That's what the Navy should do with the LCS.
First the name is horrible. Littoral Combat Ship? I think we can all safely say that the LCS has expanded beyond that simple description.
And lets be honest here.
If you want to fight small boats in the littoral zone, all you need to do is send the Riverines out in CB90's and they'll wipe the floor with them.
So what do we do with the LCS? First we rename it Multi-Mission Vessel (MMV). Then we build every one of them we have in the pipeline and then we stop.
At that point we turn our attention 100 percent toward getting mission modules together.
Some advice to the Navy. You want to get these ships fully funded and into the fleet like yesterday?
YOU GET SOCOM'S MISSION MODULE UP AND RUNNING PRONTO!
If you have to assign half these ships to supporting SOCOM then you do it! That will get you funding, it will make your ships high profile and it will get you positive press.
Next up (in my way of thinking) would be to get mission modules running for the Marines and certain Army units....Besides running these ships around the world for SOCOM, you team them up with AFRICOM to support partnership missions there.
That will get you positive interagency press. Which brings me to the next module. Humanitarian assistance/Inter Agency module.
Have you noticed the trend here? You're developing personnel modules. Not warfighting modules, but in essence support modules. This will get your ships out to the fleet quicker, will make them useful sooner and will create demand that will help kick start this poorly handled program.
Once SOCOM, the Marines, Army, Inter Agency and Humanitarian Assistance modules are done, then you can accelerate the work on the surface warfare, anti-mine warfare and land attack modules.
But you've got to rebrand this thing first. The LCS can be saved, will be useful and can contribute to the fleet.
If you do it my way, it'll be welcomed with open arms not cries of WTF!
Well...they _are_ rebranding it, wether they realize it or not. First, they took away the "combat" part of it. If you take recent words about dividing the LCS fleet between the Gulf and Pacific, because (and I quote from memory because I can't seem to find it) Austal's design "is more adequate to the vastness of the Pacific" [ie, not maneuverable enough for the Gulf], they just robbed it of "Littoral".
ReplyDeleteI wonder how they'll manage to water down "Ship", but it wouldn't surprise me any longer. I've given up trying to understand the way this program works.
Ferran
Actually if we were to cut LCS to 12 to 20 or so ships then it's not clear it makes sense to pursue the three main warfare modules.
ReplyDeleteFrankly I'd just cut the surface warfare module. When the entire thing adds a 3.5 mile range missile to a frigate I entirely do not see the point.
The ASW module might be worth keeping if they can get it to work and it doesn't cost a bloody fortune. However, if instead of LCS we go with general purpose or asw oriented frigates then the ASW module can be cut as well.
The mine warfare module should be cut immediately and we should purchase two dozen new mine hunters. Instead of mine warfare modules on LCS we can just forward deploy more 1,000 or so ton mine warfare craft. Exactly how we've operated for decades and continue to operate.
What will happen instead is the USN will build 50 of these over priced and under equipped ships and the modules will of course be another hidden expense. That assumes of course each module can be made to work, none do at present, and that integration isn't an issue on two different ship classes.
The purpose of this program is to provide the USN with a place officers can get their tickets punched commanding a surface combatant. The reason it's become this is because the USN currently has no other design it can afford to build in the numbers needed to keep the number of surface warfare hulls roughly stable.
It's not all bad news. LCS does carry two helicopters and thus provides useful capability. Of course so did the Perry's and they could also provide limited air defense, convoy escort, asw, radar picket, etc.