I keep going back and forth on these ships.
Are we in essence seeing the rebirth of what Destroyers were originally? PT Boat destroyers or in the case of the LCS, small boat destroyers? If that's the plan then the Navy needs to say it loud and proud. It would help explain the high speed of these ships and would justify the rapid firing 57mm cannon. I just don't know. Either way check out the vid.
Are we in essence seeing the rebirth of what Destroyers were originally? PT Boat destroyers or in the case of the LCS, small boat destroyers? If that's the plan then the Navy needs to say it loud and proud. It would help explain the high speed of these ships and would justify the rapid firing 57mm cannon. I just don't know. Either way check out the vid.
Sol to answer your question no we're not seeing a rebirth of the torpedo boat destroyer. The torpedo as a primary small craft (and ship) based weapon was replaced by the guided missile over 40 years ago.
ReplyDeleteLCS is intended to deal with "swarms" of small boats. This is ridiculous on multiple levels. The first one is what nation is going to attack us with swarms of small boats other than Iran? The answer is none. The reason for this is that you come up with attacking navies with small boats when that's in fact all you've got since you've isolated yourself from the world community and don't have access to anything else.
Another reason it's ridiculous is that LCS is going to be armed with a 3.5 range missile to deal with small boats. There are literally dozens of systems with a greater range than 3.5 miles that can be carried by small boats.
More importantly is that the main small craft threat isn't a bunch of speed boats armed with RPG's, machine guns, or explosives for suicide attacks but rather actual guided missile boats that have LCS both seriously out ranged and can as fast or faster.
Any basic surface combatant from a missile boat, corvette, frigate, etc., should be able to deal with the modest threat of speed boats given the main surface threat continues to be anti ship missiles launched by boats, ships, aircraft, etc.
LCS is frankly a totally flawed concept on myriad levels. The entire notion of swapping modules has been thrown out by the USN because the modules are too expensive. So in effect each LCS will be a single role ship. This assumes they any of the modules to eventually work as none do at present nor are projected to work any time soon.
LCS simply seems to be about putting large numbers of sexy hulls in the water so surface warfare officers have a greater chance to get their tickets punched. The only real utility of the ships is that they carry 2 helicopters. The fact we have to spend $500+ million for them plus the additional cost of the module(s) in order to carry 140+ knot helicopters around at 40+ knots is absurd.
The one thing in that video that interested me, however, was the projection that LCS can go 1,000nm at 40+ knots. That's one single day of operations at max speed. In effect the USN took the original Street fighter concept of a 500 or so ton fast boat added two helicopters and came up with a 3,000 ton speed boat.
In comparison the rest of the world builds 3,000 ton general purpose frigates that carry 1 or 2 helicopters at lower cost but can also undertake various things LCS can not.
LCS has extremely little ability to deal with surface threats. Assuming they get the ASW module to work only ships with this module have ASW capacity. The ships have extremely limited defense against aerial threats. They can't escort other ships, they're not equipped to do radar picket, naval gunfire support, etc. On top of all this they're far less survivable than a normal warship.
Frankly the USN is out of it's mind. They not only designed single role ships that require each separate combat module to be integrated but then went and bought two different classes each with it's own systems.
Worse they are giving up having small cost effective patrol and mine warfare craft in favor of an ill equipped over priced frigate sized speed boat. By doing away with general purpose frigates they're forcing every real mission to be performed by a DDG. Moreover, every single DDG we have is a large expensive AEGIS equipped ship. It's ridiculous.
It's not just LCS. Instead of putting a couple of the new guns on a cost effective NGS ship they put them on a 15,000 ton cruiser that costs $6 billion. Even more ironic they may end up buying more DDG-1000's because they're cheaper to operate than a DDG-51 III, the DDG-51 III is going to cost a lot more than anyone thought, and DDG-1000 performs shallow water asw far better.