In November 2011, Bethesda released The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a 12-gigabyte fantasy RPG Fourteen years later, it has been transformed into everything from a game that can now run on Alexa to a 600-gigabyte, 120fps 4K experience, demanding high-end systems. The modding community has supported this range of experimentation with over 130,000 “mods,” or modified files, which include everything from simple scripts to complex gameplay and graphical overhauls, supported by an organic network of custom software and modding tools, from the automated modlist installer Wabbajack to Nexus Mods. All of this has been done almost entirely for free, with little to no central direction, investment, or organization. As a dedicated modding community drastically expands the lifespan of a game, major studios like CD Projekt Red, Larian, and Bethesda have sought to capture and support this hobbyist community. In Skyrim’s modding ecosystem, we can observe one of the world’s largest and most unusual experiments in modular design, bridging software and hardware, with one single, small game at its center. This experiment has now outlasted the United States Navy’s most ambitious experiment in modular design: the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS).
The LCS aimed to establish modularity as a new foundational principle in warship design through interchangeable mission modules, which are groupings of specialized equipment. The LCS was meant not only to chart a new course for warship design but also to establish networked, multi-purpose ships as the future of the American Navy. Yet today, the LCS is widely considered a failure, plagued by mechanical problems, with orders canceled and a reputation that would be politely called an embarrassment. Though 27 ships remain in commission, a little over half the class’s intended production, the ships’ reputation has been defined by controversy and frustration.
Despite extensive technical, manufacturing, and budgetary analyses in the expert literature, few have focused on the design aim at the heart of the LCS: modularity. Through understanding the origins of the LCS and its early life, how the designers understood and thought of modularity, and how this modularity was integrated into the ship, and by contrasting this with Skyrim’s mod community, we can better understand the failures of the LCS and lessons for future modular design.
It is beyond rote to observe that the modern battlefield incentivizes modular innovation. Every other day we seem to find a new story of a hobbyist’s modifications reshaping frontline tactics. We may even say we are in a “mods” arms race: the nation that can eke lethality out of its systems by hacking, welding, retrofitting, and jerry-rigging will have a decisive edge in battles to come. Given the critical need to innovate at war, taking a moment to understand two examples of real-world modular design at scale may be beneficial in structuring defense technology and the American military for maximal modular mayhem.
“It Just Works”
Almost all modern construction, including that of warships, is based on modular construction. What the LCS aimed to do was achieve modular configurations. When we speak of “modularity” we can mean two distinct concepts: modular configurability and modular alterity. Many basic technologies of modern industrial society are modular. Much rarer is modular alterity: that is something that is not merely modular, but which may also be radically remade, changing its very nature and purpose. Skyrim is the ideal example of modular alterity. It can become everything from a Soulslike to an MMORPG. The LCS also aimed to achieve this high reconfigurability and alterity.
Though some may balk at the comparison of a $500-750 million vessel with a $60 video game, like so many other design and engineering principles, good modular systems share certain critical characteristics, regardless of size. Furthermore, the LCS itself is not wholly modular. The main mission packages: surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare, and mine countermeasures are contained within a mission bay composing about one to two thirds of the lower deck of the ship on both the larger Independence-class (15,200 sq ft) and the smaller Freedom-class (6,500 sq ft). The much-vaunted modular staging ground of the LCS is roughly equivalent to the modular staging ground we may find in a roomy Trader Joe’s, for the Independence-class, or small warehouse, for the Freedom-class.
The relative difference in modular potential between the LCS and Skyrim is only partially because of the differences between a computer game and a warship. In the case of the LCS, the intent was to give the ship a wide range of modular alterity.
A good place to begin with the comparison is the engines. The engine of the LCS Freedom-class was built for a top speed of 40 knots, which made it the fastest ship in the U.S. Navy. The high speed was meant to give the ship high responsiveness and threat evasion capabilities. The LCS Freedom-class, when put to sea, encountered constant mechanical issues. The LCS began its career with only three modular configurations: submarine warfare, mine detection, and surface warfare. No new modules were developed—though more were intended—as the unreliability of the engine made investment in new modular configurations unattractive. Though the Independence-class would have an alternate engine design and trimaran shape, avoiding the engine issues and providing a larger bay space, the LCS would not see genuine modular innovation for many more years.
Throughout the initial design of the LCS, leading figures, despite the efforts of some critics, did not sufficiently understand the vital relationship between modularity and robust, “default” or “vanilla” capabilities: such as simply being able to move reliably. In even some of the best critical retrospectives of the LCS, the precise negative impact of the engine on modularity is misunderstood.
What makes Skyrim so fit for modding is the Creation Engine, the framework the game runs on. In other engines, such as Unreal, game logic is compiled with the program itself. Changing how the game behaves usually means patching code. The Creation Engine avoids this by splitting the game data and the program. Mods merely override data when the game begins, leaving the program alone. Bethesda’s decision to ship their games without anti-tamper measures or encryption eases modding even more.
Bethesda’s Creation Engine can run on nearly any hardware and can deal with nearly any modifications. If Skyrim had been locked to, for example, 60 FPS, the game would not have been able to run on many systems. In comparison, the top speed of the engines of the LCS forced subsequent tradeoffs in modularity. How did this unhappy coupling of bad engineering and modular design come about?
Modularity: A Complicated Quest
Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, with a background in computer science, first envisioned the LCS in the late 1990s. He proposed a “streetfighter” ship that would be networked, expendable, and offensive. These ships could be sacrificed and abandoned easily, with advanced computer systems supporting their vicious, aggressive coordination in littoral, or near-to-coast, combat. An intellectual ally, Captain Wayne Hughes, strongly supported proposals for a new small combatant ship in fleet tactics and littoral operations. Together, they established the groundwork for a new small combatant ship to be added to the American Navy. Supporters of this vision found inspiration in the PT boat, imagining larger, more capable, but no less offensive and expendable ships.
When the idea of a small, offensive, expendable ship reached Navy command, Admiral Vern Clark chose to take the ship in a modular direction, taking a cue from reconfigurable aircraft, shifting the LCS design towards a “seaframe” analogous to an “airframe.” Their concept of “modularity” was simple: they wanted slots for 8x8x20-foot containers, approximately the same size as a small shipping container. The idea of a small, flexible, offensive craft was attractive to the American Navy, which after the Cold War found itself an ever-expanding list of responsibilities, from policing to anti-piracy, alongside classic needs like surveillance, submarine detection, and minesweeping. Navy designers dreamed that LCS modularity would allow for “56 ships” to do the work of “88 ships” with the ability to undergo continuous modernization. However, Clark’s emphasis on flexibility clashed with Cebrowski and Hughes’ original conception of expendable vessels.
Critically, the Navy did not consider the importance of expendability to modularity itself. There is natural synergy in a modular and expendable small combatant warship design, but this synergy is mutually exclusive with a vessel designed to fulfill multiple roles and survive multiple fights. This is probably the most significant mistake in the design and implementation of LCS modularity: modularity was intended as a substitution for quantity, resulting in non-expendable ships, when expendability itself is a critical pre-requisite of modular innovation.
By the time construction began, the LCS was intended to be “the first small combatant capable of operating with high-speed naval battle forces since World War II.” It would have a “payload volume…divided among twenty different mission module stations” and would be given a suite of custom software to buttress modular configurability. Advocates thought of the LCS as not only the future of warship design, but also as the future arriving. In their own words,
“…the LCS is less of a ship, and more of a battle network component system, consisting of a sea frame, a core crew, assorted mission modules, assembled mission packages, mission package crews, and a reconfiguration support structure. The total system aims for a level of battle modularity that will allow for a LCS’s complete mission reconfiguration—including operational testing of its combat systems and crew readiness for follow-on mission tasking—in less than four days. If successfully demonstrated, the LCS’s high degree of modularity would be without precedent in naval history, and would afford the 21st century Total Force Battle Network a unique ability to adapt itself to confront any existing or evolving access challenge.”
All of the significant voices in the construction and design of the LCS—Cebrowski (1942), Hughes (1930), Clark (1944), and Hamilton (1952)—were either silent generation or boomers. We expect, with high confidence, that they never played Skyrim. This is not to diminish their accomplishments or expertise, but rather to note that by the time they arrived in significant positions of decision making with the ability to shape the future of the American Navy, they had watched computers go from vacuum tubes to smartphones and were excited by and optimistic about the future. This cohort first experienced computing as an institutional program, administered by a central bureaucracy. Though they dreamed of a distributed network of small, aggressive, computerized ships, they did not grow up engaging with the sort of systems—the kind exemplified in Skyrim modding—that create a culture where computers and programs are a medium for constant reinvention, breaking, and reinstallation.
In the Skyrim modding community, we can see the distilled essence of the modular mindset that is now shaping the frontline of land and sea warfare, especially regarding unmanned (and thus expendable) systems. As one officer, Sarah Weinstein, in Unmanned Surface Vessel Division 32 put it:
“The GARC [Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft] originally was designed to kind of do a limited skill set, and we’ve turned it into something that can do escort, that can do surveillance, intelligence, maritime domain awareness, and we’ve already with one platform been able to expand what is in the realm of possible.”
GARC’s modular success is more of a child of Skyrim modding than it is the LCS, the premier experiment in modular naval design. The GARC, like Skyrim, was built with a more limited purpose and strong default in mind. A community, in one case hobbyist modders, in the other, an unmanned warfare team, has pushed the default into new directions. Permissive environments, one a company open to modding and a suite of community tools that enable easy modding; the other, a military culture that is open to and accepting of modification and experimentation, have allowed these platforms to grow in new directions. Thus, modularity does not arise as a mere condition of payload space, but as the result of competently put together initial design and openness to expendability paired with a permissive culture. Modularity is not best designed in a boardroom, but when supported by boardrooms that understand the freedom to fail that is essential to modular design.
In this respect, the attempt to bring the “airframe” model to naval design may have been misguided from the start. The largest airframes used in regular military transport—the C-5 Galaxy hold, for example—have a maximum area of 2,300 sq ft, and is one third the price. Furthermore, the C-5 has enormous security of a blanket of radar, interceptors, and air defense systems that allow it to safely perform the transport function. The LCS Freedom-class is double to triple the price, with double to triple the space, with the additional responsibility of needing to be able to withstand frontline combat and operate continuously. The LCS requires a much larger crew: in contrast to the C-5 seven-man crew, the LCS requires 40-50, not to mention additional crews ready to swap out at dock. Ships, unlike planes, require constant maintenance and operation, medical and culinary staff, and onboard technicians, as well as crews trained in different roles to perform modular functions. The much more intensive operational requirements of sea operations make the relative simplicity of the airframe unachievable.
That is why, though the Independence variant of the LCS class lacked the previously-discussed engine flaw, there are no more orders for the ship. The engine is part of the problem. Misunderstanding modularity is the other half. Modularity is not just about swapping out parts, in the words of the LCS designers and advocates, the ability to “plug and fight;” it is also a function of the total design of a system, including its reliability, expendability, and the culture surrounding modularity.
Though there are many Skyrim mods that are as simple as “plug and fight,” many more make demands, if simple, of the user and PC: certain versions of the game, graphics card requirements, and memory type (SSD vs. HDD). Thus, a good “modded” game also requires the base system to support the game. This is a critical error of the LCS: its modularity is, at base, in conflict with its need for continuous operation with little room for risk or experimentation. But it is not the only error.
Critical to Skyrim’s modular success is that the game itself is easily re-installed if mistakes in modification are made, thus allowing for a wider range of experimentation, contrasting with the LCS, which was enormously expensive and thus risky for real field experiments in modification.
Some of the most important engineering “mods” of 20th-century warfare came from the opportunity created by expendable systems, including the Sherman Firefly, Hobart’s “Funnies” built for the D-Day landing, the U-Boat Snorkel, and the AC-47 Spooky in Vietnam. In these cases, relatively simple modifications to expendable platforms achieved greater modular variability than the LCS for most of its life, because warfighters were able to experiment. Generally, the greater the expendability of the system, the greater its modular potential: this design principle can explain the Sherman tanks and Skyrim’s modular success, and is a key principle LCS design flouted, but only by virtue of conceptual redesign.
It is critical to understand that a fast, modular ship could have been built. Crews and engineers could have been given more freedom to experiment. The Navy could have hewed closer to the original vision of Cebrowski. Only in recent years with the rise of unmanned, expendable systems has the LCS found new life. The LCS is playing important roles with tools which were never part of initial mission packages. The ships are succeeding more as modular experiments in their ignoble retirement than when they were considered the future, too precious and fickle for creative experimentation.
Some efforts have been made to operationalize modularity, in the direction of Skyrim-like systems. The Navy has created a new role, the Robotics Warfare Specialist, to support unmanned systems, and though it’s not in the job description (it should be), these personnel are already modding systems to expand their capabilities. The Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA), a US military procurement and design strategy, improved upon the LCS failures by defining modularity in terms of open architecture and consensus, mimicking the community principles that run popular modding sites like Nexus Mods and Bethesda’s own open approach to software.
In the Skyrim modding community, we can find the modding “meta”: a strong “vanilla” design, expendability, and institutional support for creative experimentation—all of which the LCS lacked. Integrating modular design in a modern military may look much less like designing for modularity than giving engineers or industrial contractors greater freedom to tinker, explore, and create: to capture the spark of the hobbyist, which gave the world the modern sniper rifle, the airplane, and the tank, and put it to the end of national power. Modularity, increasingly core to the projection of modern military power and vital to keeping an edge on a daily-changing battlefield, is not just payload space: modularity is the ability to create, to fail, and to try again.
