Russians put into service the Project 11356M frigate class, Admiral Grigorovich.

via Janes.

The Russian Navy has finally commissioned into service the lead ship of its Project 11356M frigate class, Admiral Grigorovich , over two years behind schedule.

I saw this earlier this morning while doing my sweep of the net but dismissed it.  When I got curious and checked out the stats, my eyes watered.

A ship that is approximately the same size as our LCS (Freedom Class) sports the following...

1 × 100mm A-190 Arsenal naval gun
1 × 8 UKSK VLS cells for Kalibr and 3M55 Oniks
3 × 12 3S90M Shtil-1 VLS cells
2 × Kashtan CIWS
8 × Igla-1E (SA-16)
2 х 2 533mm torpedo tubes
1 × RBU-6000 rocket launcher

That my friends is a well rounded combat ship.  Our European and Asian allies are also building similar warships in the same weight class that outperform the future backbone of our fleet.

This is another example of a "popular" concept that got pushed forward that did nothing but harm.  What am I talking about?  The LCS was born of the Streetfighter Concept that wanted to design ships that were Perry sized but optimized to fight small boat swarms.

They succeeded and the Surface Navy will suffer for at least two generations because they did.  The worse part of this?  We will eventually build an "evolved" Perry Class to replace the LCS...something we should have pushed for from the start.