the congressional delegation from north carolina thought there would be too many reductions at Pope Airfield and thought that the C-130 fleet should be kept as it was. There's also the USS Haler.

So a Mississippi senator pushed for its procurement to stop there being a gap in the Ingalls production line at the shipyard at Pascagoula. This was between the end of the kid class programme and the start of the Ticonderoga class acquisition. also Sikorsky won a contract to replace the navy's sea knight helicopters under helpful pressure from the representatives from Connecticut because its production line was there and they wanted to keep it going this was despite the fact that the new helicopter's

tail wheel design was not ideal and made it very difficult to handle and there are many many more But I think the LCS provides the clearest example of this kind of trend, particularly as it had significant winning participation from the Navy as well, which is not what we see in all of the examples. What lessons can all involved take from this example then? Well, a lot has changed since 2001, but I think it's easy to imagine the US military making similar mistakes in future programmes. and I think that policy makers should be wary of the danger in placing too much emphasis on fears about the survival of the defence industrial base. If you over rely on a small number of sites and combine that with a powerful lobbying effort by prime contractors you get something like the LCS where congressional efforts to remove the funding

which citing concerns that were ultimately proved to be correct were deemed to fail. so while closing close working relationships between the services policy makers and contractors can be beneficial when you have blunders like the lcs i think that can really undermine american military capabilities and waste resources that could be better used elsewhere unfortunately we're out of time for today i'd like to thank my guest emma soulsbury emma where can we find you online and what are you working on next i believe the answer to what you're working on next is probably wrapping up that dissertation absolutely yep just carrying on research into the military industrial complex um you can find out more on twitter uh where i'm at souls bot s-a-l-i-s-b-o-t

comments and questions always welcome by dm if anyone has any questions well thank you again for coming on emma to the listeners thank you for tuning in we'll see you next time © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © transcript Emily Beynon