LCS suffers from being sold as a Swiss Army knife

Are US littoral combat ships useful or useless?

They were marketed foolishly, but they could serve as littoral corvettes within a graduated presence force.

LCS was never going to solve every mission as advertised. The ships make more sense as littoral corvettes, forming a low-end presence layer backed by cruisers, Arleigh Burkes, and carriers. The US Navy lacks a comfortable middle layer for diplomatic presence and escalation between LCS and heavily armed destroyers. That gap made the flawed presentation of LCS more damaging than the underlying idea of a smaller combatant.