Deadlines, additional costs, lack of parts: the outsourcing of the maintenance of the LCS of the US Navy is a failure

In the wake of reductions in defense funding linked to the end of the Cold War, many armed forces gave in to the lure of outsourcing the maintenance of major equipment to private providers. If certain contracts were framed from the start in the form of capacity commitments, as in the case for example of the maintenance of the EALAT fleet in Dax, the majority of them, relating to potentially projectable equipment, were limited to commitments of means. However, this approach opens the door to significant deviations in terms of costs and delays, with the result being a significant drop in the operational availability of equipment, as well as the capacity of armies to deploy this equipment in an environment degraded or distant. It is precisely this problem that the US Navy is faced with today regarding its Littoral Combat Ship.

Indeed, according to the findings of a report conducted by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, already known to the defense community for his often harsh positions regarding the F35 program, the outsourced maintenance program for the US Navy's LCS accumulates excesses, and turns out to be not only more expensive and less effective than the internal maintenance programs of other units of the US Navy, but it also involves the very capacity to employ these ships in accordance with their operational contract, yet already could not be more limited. It must be said that outsourcing has taken on extravagant dimensions in this area, the crews and technical teams of the US Navy not even being capable of emergency intervention in the event of damage, due to the the absence of detailed procedures and the difficulty in obtaining spare parts, sometimes forcing us to resort to the cannibalization of the ships themselves, a technique generally used by second-tier armies, or for very old equipment that no longer has any useful life. industrial support, which neither the US Navy nor the LCS program are.

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