The Navy's line on the littoral combat ships is that they have "teething problems". LCS-1 was so poorly built that the hull began cracking. LCS-2 had bad corrosion problems.
There is a fine line between teething problems and garbage. When they try to push the state of the art, it's pretty easy to slide into piece of shit. Sometimes what is tried is too much of a leap and, when the technology matures a little, it could have worked. For every P-51, they often build a XP-55. Or, if you like the Garand and the Pedersen.
The difference is often whether a program's problems are addressed directly or papered-over in the hopes of being able to fix the issues after the gizmo is in service. My suspicion is that papering-over is what is going on, as the fear may be if the Navy openly addresses the problems with the LCS program, it will go the way of the Zumwalt class DDGs. It still might.
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You read about how the LCS's mine detector gear doesn't actually, well, detect mines, right? Which sorta means they're useless in waters like around Iran where there's bound to be oodles of mines, but that's the sort of waters they were supposed to be designed to be used in. What, exactly, *can* these turkeys do? Other than suck up money like a trophy escort at a Republican convention, that is?
- Badtux the Baffled Penguin
The "why" is easy: Without the Navy, there would not even be an American shipbuilding industry. Avondale, Newport News, Bath Iron Works, Pascagoula, all of them would have become beachfront condos decades ago without the Navy to buy from them.
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