Good. Makes sense so far.
Let’s examine that small ship role. They take hits and are designed to be relatively cheap metal.
Each unit within this fleet is not very defensible: they don’t have individual Aegis or similar. They can’t individually defend themselves from e.g. cruise missiles.
The concept is networked attack and defence: perhaps these “Spktyr” class frigates act in concert with high value Frigates with classic Aegis.
All of which sounds similar to LCS. Wasn’t that supposed to be a networked platform?
But maybe LCS wasn’t low cost per unit?
We should maybe examine why LCS is being deprecated. I read that it was because LCS units have low individual survivability.
Which of course they do, but it turns out that that’s a feature, not a bug.
Maybe some FReeper can chime in on why LCS doesn’t work.
There are a lot of articles out there about why LCS doesn’t work. The LCS was originally intended to be a shallow sea combatant, kind of like a bigger version of the Vietnam river patrol boats. The Navy decided to make it a multirole vessel that could take on different roles by loading in different mission modules. (Shades of TFX which was supposed to be the do-everything airplane and became the F-111.) It didn’t work out at all, so the Navy’s idea of using flotillas of LCSs to replace frigates and destroyers didn’t work out either. The LCS has turned out to be fragile, underarmed, not actually very adaptable and with very poor seakeeping. All the modifications to it made it a poor choice to do its original mission too. LCS don’t even have organic CIWS on board so they can get swarmed easily by missile boats.
These FFG(X) are actually supposed to be fitted with a version of Aegis - basically Aegis Light, to be delivered by Lockheed Martin, so yes, they will be fighting datalinked with Aegis.