This old Army guy knows basically nothing about the Navy but 5 years seems to be a fairly brief period of service.
Shouldn’t have named it after an Indian. That really pisses off the college loan deadbeat kids.
Give it to someone.
It had gender-specific bathrooms
It nearly caused a mutiny among the tranny officers
The U.S. Navy has an interest in offloading its Freedom-class LCS vessels, which have high maintenance and operating costs but limited lethality and survivability in a high-end fight. The ultimate cancelation of a planned anti-submarine warfare package also removed the ships’ utility as a platform for sub-hunting. The third-party ASW package for the Freedom-class was canceled in 2022 after repeated developmental delays, and according to then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday, the small warships are “as noisy as an aircraft carrier” - an inbuilt challenge for sensitive ASW sonar systems.
In 2022, the service proposed early retirement for every commissioned vessel of the type then in service, a total of nine hulls. The House Appropriations Committee limited this divestment plan to four ships in the FY2023 spending bill.
The Freedom-class was designed by an aircraft manufacturer, and the Navy specified an unusually high top speed and low cost as its key design requirements. Achieving 40-plus knots in an affordable, conventionally-powered monohull meant accepting tradeoffs for armament and armor, resulting in a lightly-armed patrol vessel with limited utility in a near-peer conflict. This concern was identified by the program’s critics as early as 2016.
There is no warranty for incompetence.
Are the people originally responsible for poor decisions making still around. Fire their asses. Take the pensions. Send them to prison.
These Ships should have never left the drawing board, but politicians were convinced to fund these little crappy ships and then ordered the NAVY to find a mission for them! They are completely useless in a Carrier Strike Group, they are very limited range and payload and can’t operate independently for more than 2 weeks.
The NAVY convinced itself these little crappy ships could replace the Perrys, even rushed their decommissioning after they lost their single-arm missile launcher to give additional funds to this failure.
I say “Strip them of all useful components and sink them all as targets or reefs.”
Must have needed to upgrade Windoze.
Bkmk
last i read, the engine transmissions for these boats were faulty AND unfixable ...
The town of Sioux City didn’t need Navy protection anymore so the ship is gone.
The waters of the Missouri are safe now.
The Little Crappy Ships were a bad idea from the start. They’re too small to be effective.
US Navy stops taking things littorally?
I knew these ships were designed to fail when I saw a documentary bragging them up and witness the Caption and XO helping the crew polish the deck. Not a war ship a socialist haven.
Probably replacing it for one that runs on Chinese batteries