LCS: Navy Pushes Back Against Criticisms

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/05/08/lcs-navy-pushes-back-vs-leaked-reports/



The $584 million dollar USS Freedom.

LCS: Navy Pushes Back Against Criticisms
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on May 08, 2013 at 5:30 PM

In a hastily convened conference call with journalists, the Navy pushed back today against recent congressional criticisms of its Littoral Combat Ship.

Yesterday, the LCS program took a 1-2 blow from BreakingDefense, which got a draft of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report questioning the Navy’s cost estimates to operate it. There was also one from Bloomberg, which had obtained an internal Navy study critiquing the new ship. The two articles drove awkward questions in the House and Senate. (We don’t know whether the two timely leaks were coincidence or a campaign to arm LCS critics for the hearings).

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The report by Rear Adm. Samuel Perez that Bloomberg cited, for instance, dates to March 2012, as the Bloomberg article acknowledged, and parts of it have been reported before, although Bloomberg’s Tony Capaccio appears to be the first reporter to get the entire document. Many — though not all — of that report’s concerns have been addressed, Hunt said. “[Those concerns] go back frankly a year ago,” he said. “It goes back, frankly to the reason the CNO created the Council… We’ve looked at that stuff, we’ve made adjustments.”

The draft GAO report obtained by BreakingDefense, likewise, criticizes a 2011 estimate of LCS “operations and support costs,” which according to GAO was 90 percent likely to be wrong. “I’m not sure where people come up with the specific percentages of reliability,” Hunt said, but “the program office continues to refine and update those things.”