The next to last floating dumpster of the Little Crappy Ship (LCS), USS Beloit, was launched, yet another future fish apartment complex; the USS Cleveland, the final ship of the Freedom class, is under construction and will be delivered in 2025 (don’t hold your breath). The only thing an LCS can do is go fast (when it’s engines and reduction gear are working) and none of the mission modules have become deployable which was the entire reason the class was built. Each LCS now has a standard ASuW capability although it’s woefully short of what the original module called for so, yeah, there’s a standard Anti-surface warfare (ASuW) fit but it’s nothing to write home about. The Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) module has been cancelled and abandoned. The Navy was unable to make the ASW module work and dropped the capability from the LCS. There is no ASW module or capability anymore.
The first Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) commissioned was the USS Freedom (LCS-1), on November 8, 2008 and the Navy has failed to deliver working modules since promised when the designs were approved by the gullible knuckleheads in Congress.
The service had already spent “at least $3.3 billion” to operate and support 17 LCS since 2008, and in 2011 the Navy estimated a cost of $38 billion to operate and support 35 ships for their planned service lives of 25 years. By the end of 2018, the service’s estimate had nearly doubled to more than $60 billion.
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2024/3/26/littoral-combat-ship-still-fighting-to-prove-its-worth
The US Navy embarked the first Mine Countermeasures Mission Package (MCM MP) aboard USS Canberra (LCS 30), April 18,2024. I have no confidence it will work correctly and smart mines are the poor man’s weapon against first world surface fleets. Yet another reason the flag officers in the US Navy are so bad at their jobs.
But the USS Freedom lasted just thirteen years. The USS Independence lasted just eleven. The USS Detroit served for just seven years before being decommissioned last September. The USS Sioux City five years. The USS Sioux City cost taxpayers $362 million. Five years for $362 million is a bad investment.
The program has just been a mess, especially concerning the propulsion system. “High speed required a complex propulsion system that, two decades on, breaks so often…the type struggles to complete a deployment,” Forbes reported.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/littoral-combat-ship-navys-giant-warship-mistake-213130
The US Navy missed the bubble at the turn of the century by not designing the littoral combat ship as a new diesel submarine class making the US Navy competitive on the world stage.
It’s too late and no possibility of that coming to pass. The US Navy is struggling to maintain the submarine fleet they have now.
“LCS 29 is equipped with the Freedom-class combining gear correction, which will enable unrestricted operations. This correction addresses a class-wide issue that was identified as the Fleet deployed Freedom-variant LCS in greater numbers,” the Navy stated in a press release.
“The LCS class consists of fast, optimally manned, mission-tailored small surface combatants capable of operating in both near-shore and open-ocean environments to address twenty-first-century coastal threats,” the Navy stated.
But one of the benefits of the LCS warships is that they are easy to make and require a small crew, between seventy-five and 115)
“Beloit completed her Acceptance Trials in August 2024, marking the final milestone before delivery to the Navy. During these trials, the Navy conducted comprehensive testing of LCS 29’s systems across multiple functional areas essential to performance at sea, including combat systems, main propulsion, auxiliaries, and electrical systems,” the Navy added.
The USS Cleveland, the next and final ship of the Freedom class, is under construction and will be delivered in 2025.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/us-navys-littoral-combat-ship-just-wont-go-away-213126
Those acceptance trials should be revealing if they make the results public.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me
