From failure to filler: Why US Navy cant quit its flawed LCS

Facing a shrinking fleet and a widening naval gap with China, USNI reported this month that the US Navy is giving its troubled Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) a second look—not as a triumph of design, but as a stopgap born of strategic necessity.

The US Navy has decided to retain seven vessels previously slated for decommissioning, senior service officials said, amid growing operational demands and evolving mission needs.

Speaking at the Surface Navy Association conference in Arlington, Virginia, officials said the US Navy would keep five Freedom-class and two Independence-class ships, bringing the total LCS fleet to 28 small surface combatants.

Acting LCS program manager Jay Iungerich said there were currently no signals from senior leadership to proceed with further early retirements, reflecting a broader shift in US Navy priorities.

The decision comes as Independence-class LCS deployed to Bahrain have begun performing mine countermeasures (MCM) missions in the US 5th Fleet, replacing aging Avenger-class mine warfare ships that are now being dismantled after decades of service.

Vice Admiral Brendan McLane, commander of Naval Surface Forces, said the US Navy was encouraged by the performance of three LCS conducting those missions, following years of delays in fielding the complex MCM package.

Beyond mine warfare, the US Navy is retaining the LCS ships to support surface strike roles, weapons testing and experimentation with unmanned and autonomous systems, using their large mission bays as testbeds for drones, missile launchers and new concepts of operations.

Officials said the move reflects an effort to extract greater operational value from a once-controversial program as the US Navy adapts to new threats and force structure gaps.

The decision to retain the LCS may indicate US efforts to deploy a low-end general-purpose combatant and halt a short-term fleet decline. But the LCS was conceived for a very different strategic era.

As Brent Eastwood noted in an October 2025 National Security Journal (NSJ) article, the ship was designed in the post-9/11 period for low-intensity coastal missions such as counter-piracy, counter-narcotics, mine clearance and limited anti-submarine warfare.

In an era of great power competition, however, Eastwood argues the LCS is poorly suited for near-peer naval conflict, given its light armament and limited survivability against anti-ship missiles.

Technical failures compounded these conceptual shortcomings. A February 2022 US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that LCS operational testing revealed high failure rates in mission-essential propulsion and engineering systems, leading to frequent casualties and aborted deployments.

The report also noted the ship’s limited self-defense capability, underperforming modular mission concept, and sustainment problems caused by small crews and heavy reliance on contractors, leaving the class dependent on larger combatants in contested environments.

However, US Navy fleet-sizing problems may give the LCS a temporary, if not second, lease on life. A US Congressional Research Service (CRS) report from April 2025 notes the growing gap between China and the US in hull numbers.

The report notes that China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) surpassed the US Navy in total battle force ships between 2015 and 2020, reaching more than 370 ships by 2024, with projections of about 395 by 2025 and 435 by 2030.

By comparison, the report states that the US stood at 296 battle force ships in September 2024 and, under the FY2025 budget plan, is projected to decline to about 294 ships by 2030 before any later recovery.

The report stresses that this short-term US dip, combined with China’s sustained construction pace and larger shipbuilding capacity, is driving concern in the US Congress and Department of Defense (DoD) about worsening numerical and industrial imbalances in the 2020s.

Rather than fixing the LCS’s design flaws, the US Navy is increasingly seeking to redefine what usefulness looks like for a limited ship in an era of fleet scarcity.

Matthew Hipple argues in a June 2025 Proceedings article that the US Navy, with its LCS, and the US Marine Corps should leverage the Littoral Expeditionary Organic Network (LEON) concept to create a flexible, cost-effective littoral force package.

According to Hipple, the LCS is a well-suited platform for distributed operations in green-to-blue transition zones — particularly where US Marine units conduct advanced base operations — because of its mission bay modularity, high speed, and aviation support capabilities.

He notes that by integrating LCS with US Marine Corps maneuver elements under the LEON concept, the services can improve maneuver, sustainment, and mine-countermeasures capability in littoral seas.

Hipple emphasizes that this approach emphasizes adaptability over traditional high-end combat roles, proposing that the LCS’s modular payloads and ability to operate with US Marine forces amplify its operational utility in low- and mid-intensity scenarios.

However, Bradley Martin argues in a July 2025 RAND report that the LCS was initially designed as a flexible platform for various mission payloads, but system integration challenges limited this goal.

Martin points out that the class mainly serves as a replacement for the Avenger-class mine warfare vessels and lacks the capability for other specialized missions, restricting its role in crises.

While he says the LCS has participated in theater deployments to enhance US presence, it has not yet become a regular part of the rotational battle force and may not do so until after 2027. He adds that while LCS deployments can take the strain off the US destroyer fleet, it has not yet been the case.

In that sense, the LCS functions more as a holding action than as a solution. Its limitations are well understood, yet its continued service reflects the absence of an affordable alternative capable of performing routine missions without consuming high-end warships.

That stopgap logic, however, reflects a deeper and recurring pattern in US naval acquisition.

As Emma Salisbury argued in a December 2025 Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) article, the deeper problem lies not in shipyard capacity or a lack of viable foreign designs, but in the US Navy’s chronic inability to impose design discipline.

Salisbury says programs intended to be affordable and straightforward, such as the Constellation-class frigate, became overengineered as requirements multiplied, eroding commonality, driving weight growth and inflating costs.

She stresses that until the US Navy can freeze designs early and resist gold-plating, the LCS will remain not an answer to fleet shortfalls, but a symptom of the institutional failures that created them.

Ultimately, the LCS endures not because it meets the demands of great-power naval warfare, but because US shipbuilding dysfunction and shrinking fleet numbers have left the US Navy managing risk with what it has, rather than fielding what it needs.