SAN DIEGO — The Navy's top officer last week defended the service's recent decision to retire its first four Littoral Combat Ships. Speaking at the West 2020 conference here, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday said the Navy will save approximately $2 billion across the future years defense program by retiring the four vessels instead of upgrading them to maintain the same capability as ships developed later in the program. "We used those first hulls to test and we put no money into upgrading them like the rest of the fleet. So in order to put them on the same par as the rest of the LCS class, it would cost about another $2 billion over the FYDP," Gilday said. "So that was a tough decision to make on whether we wanted to put that money towards those existing LCSs or retire them, move on with the rest of the class, and then take that $2 billion and put it in the [shipbuilding] account for different capability," he continued. "The bottom line ... is those first four ships are not bringing lethality to the fight. They're not bringing capability to the fight and I just didn't see the return on investment to do that."
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