The US Navy’s shambolic efforts to modernise its diminished fleet of Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers have been laid bare in an excoriating report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), which details the spend of billions of dollars on a programme that has failed to deliver.
Published on 17 December 2024, the GAO report states the US Navy programme to modernise its Ticonderoga class required the spend of billions of dollars in a bid to extend individual ship’s service life by five years, rather than retire them from the fleet.
However, only three of 11 cruisers will complete the process and will not spend as much time at sea as intended. The three cruisers – USS Gettysburg, USS Chosin, and USS Cape St George – are planned to be divested in the 2026 and 2027 financial years having undergone a combined $1.9bn outlay.
In addition, four of the modernised cruisers, the USS Hue City, USS Anzio, USS Cowpens, and USS Vicksburg, were decommissioned between 2022 and 2024 having undergone a total of $1.8bn in modernisation works.
An initial plan would have seen 11 Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers undergo a modernisation and service life extension programme, although this was cut to seven vessels in 2017.
Among issued uncovered during the investigation were “schedule delays, wasted costs, and poor-quality work”, the GAO stated, adding that “weak oversight” contributed to the problems.
“Navy leadership discouraged the use of key quality control tools. For example, leadership discouraged the use of monetary penalties, so contractors weren't always held accountable for their late and sometimes poor-quality work,” the GAO reported.
Providing examples of modernisation failure, the GAO reported that contractors performed “poor work” on the sonar dome of USS Vicksburg, resulting in additional costs and schedule delays. In addition, USS Vicksburg was provided new weapons operating stations that were not installed years after having been delivered.
Through the planned modernisation, which the US Navy “did not effectively plan”, a high volume of unplanned work – including some 9,000 contract changes – resulted in cost growth and schedule delays.
“The Navy has yet to identify the root causes of unplanned work or develop and codify root cause mitigation strategies to prevent poor planning from similarly affecting future surface ship modernisation efforts,” the GAO said.
Further, weakened quality assurance tools restricted the US Navy's ability to hold contractors accountable for “poor quality” work. In 2018, leadership restricted maintenance officials from assessing monetary penalties to contractors without senior leadership approval.
In 2020, leadership changed procedures to reduce inspections, which are a vital tool for overseeing ship repair contracts, by almost 50 percent. These actions were implemented to maintain strong working relationships with the contractors because of the Navy's dependence on them to modernise its fleet, according to US Navy officials, the GAO report cited.
Without reassessment, the US Navy “risks experiencing similar negative outcomes in future modernisation efforts”, the GAO report concluded.
Mass decommissioning cripples Tico fleet
Acquired between 1983 and 1994, GlobalData’s intelligence on the US defence market highlighted the Ticonderoga class was planned to be replaced by the DDG(X) programme from the 2030s.
Having been in service for more than 30 years, 2024 saw the rapid drawdown of the Ticonderoga class, with the USS Cowpens, USS Antietam, and USS Leyte Gulf all decommissioned in the space of a single month.
Out of an original 27 vessels, just nine, or 33% of the fleet, are still in service.
Far from undergoing a LIFEX programme to help them sustain operations to the late-2020s, the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers are seemingly sprinting, or being pushed, to the finish line.
