"Chip paint and scale rust? Way out on the side of that gray cliff??? Who do you think I am, Chiefy Baby? I dint sign up for none of that shit!" LGBTQ+ privileged minority sailor
Posted on 03/20/2022 3:32:34 PM PDT by Spktyr
Subtitle: The oldest Littoral Combat Ship on the chopping block is just seven years old.
The U.S. Navy will reportedly seek to decommission between eight and 10 Freedom class Littoral Combat Ships, or LCSs, as part of its budget proposal for the 2023 Fiscal Year. This would despite the oldest example still on active duty being only seven years old. Last year, the service admitted that it would take years to implement critical fixes to the propulsion systems on all of the Freedom class vessels it has acquired to date.
Politico first reported this news today, citing three individuals familiar with the plans. The outlet said that the Navy and the Department of Defense had declined to confirm or deny that the 2023 Fiscal Year budget request, a public version of which is expected to come out sometime this month or in April, would propose decommissioning these ships. The Freedom class is one of two distinct types of LCS, the other being the Independence class, that the Navy currently has in service.
Last September, the Navy decommissioned the USS Freedom, leaving it with only nine other Freedom class LCSs in service. All of the remaining ships were delivered between 2015 and 2020, making the entire fleet extremely young. The Navy officially took delivery of another one of these LCSs in November, the future USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul, but has not commissioned it. It also has five more on order, one of which is in the process of being fitted out and the other four being in earlier phases of construction.
Given the total number of ships involved, it seems more likely than not that the eight to 10 Freedom class LCSs that the Navy may now be looking to mothball includes four that it had previously announced it wanted to have withdrawn from service by the end of this month. That quartet includes the second Freedom class LCS ever produced, the USS Fort Worth. Freedom and Fort Worth, which were commissioned in 2008 and 2012 respectively, have different configurations from later ships in the class and have already been relegated to test and training roles years ago.
If the Navy does ultimately pursue this decommissioning plan, it could amount to an effective resetting of the Freedom class, which has been plagued by major issues with its water jet propulsion system. A design flaw has led to repeated failures in the combining gear on multiple ships in this class in recent years. The combining gear connects a set of gas turbines to the main diesel engines that power these vessels, allowing them to hit top speeds of over 40 knots, something that was a key Navy requirement during development. These LCSs can only sail at between 10 to 12 knots on the diesel engines alone.
There are actually 12 of them. The class namesake was the testbed and was decommissioned last year. That leaves 9 in service and 2 fitting out. None of them have the propulsion fixes.
I said when the first one of hese went into the water that they were bathtub toys and a waste of money.
Check the video, but if you want the “I haven’t followed tech in 50 years and I think warships should be propelled by oars and sails” version:
Ship has twin waterjet propulsion like a jetski or a number of modern watercraft.
Ship is designed to go up on plane like a jetski or cigarette boat and be very fast.
The waterjet systems turn out to be horrifically badly designed and boat is so slow that it can’t go up on plane.
Ship is slow.
Fix is going to cost a significant portion of the cost of a new Burke class destroyer and take many years to implement and install.
Yeah. If you follow the CDR Salamander blog this is absolutely not a surprise.
“ Billion dollar boondoggles is what our military does best.”
Why won’t we hold the shipbuilder accountable for selling a ship with a design flaw? Why do I have to pay for it.. twice?
I figured they would be scrap metal the first time they are tesed in combat.
Bingo! Everyone knew from the beginning that the LCS ships could not sustain any expected level of combat damage. They are glorified shallow water transports.
“You’re going to have some failures and some successes.”
Sort of like the covid vax: successful for some people; a deadly failure for other people.
Additionally the “combining gear” which is meant to allow you he main diesel drive be boosted by a higher speed gas engine for the 40 knot+ top end speed breaks frequently.
"Chip paint and scale rust? Way out on the side of that gray cliff??? Who do you think I am, Chiefy Baby? I dint sign up for none of that shit!" LGBTQ+ privileged minority sailor
“Billion dollar boondoggles is what our military does best.”
I can attest that the DoD is rife with money holes. This probably applies across the entire Federal government, but I only have first-hand knowledge of DoD shenanigans.
But the Pentagon, which makes up for more than half of the U.S. discretionary budget, remains the only federal agency unable to pass such scrutiny, as it has never detailed its assets and liabilities in a given year.
If you check the video, the explanation starts at 0:37. It has dual powerplants - a diesel for economical cruising and a gas turbine for a combat speed and power boost. This isn’t unusual for modern warships; the system is called CODLAG - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_diesel-electric_and_gas
The problem that is unique to the Freedoms is that the gearing system that allows both powerplants to drive the propulsion system (in this case, the waterjets) has an enormous design flaw. If you fire up both powerplants, the gearing strips out. If you try to run the ship at high speed on just one power plant, the gearing strips out. The ship is then completely dead in the water.
The combiner gearing is made of failure and shame, and it’s not a simple matter to redesign it. The stupid part is that other countries can get waterjet combat ships to work. Other countries can and do get CODLAG to work reliably. We have CODLAG working just fine on the three Zumwalt destroyers - but we don’t have it working on the Freedom LCS.
Not arguing with you on them being a piece a crap, but unless we announce some kind of offset to build new ships, we look like IDIOTS if we’re trying to beat the war drums on Putin.
See my post 33 - it has CODLAG, which is the new more economical system for warship power plants. A diesel for cruising, a gas turbine for supplementary power. It’s a well proven concept these days, and we even have it working in the three Zumwalts we built.
Unfortunately, the one in the Freedom doesn’t work.
Maybe an ally could make good use of them. Maybe give them to the Phillipones?
We had previously announced that we were going to build the Constellation class frigates - an adaptation of the off the shelf French/Italian FREMM frigates. But those are years away.
We looked like idiots already, because everyone knew the LCS was a disaster years ago. We didn’t even buy the best version of the LCS - the Saudis did.
Sailors have called them Little Crappy Ships for years. They hate them. These things are useless and need to be scrapped.
How would they be able to make good use of ships that go dead in the water if you order full power? And that have been offered in the past and rejected by everyone else - the only takers so far are the Saudis and they got a much better version than we did, in a configuration that makes sense for them (Persian Gulf naval units).
As far as I know, we can still say “Our navy is better than the Russian navy.”
But this is setting the bar pretty low.
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