SAN DIEGO _ It's been a year since the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Littoral Combat Ship Training Facility at Naval Base San Diego.
The facility boasts 89 military staffers, plus 31 Department of Defense civilian and contractor employees and a wonderland of display screens so exact that they've made sailors sea sick on land.
"I'll find myself doing this," said Capt. Jordy Harrison, the commodore of the San Diego-based Littoral Combat Ship Squadron One. "I'm rocking on my toes because you feel like you're standing aboard a ship, even if it's not really moving."
The high-tech facility had its start at a rocky time for the controversial ship program. Reeling from a decade of design glitches, cost overruns, yard delays and leadership snafus, the littoral combat ship or LCS program by mid-2016 appeared to be mired in dysfunction.
Relying on automation, the radically reduced crew sizes aboard the LCS vessels promised deep savings to the Navy by shaving the dollars spent on personnel and their families. But to make the ships work, crews selected for the littoral combat fleet needed to perform multiple jobs, putting a premium on training.
Originally conceived as a futuristic fleet of cheap and nimble warships capable of fighting in the shallow waters of the Pacific Ocean and Persian Gulf, the LCS accounted for $12.4 billion in wasted spending, according to U.S. Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican and chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
Since December of 2015, five of the eight LCS warships delivered to the Navy suffered what are called "engineering casualties" _ expensive and often preventable mechanical breakdowns at sea that sidelined the vessels for months. The Navy blamed the ongoing problems not only on construction quality and design problems, but also on poorly trained crews.
In September 2016, Vice Adm. Tom Rowden, the Coronado, Calif.-based commander of Naval Surface Forces, ordered a pause in LCS operations to reboot the testing and training of all the vessels' engineering departments, part of a larger ongoing effort to reconfigure crew sizes and duties while constructing new squadrons in both San Diego and Mayport, Fla.
Rowden also turned to the Littoral Combat Ship Training Facility. Navy leaders hoped that the facility would train both individual shipmates and whole crews ashore, eliminating much of the on-the-job instruction taken for granted aboard destroyers and cruisers.
On a video screen stretching across a darkened room built to resemble exactly an LCS bridge this past week, trainers brought up a nearly perfect digital replica of San Diego Bay, including the carrier Carl Vinson, but with snow flurries whipping into the face of the ship.
"OK, you'd never likely see that in San Diego, but it shows you how we can change it up to fit any scenario," said Cmdr. Will Chambers, a career surface warfare officer who runs the LCS Training Facility, ticking off where his instructors can put a crew virtually, like an anti-piracy mission near the Middle East or the bustling sea lanes trafficked by the Japan-based Seventh Fleet's warships.
"But it's important because a littoral combat ship might have only three watch standers on duty. You'd have 12 on a destroyer."
There also are two mammoth mission bays that replicate to the inch the size and configuration of both the Freedom- and Independence-class warships, allowing whole crews to train at the same time.
By late 2019 or early 2020, the campus will be fully built, gobbling a large portion of what used to be the Fleet Industrial Supply Warehouse, but Harrison and other top Navy leaders told The San Diego Union-Tribune that they're already starting to see the fruits of the training complex and its teachers.
"We're even learning things about the LCS ships on the simulators before we see it at sea," said Capt. Ronald W. Toland Jr., commander of the Fleet Anti-Submarine Warfare Training Center that sponsors the LCS complex.
The cost: About $450,000 to run the program annually, according to Toland, but the figures are hard to crunch because expenses are shared between several commands and often are built into the procurement price of the LCS program itself.
Toland calls it "LCS University" and credits the Navy for borrowing the best ideas from aviation simulators and the submarine fleet's school houses to make it come together.
A second campus is being built in Mayport, with equipment from San Diego slated to head to Florida. The Pentagon's plan is for the aluminum trimaran Independence-class warships to homeport in San Diego while Florida becomes the East Coast station for the traditional steel Freedom-class LCS variants.
On both coasts, the vessels will be assigned to three divisions that handle minesweeping, surface warfare or anti-submarine operations, a change from the original plans for each LCS to handle a wider range of duties.
Like the Navy's ballistic submarine program, "Blue" and "Gold" crews will rotate on and off the warships, and about half the vessels will be forward-deployed to global hot spots like the Western Pacific of Persian Gulf. Rowden thinks that will help crews take ownership of their warships.
With so many sailors slated to jet to Bahrain or Singapore, Harrison says that "sustainment training" helps sailors retain skills between deployments. They can go home at night to spend time with family instead of putting to sea for weeks at a time, too.
"I like it because the program is built on crawl, walk and then run. I want crews to make their mistakes in the classroom and the simulator here before they come aboard the ships to prove their capabilities," said Harrison, the former commander of the guided-missile destroyer Halsey.
Before the new center began the digital training, it took sailors about 1 { hours to get a patrol craft back aboard the ship. Now they can do it in under 30 minutes, boiling down a process that consumes 50 pages in the official manuals, according to the Navy.
Congress has been skeptical of the Navy's zeal at exploiting the center's innovations. In a July report, the House Armed Services Committee determined that the fleet had been too slow to leverage the immersive courses and voiced concern about "the Navy's commitment to addressing the LCS training environment."
But Harrison and other Navy officials said that's changed and the Navy can expect the best trained crews in the history of the LCS program.
"I was a healthy pessimist of this program before I came to the squadron, too, but they've made changes," said Harrison. "We're seeing a program that's maturing. The training they're getting now is as high and complex as any in the surface Navy. It's paying off."
