Less than two days after the US Navy revealed a third mechanical breakdown in a year of one of its $360 million littoral combat ships, the service has announced a fourth.The reason behind the LCS class of ships was that they were supposed to be commercially-available ships that would be cheaper to build than milspec warships and they could build them faster than warships.
Hasn't worked out. It's been eight years since LCS-1 (USS Pierside) was commissioned and in that time, a dozen LCSs have been commissioned. It took eight years to commission all 46 ships of the Knox class. Eight years after the commissioning of the USS Oliver Hazard Perry, 48 ships had been commissioned. It took eight years to build the 35 ships of the Spruance and Kidd classes. And all of those warships were built as warships, to milspec/BuShips standards. The only possible "COTS" tech on them was the installation of LN-66 radar units (and maybe the typewriters and copiers).
Why these floating abortions continue to be produced is probably a matter of greasing the right congressmen, if not project offices. They can't sail, they can't fight and they can't take a punch. CDR Salamander has had a lot to say about them, as far as I can tell, none of it is good.
And SecNav Ray Mabus should have been flogged for ordering that the LCS be rebranded as frigates. I can't think of a single DE/FF, other than maybe the Evarts class, that would not have been able to reduce a LCS to a burning and sinking hulk in a fight.
I'd be hard pressed to not bet on a Flower-class corvette not beating an LCS...except the LCS could run away, maybe.
ReplyDeleteThe Flower class had a lot of shortcomings, but the Brits and the Canucks turned them out quickly at a time when truly "perfect is the enemy of the good-enough". the LCS is more reminiscent of the Tacoma class, which were built to commercial standards and most of them were pretty poorly made, depending on who cranked them out.
ReplyDeleteWe gave a bunch of them to the Soviets in 1945 in preparation for the invasion of Japan. A few years later, even the Cold War having begun, the Soviets gave them back.
How can anyone specify "commercial grade" and then expect it to pass shock tests?
ReplyDeleteLiberty ships. They were made better and that's not saying much other than a lot
ReplyDeleteof merchantmen bet their lives on them.
LCS was idiots testing commercial to mil spec.
The military is still stuck in the dark ages of you uild it and test for quality.
The commercial world learned long ago that you design in quality then test to assure its built to spec. Costs less and you get less junk you can't use or have to remake.
Eck!
The reality is that attempting to build a ship to commercial standards in a nation which has no commercial ship building industry is just a shitty way to build a ship expensively in military ship yards. We haven't built a merchant vessel here in the United States in over twenty years. We build oil rigs, we build fishing boats, we build barges, we build tugboats, we build yachts for rich people, and that's about it. None of that capacity is being used to build the LCS, which pretty much destroys any rational for building the LCS to commercial standards -- i.e., that the shipyards it's being built in can build them affordably to commercial standards but can't build affordably to milspec standards. Instead you have military shipyards now having to reset to building to little crappy ship standards...
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