Ankit Panda – Anti Empire Feb 24, 2021
Last week, the U.S. Navy formally announced that it will soon begin to retire the first four of its Littoral Combat Ships, two of the Freedom class and two of the Independence class. The vessels have long faced technical, operational, and logistical hurdles to fulfilling their originally envisaged role. The retirement of the four LCS vessels amounts to a tacit acknowledgement by the Navy that the Freedom and Independence class vessels are effectively a failed concept. The downsizing will come even as the U.S. Navy continues to work toward a nominal 355-ship fleet.
The announcement of the Freedom and Independence class LCS retirement came in the U.S. Navy’s fiscal year 2021 budget request. “These ships have been test articles and training assets, and were key in developing the operational concepts leading to the current deployment of LCS ships today,” the Navy’s budget preview noted. “But cancelling their modernization allows us to prioritize lethality and survivability where we need it and in the mission packages assigned ships that will fill the roles of Surface Warfare (SUW), Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW), and Mine Countermeasures (MCM) going forward,” the budget added.
The LCS program was conceived roughly two decades ago and was meant to the give the U.S. Navy a low-tonnage, responsive option that would be capable of operating in shallow seas off coastal areas and in dense archipelagic settings, like in Southeast Asia, as the name implied. The final production Freedom- and Independence-class vessels ended up being underarmed and oversized compared to their original conception, effectively hamstringing their value for the Navy day-to-day.
To make matters worse, the operational history of the four LCS vessels that are slated to be retired (USS Freedom and USS Fort Worth from the Freedom class; USS Independence and USS Coronado of the Independence class) left much to be desired. USS Coronado was commissioned in April 2014, meaning that its announced retirement comes less than six years into its life. Freedom, Fort Worth, and Coronado all have suffered notable breakdowns while forward-deployed.
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The LCS will eventually be replaced by the U.S. Navy’s next-generation multi-mission guided-missile frigate, which will operationally be able to play the role the LCS was originally envisaged to.
The LCS vessels have been a mainstay of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s operations in the Asia-Pacific in recent years. Over the last year, LCS vessels undertook freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. In January 2020, USS Montgomery, one of the LCS ships not slated for retirement, conducted an operation near Fiery Cross Reef. Montgomery, along with USS Gabrielle Giffords, another LCS, conducted another FONOP — the first by LCS ships in the South China Sea — in November 2019.
Unlike the total F35 eff up, these ships were very cutting edge & were test-beds that went very badly for the USN. There’s a big difference between having a combat robot 20 miles up the road and failing when 99 still operational, & having a very high-tech ship, which is a forerunner manless battleships, 3000 miles away and breaking down or not having manual overrides when the Russians jam your systems. I don’t know, but I doubt that many US ships have that much manual capability. The Americans seem to think they can win big wars sitting in the front room playing a PS4 war game when the Russians are all around your house. At some point, you need to drop the controller, pick up the handgun and get outside. Here in the UK, they are slashing the foot soldier count, because they simply hire mercenaries/terrorists when they want something illegal done & it appears that many senior military brass don’t know this is a thing, that their boys can’t legally do the jobs required by the deep state.
How many Americans went hungry and homeless to pay for those contraptions? The suggestion they don’t return a radar signal seems utterly ridiculous to me.
They don’t need retiring, they just need their own next generation sea going tug to tow them to their next generation wharf to tie up to, then maybe some air cover by the next generation flying turkey, maybe the next generation gun
to shoot big wads of moola could be mounted… oh, they already have all that.
Mission accomplished then, or is this an advance to the rear?
Another HUGE waste of money……..the LCS is a ship with no mission. Not as much waste as the F-35, but BAD. The small Russian corvettes with ASCMs will eat them for lunch. The USN should hire the Ruskies to teach the USN about building competent warships.
We can see a pattern here similar to the collapsing Soviet Union where engineering projects have too many stake-holders, some of these are there to make money (or whatever) not to build an effective machine. Bad premises, low creativity – the field guys, old Navy sailors who have the expertise, are seldom consulted and worse don’t have decision-making power, bureaucrats wearing suits have. Those bureaucrats coordinating projects are way above the pay-grade of technicians and field engineers who know issues are not being solved correctly but can’t do anything about it.
A society that doesn’t value truth doesn’t value (real) science and engineering.
Check the story of John Boyd (1927-97), one of the best jet fighter pilots of his time, he developed and coordinated the F-15 & F-16 projects. He has had to face unbelievable opposition in the Pentagon to turn these projects into reality. His perseverance, against all odds, created the most effective fighter jets Americans ever had. On the other hand the modern F-35 lost his touch with reality – a supersonic, stealth, dog-fighter jet with VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) capabilities. A duck can do many things other birds can’t do, it can run, swim, sing and fly but its performance is poor in all these tasks. To be the best in anything one has to compromise.
That’s a disgrace. What I didn’t see in the article was how much the American working people were fleeced for those barely-floating xxxx-buckets. I’m sure they were monstrously expensive. Whichever company designed and built those bricks should be disqualified from ever receiving another government contract again. Furthermore, the lead designer and everyone on the board of directors of the company should be publicly horse-whipped and rolled in pig excrement, which should be nationally broadcast. Same for whomever in Congress and the “defense” department championed the disastrous program. Of course, there is no accountability in that criminal sewer known as DC, so I won’t get my hopes up.