Yes we are. My only real concern is that we are being told that 50+ of these vessels will be part of our 313 ship Navy of the future. I believe we need 50+ of these vessels for sure, but I also believe the other number is far too small. I personally think we need a good 450 other major surface combatants and support vessels to maintain our position of dominance on the high seas.
Our Navy is much too small at this time and our Merchant Marine is non-existant. This must change, or Gorbachev will be right. We will be forced to bow down to China and India.
GlobalSecurity.org has an interesting bit about the "StreetFighter" concept for the new Navy:
As of mid-2001 the Office of Naval Research was considering construction of a Littoral Combat Ship with a displacement of 500 to 600 tons. The LCS would have a draft of about three meters, an operational range of 4,000 nautical miles, and a maximum speed of 50-60 knots. The cost per ship might be at least $90 million.They want to make a ship cheap enough, and with few enough sailors manning it, that they can risk sending it to where it might actually be in danger. No admiral in 2006 wants to risk actual danger to a carrierThe Streetfighter would be a smaller, very fast ship (part of the more general Streetfighter concept), that could compete successfully with the enemy for control of coasts and littoral waters. These ships are envisioned as costing less than 10% as much as current Battle Force ships, while comprising more than 25% of the total number of surface combatants [that is at least 25 but no more than 50 units].
The President of the Naval War College, Admiral Art Cebrowski, and others such as Capt. Wayne P. Hughes, have advocated the deployment of larger numbers of smaller ships to operate in harms way in littoral waters. Cebrowski and Hughes talk of tactical instability, where a navy is unwilling to risk its ships because the fleet is constituted principally of small numbers of expensive ships. They propose re-balancing the fleet by supplementing the currently planned large surface combatants with the procurement of smaller ships.