. Getting rid of the Freedom class because there was no way in hell any fix to the combiner would make it reliable is a good call. Also limiting the Independence class to surface warfare, spec ops support Mine warfare fills a real need and does it well. I have no idea what they call the Modules that support the above warfare missions are called now but they seem to work and work well. It seems that huge Help deck has paid off handsomely for both Helos and unmanned vehicles.Using the LCS in the first island chain especially inshore of places like the Philippines is the right ship for the right job.
That 57 mm pop gun and the two 30mm Chain gun mounts are just the thing for dealing with the ChiComm coast guard and auxiliary attack/gunboats from the chi com fishing fleet. IMO SHIPPING SEARAM AND NSM really makes the LCS deadly in the littorals it was mean to fight in.
Just a thought looks like the Hypersonic missiles have given the DDG-1000 class a new lease on life. what did you thinK.
Here is a bit more detail. Always I'd greatly appreciate your opinion and I promise not to BITE anyone.
Officers at the Surface Navy Association panel briefly acknowledged the program’s tarnished reputation but said it was ready for redemption. Moderator Rear Adm. Ted LeClair, director of Task Force Littoral Combat Ship, emphasized the “tremendous progress the Navy has made in making the LCS ship class more reliable, sustainable and lethal.”
Perhaps the most championed upgrade was the program’s approach to training and maintenance, a sore and expensive subject in the program’s history. All four panelists and LeClair highlighted a shift from an almost complete reliance on contractors for maintenance to training crews that can be both operators and maintainers.
LeClair said the task force has partnered with regional maintenance centers to establish maintenance execution teams that are fully operational on both coasts and “[continuing] to drive greater self-sufficiency” onboard ships.
The hope is that the teams will eventually take over maintenance checks that have traditionally been handled almost entirely by the original equipment manufacturers.
Capt. Marc Crawford, commodore of Littoral Combat Ship Squadron One, said as recently as 2020, 95 percent of maintenance checks were being handled by contractors, with maintenance execution teams handling 5 to 10 percent. So far in 2024, maintenance teams have taken over about 70 percent. “That in and of itself is a tremendous feat,” he added.
Capt. Sean Lewis, commodore of Destroyer Squadron Seven, said a deeper investment is still needed in the LCS sailor “and their ability to perform preventative maintenance and corrective maintenance without over-relying upon flying contractors or government employees into a theater — which I cannot rely upon, especially in the fight.”
The program is also shifting toward a concept called single crewing — an approach that combines what has previously been two separate crews trained on separate platforms into one.
Capt. Mark Haney, commodore of Littoral Combat Ship Squadron Two, said the concept is not just combining two crews into one, but re-envisioning what an LCS crew looks like. The one crew concept is a return to basics, he said — “a more standard, traditional capacity, [to] be able to do your own maintenance, having supply on board a traditional combatant, returning that to an LCS.”
Split crews took away from their opportunity to gain knowledge about how to operate their ships, he added.
Training and maintenance play into the Navy’s broader goal of improved operational availability, established by an in-depth review of the program in 2020. The review resulted in then-Commander of Naval Surface Forces retired Vice Adm. Roy Kitchener creating Task Force LCS, which focused on a key performance parameter known as materiel availability.
The metric assigns a score derived from an assumed operational availability of .85, considering both unplanned and planned maintenance downtime. It’s also a parameter by which the panel championed the LCS’s recent successes.
The latest triumph was an “unprecedented’’ 26-month deployment of the Independence-class USS Charleston to the Western Pacific, Crawford said.
Capt. James Hoey, assistant chief of staff for Littoral Combat Ship and mine countermeasures readiness for Naval Surface Forces, U.S. Pacific Fleet, said the ship maintained an average materiel availability of .72 throughout the deployment, or 13 percent above the .64 threshold established by the task force.
Four other Independence-class ships currently deployed to Seventh Fleet — Gabrielle Giffords, Manchester, Oakland and Mobile — are operating at a .73 materiel availability, “which means they’re operating at a 96 percent efficiency rate, which is fantastic,” Hoey said.
The task force also focused on improving lethality, which the panel highlighted when discussing the ship’s missile capabilities.
Gabrielle Giffords, Manchester, Oakland and Mobile are all equipped with the Naval Strike Missile — a long-range, precision strike weapon that seeks and destroys enemy ships at distances greater than 100 nautical miles. Freedom-class ships are expecting installation of the missile in fiscal year 2025, Haney said.
“This is a ship killer,” he said. “That is a high-end fight weapons system.”
In October, an SM-6 multi-mission missile was launched off the back of an Independence-class ship, which Crawford called “unprecedented” and “just the tip of the iceberg.”
LeClair said more impressive than the launch itself was the time it took to install the SM-6. The missile was installed in three days and fully operational, and “we think we can get that down to a day,” he said. It was also uninstalled in 24 hours, he added. “That versatility is exactly what we designed the ships to do. We just have to be creative with what we want to put on there and how we want to do it.”
The ships are also incorporating unmanned aerial systems such as Textron Systems’ Aerosonde — a small, multi-mission drone used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — which was installed for the first time ever on the Independence-class USS Savannah in fall 2023, with operational testing in December proving “highly successful,” Crawford said. The system is currently being installed on the USS Mobile, he added.
The Freedom class, with four delivered to Naval Station Mayport in Florida and an expected 11 total by 2025, means capacity, Haney said — “capacity to deploy ships in other theaters on a regular basis.”
The success of systems like Aerosonde shows the potential for the LCS “to be a cornerstone of naval operations,” Lewis said. “I’m a believer in LCS in the right environments. The Littoral Combat Ship is a tool for naval excellence.”
As the LCS program works to gain more believers, the Navy continues to express confidence in the ship’s relevance to the service.
“You look at the needs of the fleet commanders [and] the surface Navy, LCS provides capability across a wide range of mission areas that does free up the [guided missile destroyers] to go do that high-tier mission set,” Haney said. “In the Red Sea, you had … [Freedom-class LCS] Indianapolis holding down the Arabian Gulf where you would have had to put a DDG in there to do those same mission sets. So, there’s great value when you look across the landscape of what the Navy demand signal is today.”
Crawford called the LCS the cavalry of the Navy, “whether it’s a scouting mission that we’re doing to support maritime domain awareness … or whether it’s flanking maneuvers that we’re doing to go envelop the adversary. The LCS can bring that to the fight.”
Five or 10 years ago, LeClair said the conversation about the LCS class was “very different. But I feel strongly we have turned a corner. We still have more work to do, but I have tremendous confidence in the ships and the crews.” ND
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