“They are not intended for heavy seas. They are intended for operations close to shore, a.k.a. the littoral environment.“
Lucky thing the seas never get heavy near land.
L
Fair enough, I meant blue ocean operations. These are based on commercial transports as an experiment, get speed and sacrifice some other things so you can rapidly counter threats from small craft and the like. So yeah, they aren’t good in a hurricane or tropical storm.
They are kind of useless I think. They were created when we thought there was no fleet that could challenge us on the blue ocean so what we needed were fast ships that could sweep the coasts and ports for threats. Times change, China and Russia have bigger, more capable ships with more advanced weapons now so destroyers are more in vogue now. But we still have these.
Reminded me of one transit from Southern California to our homeport in Bremerton on Nimitz in 1988. Not far off the coast of Oregon I watched the inclinometer on the bridge hit 24 degrees.