Death Knell for the Littoral Combat Ship?

If so, it's about fucking time.

I'm more of a general-purpose blogger, I don't stick to a certain topic. But I've been critical for years about the LCS. A decade of wearing the blue suit, followed by decades of watching the Ft. Fumble Follies has led me to be very skeptical of the entire concept.

The LCS was sold as being kind of a lego-ship, where combat-mission-specific modules could be swapped in and out. Not that there was any serious funding for those modules, mind you. The LCSs have had serious construction problems (though to be fair, so have bigger ships, such as the LPD-17 class).

The whole idea of the LCS was to basically be a brown-water ship to beat up on people who don't have the capability to engage in naval warfare. The LCS can't take a punch, they don't have the crew size to fight a fire or to maintain the ships to the standards expected of a destroyer sailor. My feeling is that the LCS is a great ship if your idea is to drive everyone out of the Navy after their first tour (and to ensure that CPOs, XOs and COs of those ships all have divorces).

The LCS cannot play well with the rest of the Fleet. But neither could the PCs or the PCHs, which is why none of them lasted very long.

The Navy made a major mistake by neutering the FFG-7s and then getting rid of them, thinking that the LCS could do some of their tasks. (The Navy also made a mistake by getting rid of the 1052s without replacing them.)

I predict that however many LCSs the Navy builds, they are going to spend almost as much time in port as did a Soviet Navy DD. They'll be sold off rather quickly in about ten or fifteen years, if any other nation is foolish enough to want one. Most will be scrapped or sunk in SINKEXes.

The better choice would be to pull the plug on the program right the fuck now and stop the wastage sooner rather than later. But that's not going to happen.

(H/T)