Navy's newest ship breaks down...needs to be towed back to port. Yeah...it's an LCS.

via Navy Times.

The ship was commissioned Nov. 21 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and has been making the long trek to San Diego through the Great Lakes since.
Problems with the propulsion plant began almost as soon as Milwaukee got underway from Halifax. The ship’s computer system triggered an alarm and the ship called away an engineering casualty.
Engineers cleaned out the metal filings from the lube oil filter and locked the port shaft as a precaution. In the early hours of Friday morning, the ship was conducting steering tests and lost lube oil pressure in the starboard combining gear due to the presence of the same metal filings in that filter.
The metal filings in the lube oil have not been a class-wide issue, according to the Navy.
The ship then dropped anchor while the engineers worked on the system. By mid-morning, the salvage ship Grapple rendezvoused with Milwaukee and connected a towing hawser line for the trip back to Little Creek.
The ship is currently manned by Crew 104, and was scheduled to swap with Crew 108 in Mayport. The crews will now swap in Virginia while the ship’s system is repaired.
News of the breakdown reached Capitol Hill by late Friday. Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement to Navy Times that the plant issues were troubling and called for accountability.

This doesn't surprise me.

The LCS is a ship without a mission and stems from a concept that was short sighted and trendy.

A warship built to operate in the littoral zones?  Yeah.  Sounds great...even futuristic...but its bullshit.  You're talking about a patrol boat for that mission set.  In the meantime the US Navy needed a frigate.  But instead of acknowledging the failure that is the LCS, the powers that be "stayed the course" and simply rebranded the LCS in a vain attempt to fool the clueless. 

The saddest thing about this time in our military history is this.  We will fight future wars with the weapons we're building now.

Future Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen and Coast Guardsmen will be at a disadvantage because this generation's leaders couldn't do the hard thing....admit that they got it wrong.