MILWAUKEE — A new report this week from ProPublica took an extensive look into the United States Navy’s Littoral combat ships (LCS), some of which have been built in Wisconsin at Marinette Marine, as the Navy continues to decommission those vessels at a faster rate than many surely projected when the multi-billion dollar ships were initially planned.
“We worked with a source who was a top analyst at the Government Accountability Office,” said Joaquin Sapien, who wrote the piece for ProPublica titled “The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the ‘Little Crappy Ship.’” “One of the estimates that he came up with for a possible lifetime cost of these ships was $100 billion or more.”
Since the first LCS-1, the USS Freedom, was commissioned in 2008, 28 more have been commissioned, with all being built at either the Austal USA facility in Alabama or at Marinette Marine in Wisconsin.
Those ships include the USS Milwaukee, which was commissioned in late 2015 and decommissioned Friday, not even eight years after going into service.
“There have been some more recent deployments that the Navy is calling successful,” Sapien said. “But these were initially meant to do a lot of things that they’re really not capable of at this point.”
Watch the full interview above.