Secretary of the Navy Donald Winter on Jan. 12 ordered Lockheed Martin to suspend construction of the third Littoral Combat Ship owing to a sudden spike in cost, the Navy announced.

The work stoppage, in effect for 90 days, gives the Navy time to understand why the cost of the speedy 3,000-ton warship’s price tag has risen to more than $400 million. The service has set a target of around $200 million apiece for as many as 60 of the new ships. That does not count the cost of plug-and-play sensor and weapons modules.

It’s not unusual for the first few vessels of a new class to exceed cost estimates.

Still, Winter said in a statement, "I determined that at this point in time it was critical to stop work on LCS-3 to assess the LCS program and ensure we understand the program's cost and management processes before we move forward.”

The stoppage does not affect the imminent completion of the first of the class, named Freedom, which was launched in September and is now fitting out. Freedom will enter service at San Diego this year.

Also unaffected is a parallel line of similar vessels designed and built by General Dynamics. The General Dynamics version of LCS is a triple-hull trimaran -- similar in appearance to a massive, high-tech houseboat -- while the Lockheed Martin design sports a conventional hull. In an unusual move, the Navy is buying equal numbers of the competing designs for testing while it works out tactics for the future LCS force.

Missions planned for the 40-knot vessels include near-shore minesweeping, hunting and killing super-quiet diesel submarines and launching Special Forces boats into inland waterways.

Cost growth aside, LCS has been at the heart of an ongoing controversy over rising shipbuilding costs and a shrinking U.S. fleet.

Robert Work, an analyst with the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says that LCS was conceived of, in part, to boost ship numbers at a time when the Navy was shrinking to fewer than 300 major vessels. “All this time, the Navy is saying, ‘We’ve got to have more ships.’ But it has lost cost control of these [new] ships.”

Besides LCS, the stealthy DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer has seriously exceeded cost estimates. Once pegged at around a billion dollars apiece, each of the 14,000-ton warships might cost as much as $3 billion.

Changes to the services resulting from operations in Iraq are further squeezing the Navy budget. “Everybody says we’re going to build up the Army, Special Force and the Marine Corps,” Work says. “The chance of us doing all that plus having a big increase in shipbuilding is extremely remote, especially if we can’t build LCS -- the cheapest and easiest ship to build -- for less than the $300 [million] or $400 million it looks like it might cost.”  

But Work is optimistic. He says the work stoppage is evidence of the Navy’s increasing discipline when it comes to keeping down costs.

Even so, LCS might not be best for the fleet, according to one critic. In a recent article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine, retired Rear Admiral W. J. Holland, Jr., pointed out that larger vessels, such as the Navy’s 9,000-ton Burke-class destroyers, boast more firepower per dollar than smaller ships, which are vulnerable to enemy missiles and are prone to structural damage in rough seas.