You really should read more about the Little Crappy Ship. Check out how many deployments they’ve made and how long the first two have been around. This ‘ship’, if we can call it that, would be a net negative for any Battle Group.
The little Crappy Ship DOESN”T belong in a battle group. Wrong place, wrong task. I spent several years on a Little Crappy 378 foot Coast Guard ship in very similar circumstances, in the Littoral, brown waters; mainly off of Alaska in the Aleutians.
Yeah, yeah pile on with the six foot sailor jokes.
A littoral ship should NOT be in a battle group, it should be an independent command patrolling and working in the Littoral waters, ie. a ‘brown water navy’. That’s why I said what I said, design it for a role, use it in that role. A LCS should NOT be a ‘do everything’ ship. It’s not a destroyer, it’s not a cruiser, it’s not a ship of the train. It’s supposed to be close to shore where it’s capabilities were designed to be.
And if the LCS’s of the U.S. Navy are not what you think they should be, then perhaps they weren’t designed correctly or more perhaps... they are trying to make them fit a hole they weren’t meant to fit in.
The point is - our old FFG-7 was more capable, cheaper and could deploy without breaking down. The LCS can’t be left alone and would likely require a DDG to tow it from one overseas maintenance facility to the next. LCS-1 was commissioned seven years ago and we’re just now discovering ‘vulnerabilities’. Last time I checked, there weren’t a bunch of Revolutionary Guard types aiming to take out a Coast Guard cutter in the littorals near Alaska.