Marine Light Amphibious Warship Debacle Continues

As you’re well aware, the Marines have come up with a poorly conceived idea to act as hidden anti-ship missile shooters.  The absolute key to the entire concept was the Light Amphibious Warship (now called the Landing Ship, Medium, LSM), a small landing ship which would ferry small Marine units among the first island chain islands, enable relocation, and conduct resupply.  The Marines were asking for something on the order of 30 such vessels although the Navy seemed to be in mood for around 18.
 
The LSM is envisioned as a small vessel with cargo carried on an open deck, a capacity for around 70 troops, no viable defensive weapons, and a transit speed of 14 knots.  Construction was to have started a few years ago but that hope quickly fell by the wayside due to lack of Navy interest and buy in.
 
Now, with the Navy finally ready to proceed, the program has suffered a resounding setback.
 

After receiving bids from industry, the Navy canceled the request for proposals for the Landing Ship Medium …
 
“We had a bulletproof – or what we thought – cost estimate, pretty well wrung out design in terms of requirements, independent cost estimates,” Assistant Secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition Nickolas Guertin said at an American Society of Naval Engineers symposium last week.
 
“We put it out for bid and it came back with a much higher price tag,” he added.[1]

The LSM, the key to the Marine’s concept, has been abruptly halted due to being shockingly expensive.  Shocking to the Navy, perhaps, but to no one else.
 
This raises a few issues.
 
Cost Estimate – This demonstrates just how unrealistic and incompetent Navy cost estimators are.  I don’t have the exact number in front of me but the Congressional Budget Office, for example, estimated the LSM cost at over twice the Navy’s estimate and it looks like they were much closer to reality.  If this were just one isolated incident of a cost estimate failure we might write if off as a fluke but the history is that every Navy cost estimate is ridiculously, absurdly, laughably, stupidly, incompetently low.  That kind of a pattern isn’t bad luck, it’s intentional, systematic fraud on the Navy’s part.
 
Look at the mismatch between CBO estimates and the Navy, as documented below.
 

The Congressional Budget Office projected the lead ship in the class costing anywhere from $460 to $560 million, according to an April report. If the Navy buys the 18 to 35 ships according to current plans, each hull could cost $340 to $430 million. Initial plans in 2020 called for each ship to cost $100 to $150 million.[1]

The Navy believed the ships would cost $100M-$150M versus the CBO estimate of $340M-$430M with a lead ship cost of up to $560M!
 
Priority – The key to the entire Marine concept (setting aside the idiocy of the concept) was the LSM.  It was the first piece of the puzzle that had to be nailed down before anything else could proceed.  Without the LSM, you have nothing but a stupid idea on a piece of paper.  Did the Marines secure the LSM first?  NO!  Instead, the Marines (and by ‘Marines’, I mean Commandant Berger) proceeded to dump armor, tanks, artillery, and firepower and reshape their entire organization and focus with the assumption (when you assume you make an …) that the LSM would magically appear when needed.  This is program mismanagement of the worst kind.  Commandant Berger destroyed the Marines and now has nothing to show for it. 
 
Buy In – It doesn’t matter whether it’s the military or industry, when you attempt change, you have to get buy in from all affected parties or you won’t succeed.  Not only did Commandant Berger fail to get buy in from his own personnel, active and retired, he failed to get buy in from the party that would have to pay for the most important element of his concept, the LSM.  Berger simply issued commands and assumed everyone would see the brilliance of his idea and fall meekly in line.  Well, that worked internally with active duty Marines who were intimidated into silence but the Navy, being outside Berger’s chain of command, responded with indifference, to put it mildly.  Again, buy in from the Navy is something the Marines should have secured before tearing down their organization.
 
 
Future
 
The Marines seem determined to ride their ill-conceived concept down to combat-irrelevance, if they haven’t already gotten there.
 
Along with a stunning failure to deploy when requested at the beginning of the Ukraine conflict, the Marines have lost their place as America’s crisis response force and are now relegated to an afterthought, if that, by civilian and military leadership.
 
Nothing is going to progress regarding the LSM for the foreseeable future.  For the immediate future, the Navy may obtain a used vessel for the Marines to play with while negotiations between the Navy, Marines, and industry resume and drag out.
 

For now, to quickly get the Marines a ship that can move them around the region, the Navy plans to buy a “non-developmental vessel” while it works on the requirements … [1]

The utter failure of the program and the cancellation of the RFP offers a way out for the current Marine Commandant.  The Marines can cancel the entire concept, claiming that industry and the Navy have made the LSM unaffordable, and that the Marines are going back to doing what they historically should have been doing.  Will the current Commandant, General Eric Smith, have the courage and wisdom to seize this opportunity?  Unlikely, but it’s there for the taking.
 
The more likely scenario is that the LSM will linger in negotiations for several more years and the Marines will wind up with a missile shooting organization that has no way to deploy.  What an embarrassment and a waste !
 
 
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[1]USNI News website, “Landing Ship Medium Program Stalled Over Price, Navy Cancels Industry RFP”, Mallory Shelbourne, 17-Dec-2024,
https://news.usni.org/2024/12/17/landing-ship-medium-program-stalled-over-price-navy-cancels-industry-rfp