Navy photo / Lt. Jan Shultis The first two Littoral Combat Ships: the USS Freedom, rear, and the USS Independence, off the California coast. The ships primarily are designed to engage in combat close to shore.
Posted on 10/09/2012 3:31:33 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
The Navy’s New Class of Warships: Big Bucks, Little Bang
The Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is not only staggeringly overpriced and chronically unreliable but — even if it were to work perfectly — cannot match the combat power of similar sized foreign warships costing only a fraction as much. Let’s take a deep dive and try to figure out why.
The story so far:
– Congress has funded the LCS program since February 2002. Its publically stated purpose was to create a new generation of surface combatants able to operate in dangerous shallow water and near-shore environments.
– By December 2009 the Navy had built two radically dissimilar prototypes, the mono-hulled USS Freedom (LCS-1) and the trimaran-hulled USS Independence (LSC-2).
– A year later it adopted both designs and decided to award block buy construction contracts for five more ships of each type.
– Since neither design had yet proven either its usefulness or functionality it seems that the Navy’s object was to make the LCS program “too big to fail” as soon as possible.
– It may be working: the 55-ship fleet is slated to cost more than $40 billion, giving each vessel a price tag north of $700 million, roughly double the original estimated cost.
Both LCS designs were supposed to be small (about 3,000 tons displacement), shallow-draft coastal warships that relied on simplicity, numbers and new technology to stay affordable and capable throughout their service lives.
he new technology was mainly robotics (unmanned air, surface and underwater vehicles) and modular weapons and sensors. The modular systems were a
(Excerpt) Read more at nation.time.com ...
Navy photo / Lt. Jan Shultis The first two Littoral Combat Ships: the USS Freedom, rear, and the USS Independence, off the California coast. The ships primarily are designed to engage in combat close to shore.
What a waste. There have been multiple failures (no other way to describe it) over the past couple of years, including the F35. Overpriced, over-engineered, over-reliant on technology and less value. I blame everyone involved.
What do they mean, little bang?
These ships can carry a full complement of a hundred community organizers.
Banging everything in sight, from mermaids to hula-people.
Time paints this as a fustercluck. Do we have any media sources besides the America-hating, Communism-coddling Time?
I have seen LCS-2 Independence twice. Once at Mayport (Jacksonville) and also a second time getting some updates at the small shipyard just up river (St. Johns). LCS-1 Freedom has also been here as well but is not so noticeable.
It was impressive to look at considering it is a prototype. The one thing the author fails to recognize is as both are prototypes, they will require tweaking and while testing a prototype things are driven to fail just to find out what caused the failure. Its all a part of design and development.
This article reminds me of how the press was talking down the capabilities of the Apache and Abrams before the start of Desert Storm. The reality is that none of the naysayers knew anything about what they were talking about, other than trying to keep us from kicking Hussein’s ass or unwittingly spreading disinformation to the enemy.
As an aside, I was wondering when warships would begin looking different. Their design has been eerily similar since World War I.
Another project that should be zedded.
The moment I read that these ships had an aluminum upper structure, I knew this was a boondoggle of the first order.
Then when I read the glowing reports of trying to weld aluminum upper structures to the steel hull, I knew it was time to kill this idiotic project.
Here’s what I see:
A project which was sold to the Congress with a cost of “X.”
A new revision puts the per-unit cost of these ships at double what was quoted to Congress.
In the private sector, we call that “bait and switch” and there are laws against it.
Here’s the new reality which everyone who clamors for new military toys needs to get their head around: We’re broke.
Here’s what I see:
A project which was sold to the Congress with a cost of “X.”
A new revision puts the per-unit cost of these ships at double what was quoted to Congress.
In the private sector, we call that “bait and switch” and there are laws against it.
Here’s the new reality which everyone who clamors for new military toys needs to get their head around: We’re broke.
And what part of the article was wrong?
I’ve been around the block a few times...therefore I know for a fact this is a POS !!!
Littoral Combat Ship?
Who named these thing? The average person doesn’t know what littoral means.
Even if they are an albatross, they need a name that an enemy can understand like, battleship or destroyer.
Why not just call them sissy ships and be done with it?
With all due respect to your argument, mine was all about the technical aspects that the writer was using to justify his tome. The cost issue goes wwwaaayyyyyy back when for some silly reason the cost of any government project from the local city to federal does not include solid time constraints as well. Many of the cost overs on this project were due to time because of change orders brought on by the customer (Pentagon).
I see this all too often, in that the governing body will commission a project and whether it is intentional or not, the specifications are not complete or up to date, mostly incomplete. The contractor can only bid on the specifications listed to get the job and only then start to point out where the specs are bad. So then come the change orders and in many cases, things need to be undone before they can be done again.
This all goes back to getting legal hacks the hell out of government and focus on electing citizen legislators who have real life experience at doing these things right the first time. Rejuvenate the calendar conditions on all contracts which stipulate penalties for late delivery and fire the people who write the bad specifications in the first place.
Those aren’t ships...they are boats.
What wonderful targets they make.
There have only been about 7.9 Trillion articles in the Defense and Naval media (including Naval Institute Proceedings, etc.) about what a horrible concept and design the LCS is, and simply bringing the LCS up in conversation in naval or professional naval analysis circles up provokes snickers as the ships are widely considered a joke.
The Spruence (SP?) Class destroyers were half and half back in the 70’s.
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