Posted on 02/12/2020 4:34:09 AM PST by mowowie
Yep.
“the 13th U.S. naval ship since 1850 to be named after a living person”
Still more ComDem Insanity!
They’re not even good for that. Even the steel hulled ones are developing hull cracks and other problems.
Negative. The OHPs are worn out and have hulls so thin you can put a screwdriver through them. Mexico and Taiwan were going to buy some from the reserve and they were neither seaworthy nor economical to repair. All are now awaiting SINKEX, scrapping or coral reef duty.
We are still building Arleigh Burkes, which work okay for now, and the FFG-X program should begin builds this year.
Except the ship that was lost in the Falklands was made of ***STEEL***.
Funny thing with aluminum - when it’s not there, you can’t set it on fire.
There are two designs of the “Littoral” ships and two shipyards are building them. The design with a conventional hull shape is made up in Manitowoc Wisconsin and the design with a catamaran type hull is built near Mobile Alabama. Both designs have had a number of problems, including bad propulsion, poor sea keeping in heavy seas and the inability to have a quick change via modular add-ons. We in Wisconsin will miss the jobs if building these stops.
My take on those things when I saw the first graphics and some specs like weight and thickness of plate was that they would never survive combat. I believe the Navy has made the same assessment.The LitComs were a political fleet, I think, designed to be coastal defense craft for when we were to phase out our force projection capabilities.
This happens quite often because the government “workers” (aka: public servants) are literally playing with OPM (other peoples’ money). hey doesn’t give a sh**.
Criminals.
That wasn’t their original mission - they were originally designed to go into shallower waters such as the Persian Gulf and escort shipping. Why tie up a deep water combatant that’s at a bit of a disadvantage against local shallow draft threats when you could make a purpose-built lighter, cheaper combatant? You could replace a frigate in that specific role, freeing it up to go elsewhere.
What it looks like is that government (particularly the Obama Administration) and their creatures in the military saw the line about LCS replacing a frigate, ignored or glossed over the part about “in that specific role” and then for various reasons tried to make it a full frigate replacement, with terrible results.
*possible ping of interest*
Whoops.
A rather belated “also” - modern capital ship/antishipping missiles render armor more or less useless. They basically can rip through any practical thickness of armor these days, so naval architects design ship armor to hold off mostly small arms to small naval guns. To pick just one example: A salvo of Granit antiship missiles would make short work of even an Iowa-class battleship, for example, and armoring a surface combatant to a greater degree than an Iowa just isn’t going to happen these days. When gigantic near-ton self-guided shaped charges are flying around at speeds in excess of Mach 2 with swarm attack capability, most any practical thickness of armor isn’t going to help. And that’s assuming someone doesn’t decide it’d be fun to replace the shaped charge warhead with a 500kT nuke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-700_Granit
The Granit is old now, and is being replaced by an even nastier missile. It is by FAR not the only missile capable of doing this on the world arms market, which is why naval architects have changed from “survive a hit” to “don’t get hit” as a strategy. Well, until we decided it was a good idea to make LCS replace frigates and deleted CIWS from many of our ships, something we are hastily correcting.
Or, put another way:
The Iowa class battleships had belt armor steel of 12.1 inches thickness. The turret faces are 19.5 inches in two layers.
The current squad-packable (technically man-portable), tripod launched Kornet antitank missile that’s widely available on the world arms market can penetrate ***43 INCHES*** of rolled homogenous steel armor. With a 10lb warhead.
The Granit has a similar warhead, scaled up to **1650**lbs.
Modern capital ship and antishipping missiles make any currently practical level of armor on a ship useless in a peer fight - *if* they hit.
Antiship missiles are not always met in an engagement.Sometimes it can be a small boat with a package or a machine gun on the shore. Those ‘littorals” can be swiss cheese pretty easily, I think.
The LCS would be able to shrug off most small arms fire, but that’s about it. On the other hand, against even man portable missiles, even an Arleigh Burke might not do much better if it is hit.
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