 During planning for the FY21 Budget proposal, Navy recommended the scrapping of hulls 1-4 in 2021, some 10 years ahead of prior planning.This was explained by Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Mike Gilday, during the WEST Conference on 2 March 2020, when he said, "We made a decision a number of years ago.… In order to give capability to LCS 5 and beyond, particularly the block buys we did in 2015, we decided we needed to do much more testing and use those first four hulls, so that we could better understand what were the issues with respect to hull maintenance and engineering that kept plaguing us and kept us from getting those ships to sea.