 ProPublica recently published the results of an almost year-long investigation into the literal combat ship, which was supposed to be a ship that the Navy was going to rely on as a very technically advanced ship that could fight in close to shore, which is what littoral means. And Joaquin reported on that story, interviewing tons of people, going through readings of documents. This is a story that's been 20 years in the making. So I'll just kind of kick it off this live session by asking Joaquin, it has been two decades since the ship's been around. There's been stories written before. What was the major one to kind of dive a little deeper into the story? Yeah, well that actually was part of it. The ship's been around for 20 years now, in that time there's been dozens of reports from places like the Government Accountability Office, various IG reports, the Department of Testing and Evaluation, and the Pentagon congressional hearings, news stories about how poorly these ships are working. But what hadn't really been done yet was to sort of show the complete history of how and why the Navy made these decisions to continue to build them and invest so heavily, and just keep doubling down again and again on these ships that had such obvious shortcomings. And so our ambition really was to trace the entire history of the program from its conception to the construction, to the deployments of the ships, to many of the breakdowns that befell these ships so that we could understand how exactly these things happen. Right. So we did a lot of synthesizing, in other words, of all the strands kind of deliver the big picture overview of how this ship came to be and why it is now being, many of them are being sent to Mothball early. So let's just kind of go over that part of it. Why don't you tell us about what the idea was behind the littoral combat ships and what the end result was? Sure. So early on, the idea was that the Navy in the early 2000s needed to expand its presence in, as you said, shallow waters all over the world. There was a demand for the Navy to have a greater footprint in the Persian Gulf, especially to help with the war in Iraq and help deal with the Iranian Republican Guard, and also to be able to operate in the Caribbean and deal with drug runners and gun runners in that area, and also to work with smaller Allied navies in Southeast Asia. And so the thinking at the time was that the Navy was going to need a ship that could help do that because the ships that it had were sort of too heavy and lumbering to get too close to shore. And this was a real vulnerability for the US Navy. USS Cole had a big hole blown into it through what's sort of called the asymmetric threat, an attack on a speedboat that had explosives on it. And so there was a strong desire to try and counter that. And at the same time, there were a number of functions that they needed this ship to be able to achieve. So they wanted the ship to be able to hunt and destroy submarines. They wanted the ship to be able to hunt and destroy underwater mines, which are really important to maintain safe shipping around the world. And they also wanted the ship to be able to fight other warships. And so the thinking was that you could do all three of those missions with just one ship, and they could come in and be very quickly transformed to accomplish their next mission. And the person that had this idea in mind is a former chief of naval operations, Vernon Clark. And his thinking was these ships were going to be able to go in and, you know, like a NASCAR sort of speed race, get fixed up, outfitted, and go out to their next mission. He gained confidence that this idea was going to work when he saw a Danish demonstration of sort of a similar form of technology called the Standflex, which is a very quick, small modular ship that the Danish Navy had. And so his thinking was, well, if they can do it, we can do it. And as it turned out, that turned out to be wrong. You know, the mine warfare capability is really just in its initial phases still, even after 20 years. They just reached initial operating capability. The surface warfare equipment that the ship has is mostly just to protect the ship itself. And they've given up altogether on the anti-submarine module. And that's part of the reason why the Navy now wants to decommission these ships. So let's talk about those, those different weapons systems for a second. For each of them, can you talk about a little about what the idea was and then what actually happened to it? You know, the idea of having a, almost a kind of a Lego blockability to kind of plug in and plug out sounds like it's not a bad idea. But in practice, can you tell us a little bit about like what happened with each of those different systems? Like what are they actually supposed to look like and then what happened to them? Sure. So they were going to have what's called plug and play technology where, just like it sounds, you'd be able to bring the ship in, it's got open architecture, and then you could install equipment that could do whatever you needed it to do. And each of these missions, though, were extraordinarily complicated. And so like I said, there's mine warfare, there's anti-submarine warfare, and there's anti-surface warfare in order to fight other ships, other warships. And so for the anti-submarine and the mine countermeasures, in particular, the idea was they're going to have sonar devices that they could control off the stern of the ship. In one case, it was a mini submarine that could go out and find mines, you'd send a signal back to the ship, and then you'd send something out to go and destroy the mine. And for the submarine, there's a drag sonar device that could detect other mines in the water, it would feed information back to the ship, the ship would send a signal to a helicopter, which would then drop another sonar into the ocean, find the submarine, and then drop a torpedo to go and destroy it. So among the many issues that these devices had was that they had difficulty communicating one another with one another, in which you can imagine it's a really important part of making all of this work. Another issue that they had was that they had a lot of difficulty functioning in the large wake left behind a latoral combat ship, because these ships are almost like a giant jet ski. They're operating on the plane of the water without the sort of propeller propulsion that most ships have. They actually do have jet streams. And so they're up on the surface of the water, they leave this big wake, and that makes it really hard to control some of these devices that they wanted to hang off the back of the ship to accomplish some of these missions. And so we spoke with somebody who was involved in developing these modules for basically the entire course of his career in and out of the Navy as both a civilian and in uniform. And the way that he sort of described it is that without these mission modules, the ship is basically like a box floating in the ocean. And so that's kind of where we are with the LCS at the moment. We're still waiting on its fighting capability, anti-surface is in place, and they've given up on being able to fight sets altogether. I mean, some of those things sound so complex, it sort of boggles the mind a little bit about, you know, why it was that the Navy thought they would work in the first place. But can you tell me, like, were there were there warning signs, were there moments when people said, either inside the Navy or outside the Navy, you know, what's going on with these ships? They're not working as they should. Were there any kind of questions that were raised about that? So that's one of the interesting aspects of this story is that there were a lot of questions raised through these internal and external investigations. Some of these were assigned to senior officers in the Navy who had the task of doing a deep analysis of the LCS to try and figure out how to make it work or whether it can work. And a couple of those analysis came back negative, basically suggesting we should curtail the program altogether. And in both the cases that we looked at, not only did the Navy fail to heed the advice that was in these investigations, but the authors of those investigations saw their careers derailed as a result. And so it wound up creating this kind of chilling effect where if you spoke out against the LCS during a certain time period, you were going to run into trouble. And the consequences could be pretty severe for your personal professional career path. And when we went out to report this story, you and I had all kinds of discussions about the folks we were talking to and the need for anonymity for a lot of them. Even so, I was always struck by how it continued post-career. There was still a real desire to kind of keep quiet about things. So how did we end up sort of like kind of getting over those, how did you make connections with these folks who obviously showed some hesitancy, some nervousness throughout talking years after they had even left the Navy? Yeah, I think it was important to show that we were willing to make the investment in both time and resources to really try and understand what happened here and to tell the story with the degree of sensitivity and nuance, but also by holding the desire to hold the right people accountable that I think spoke to a lot of the people that ultimately wound up participating, whether they were on the record or not. I have to say that the series that you and Megan Rose and Robert Fadarecchi did a few years ago turned out to be a great calling card. And even though that was a series that was quite critical of Navy leadership, there were a lot of people who said, you know, you guys got it right that time, and so I'm going to talk to you again. And so that that helped a lot. But, you know, those fears that you're talking about are real, even for people, as you said, who've left the Navy, because a lot of them continue to work with US military in one way or the other. People go on to work as defense contractors or they're working at, you know, universities or any number of other things where they their their concern was, well, if I call out the wrong person, this is going to affect me and my livelihood going forward, even though I'm not in uniform anymore. Flattery will get you everywhere, you know. Flattery will get you everywhere. Yeah, with my host. Yeah, exactly. All right, so people are warning the Navy, people are raising concerns about whether or not these things are worth it. Why didn't they, why weren't their warnings heated, what was kind of propelling along this project, even though there was kind of alarm bells going off? One of the things that we found was that once these programs of this scale and this investment get going, they can be extraordinarily difficult to stop. They take on a degree of momentum that seems sort of impervious to logic and to reason and to even these really obvious systemic problems. And there's there's a bunch of complicated reasons for why that's so, but I think a lot of it boils down to one was, you know, personal ambition and people who were passionate about this program really wanting to kind of defy the odds and make it work and really being true believers that it could work and it could serve important needs for the Navy. And then also you have members of Congress who represent districts where these ships are either produced or maintained or they build parts for them. And it is, you know, those lawmakers have enormous interest in protecting those jobs that these ships create. And so they advocated very strongly at the highest levels, even writing to President Trump, for instance, and insisting that the White House add more ships to the budget after it had been submitted to Congress in order to keep these jobs going in what are pretty important, pretty politically important parts of the country. And so those two between those two things what you wind up with is a program that's lasted for 20 some odd years now, even though you can go back to the early 2010s and see these really embarrassing breakdowns occurring over and over and over again. And let's name some names here. Who were the people who were the big proponents who kind of kept this thing going, even when there were obvious signs of trouble with the program? So a couple names pop up. I mean, I mentioned earlier that C&O Vernon Clark really had a vision for what this ship could do. He was one of its earliest proponents. And then later on, a lot of key decisions were made by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, who wanted to expand the program. There was a plan in place at that time to get the Navy to be well over 300 ships. It got to be a plan to build 355 ships at one point. And certainly he wanted very much to build as many ships as he could. And things were set up to build littoral combat ships in these two shipyards in Alabama and in Wisconsin. And so he very much wanted to see this program continue and push for it in what turned out to be a pretty shrewd and calculating way. Yeah. Talk about some of the best writing in the story was about the string of incidents that happens in the summer of 2016. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about what occurred and the significance of that time period, not just the summer, but around the year of 2016. What kind of happened then? And what lessons did you draw from that? So that was a really important year for the program. This was the year that the ships began to enter the fleet and participate in exercises around the world that are important for the Navy for an evil strategy and to show their its power. And the first of these incidents occurred in 2015 with the USS Milwaukee, which was on its way eventually to California and then the South China Sea after stopping Mayport to do more testing. And it never made it halfway down the East Coast before a software failure damaged its combining gear and had to be dragged in some 40 miles into via Navy salvage ship to be repaired in Norfolk. And so that was the first breakdown that happened in that year. The second one involved the USS Fort Worth, which was actually on an otherwise pretty successful deployment in Singapore. Working with Allied navies and worked on a rescue of an Indonesian commercial plane crash. But it was being run sort of to the grant. One of the things that we learned in that investigation is that the sailors who were on it were just completely exhausted by that deployment, which is one of the consequences that you will see of a ship with this kind of technology on it and this kind of responsibility being served on by just 40 people. Everybody on it is wiped out. And so unfortunately the sailors in that instance skipped a routine step. They failed to properly lubricate the combining gear and they caused some pretty serious damage and it took the Navy about seven months to repair it. So that was number two. The third one took place on the USS Freedom. They went out to participate in the Rim of the Pacific exercise, which is an enormously consequential. It's the biggest naval exercise that's held. And so all eyes were kind of washing. It was meant to demonstrate its ability to go out and find mines. There was a seawater leak that takes place inside the main machinery room in that ship. And so there's just water spraying all over all of this electrical equipment. They bring the ship back in. They do a procedure that they think is going to fix the problem. As it turns out, it doesn't. And yet they decide to take that ship back out again anyway, in part because of all of the pressure to perform. And the idea was that they could just rely on their three other engines while they bring it back and they discover that that one engine that was contaminated was now severely corroded and had to be replaced, which was another very, very costly mistake. So then there's two more over the course of that year, or at least two other ships were involved. One was heading out to Singapore from Hawaii, had to turn back. And another one hit some locks in the Panama Canal, struck a tugboat and had just kind of a disastrous five weeks in that part of the world. And so with that, time period really showed, was put on full display some of the many mechanical and crewing issues that these ships had. And it turned out to be a year where the Navy learned quite a lot about the limits of these ships. So we want to get to fewer questions in a second. If we could wrap up, what is the status of the LCS program today? Like what's going on with them? So last year, the Navy tried to decommission nine of the ships. They were able to decommission only four because Congress blocked it, blocked half of them from being retired. And those are happening as we speak. The Sioux City was retired last month. The USS Milwaukee was retired just within the last few days. And there's a couple of more that are scheduled to be retired this year. And the Navy is asked to retire two more, or both independence class ships next year. And so we'll see whether that happens. In the meantime, the Navy is trying to put these ships that they still have on missions that they can actually handle. But there seems to be, I mean, certainly from the response that we were getting from the Navy to our questions, there, it wasn't the most robust defense of the ship. They're acknowledging that it's got pretty serious flaws. And they're basically saying this doesn't do us much good against our top line priority right now, which is China. And so we are better off retiring these ships and investing the money elsewhere than continuing to try and make them work against a peer that we really don't think that they would be capable of fighting anyway. Right. So these are ships that were designed to last 20 years that are being put to bed after five, 10 years. Each one cost $500 million. What's the long-term total overall cost of this program? So we worked with an analyst, a former government accountability office analyst who was able to help us figure out exactly what that was. And the estimate that he showed us was that it could reach $100 billion or more. But that figure takes into account basically everything, the mission modules, the people serving on the ship, the maintenance, the cost to actually decommission the ship when that time comes. And so depending on how long this program lasts, that's the price tag that we're looking at, $100 billion or more. It could be less than that if the Navy decides we're going to get permission to decommission a larger number of these sooner. But that's looking like a potentially $100 billion or more program. $100 billion. Let's get some questions from our audience. We'd love to hear from public readers and viewers. Questions come in about who is responsible for oversight of this line of ships ultimately? And have there been any real consequences? Yeah, so responsibility lies with Congress and lies with the Defense Department to some degree. But certainly we have oversight committees in Congress that are supposed to be monitoring this stuff. And over the years, some members have really gone to task trying to hold the Navy to account for some of the cost overruns. As we detail in our story, John McCain was very much opposed to this program and would periodically grill Navy officials about the skyrocketing costs and the mechanical breakdowns. Of course, he's now passed away, but there are others who have been also very critical of these ships. But at the same time, you have other forces on those same committees that are big advocates for those ships. And they tend to be people who represent districts, again, where the ships or their parts are being made. So we've got the Navy, we've got the Department of Defense, another player in this is the defense contracting industry, the folks who built these ships. Do we have any idea about where blame lies with them? What did they do, if they did anything, in terms of making the ship really not able to fulfill its duties? Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question. What the Navy did and does in most cases is they put out requirements for these kinds of ships. They basically say, this is what we wanted the ship to do. We wanted to go this fast. We wanted to have this kind of capability. And so give us your best ideas. And that's what the defense contractors did in this case. And they came back with some really interesting and innovative ideas. You know, early on the designs were based on designs for commercial or passenger ferries, which was a very unusual choice for a ship meant for war, not transportation. But nonetheless, those were the designs that were the most compelling to the Navy and ultimately the Defense Department and everyone else. And that's how they wound up getting these contracts. And then they built these ships to the designs that they had agreed on with the Navy. And so there is certainly some responsibility there. But what they would say is, well, we built the ship that the Navy asked for. Ultimately, one of the things that we heard from Marinette Marine, for instance, is that we didn't design the ship. We just built the ship. It's actually a Lockheed Martin design. And we built it to Navy specifications. The Navy told us what to do in the budget with the Navy and Congress, because they're the ones who provide the funding and approve this whole program. So if you're looking to kind of look at where the accountability lies, it really lies with the people who are spending the money and making the decisions to keep these things going, even despite these warning signs. Do you think, do you have any kind of idea of like why there hasn't been more of an outcry from voters about this particular program? I mean, I don't know that this is the thing that, you know, most voters and their sort of day in, day out routine lives are following much. So I think that's probably part of it. I mean, hopefully, you know, our story changes that a little bit. But I think it is also something that everyone, you know, we've all as Americans have something at stake here. We're all paying taxes and we've all got to be protected by our U.S. military. And so a lot of people, while they might feel very removed from what's described in the story, there is reason for concern. I mean, ultimately, this is our money that's being spent. But, you know, these stories are also really complicated. And I mean, it took an enormous amount of time for us to be able to break this down as simply as we could. So I think that that is also potentially part of the reason why there isn't so much, you know, emphasis on this or attention put on this from voters. Yeah, right. It's very complicated to understand. It's just not something that people are sitting around their kitchen table necessarily aware of or talking about every morning. Right. And kind of unfolds kind of slowly after after 20 years of time. Are there any concerns that the Navy invested sort of so heavily into the littoral combat ships that they have been something that has in some way left us behind kind of our modern day peer to peer competitors like China? Yeah, that's a big concern from people who watched the Navy closely is that, you know, they made this huge investment into ships that aren't working and aren't going to do us any good against what the Pentagon has decided is our top most important competitor right now, which is China. And so, you know, the exact numbers, I think are there's Chinese Navy has 340 ships and submarines at its disposal according to the Pentagon's most recent report. And we've got somewhere around 294. You know, there's a lot of questions there about how much those numbers matter and our carriers are superior and things like that. But, you know, when you consider that meant, you know, 294 of those ships, many of them are now made up. I mean, there's 35 or worth 35 littoral combat ships. A couple of them are still being built. We've decommissioned a few, but that's still a pretty significant chunk of the Navy. And, you know, the Navy's just said, these aren't really going to help us in a peer to peer fight. And final question, we'll wrap things up. Can you tell are these ships still being built and what is their ultimate fate going to be? So, there are a couple of ships that are, I think, just finishing construction or being outfitted just now. These are the very last ships that the Navy bought. Ultimately, they decided they wanted 32. Congress wound up successfully tacking on three more and they got 35. And so, now we're in this very strange period where you have the very newest of these ships entering the fleet. And at the same time, they're getting rid of some that are just a few years old. So, that's basically the status of the program. One thing I haven't talked about that one of our viewers kind of pointed out is, what about the crewing of these ships? Can you talk a little bit about the size of the crews and what they were going through? Yeah. So, early on, the idea was that they were only going to be 40 people on them, which is a drop in the bucket compared to most Navy vessels, which have typically hundreds. And so, this really was a unique ship in that respect. And so, every sailor or officer on it was going to have multiple jobs. And the calculus was that they were actually going to rely on contractors to do much of the work that sailors and officers would normally do, help to maintain the ships and fix them and things like that. That turned out to backfire because the Navy wound up even sort of more behold into these contractors because they'd have to be waiting around in order for them to arrive and help fix the ship. And we talked to many, many sailors and officers who complained about how long that could take. And, but after some of these deployments that I described earlier in 2015 and 16, it became pretty clear that the crew, original crewing concepts weren't going to work and that they were going to have to expand the size of the crews, which they ultimately did. And they also made the ships so that they were single mission. And so, they've given up on the idea of having swappable weapons packages all together at this point. Okay. So, ultimate question here. What lessons did you draw from your reporting in terms of the Navy's investment in more innovative, what seemed at least to be at the time, innovative technologies? Yeah. So, I think that they're, you know, certainly one of the things that we heard quite a bit is that there's this sort of cardinal principle when it comes to Navy shipbuilding, which is to buy a few and test a lot. And so, you kind of figure out how this thing works, what its flaws are, before you go out and buy dozens of whatever it is that you're looking at. And, you know, in this case, what we were told by former Navy leaders is that we did the opposite. We bought a few, we did buy a few and test a lot. We bought a lot. And then by the time we got them out to the fleet, it was too late. We were learning about the flaws of the ships as they were being deployed. And so, you know, if we're going to make a significant investment in this kind of innovative technology, again, which seems inevitable, then I think it's going to be really important to very thoroughly test it, you know, before we buy these things. And also just to be aware of, you know, how this kind of inertia develops over time, where you have lawmakers who are going to ardently support these ships almost no matter what, you're going to have people in the Navy who are going to sort of stake their careers on the success of these ships. And so, you know, there's a lot of forces at play here that make it very difficult to stop it, even once it's obvious that things are going wrong. And this is not the first, you know, instance of this. I mean, people have made similar comparisons to the F-35s, to the Gerald R. Ford, to the future combat system. And so, it is something that has popped up again and again throughout our history. And each one of those weapons programs I think serves as a kind of case study for the sorts of pitfalls that we really want to try to avoid so we don't make these kinds of mistakes again in the future. All right. That's our time today. Thanks so much, everyone, for tuning in and for supporting our work. 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