Just needs to go away as a class… Spend the money on FFX and move on.
The U.S. Navy hopes to boost the number of days the littoral combat ship is operational by targeting the drivers of down time: design flaws in 32 parts that need to be replaced and a sluggish contractor-based maintenance model that needs to be made more responsive.
<snip>
He said today it can take as long as three weeks to identify the right technical experts and get them to a deployed LCS to start fixing it; he wants to trim that down to five days.
NORMAL availability 2 weeks a month? 32 parts/design flaws? WTH???
Full article HERE from Defense News.
And this isn’t ‘all’ the problems. The crews ‘routinely’ have to work 12-14 hour days at sea, if there are no major problems. And the whole ‘crew swap’ thing has been tried before with little success, as there is no ‘pride’ in ownership when you’re moving on/off anything on a regular basis. We tried that in aviation squadrons 10+ years ago with ‘combined’ maintenance staff, and three years later dumped that concept, then took a year to get airplanes back to ‘minimum’ levels of cleanliness and operational ability.
LCS is much like the F-35 in that parts/etc. are spread through so many congressional districts that no congresscritter wants to kill either program, fearing loss of jobs.
Grrrr…
LCS is a jobs and kickbacks program, not a national defense asset.
It is proof that a boat is a hole in the water that you pour money into.
Apt comment, IMO.
I heard that they offered the boats to the USCG and the Coasties said no thanks.
Gerry – likely so but can’t say for sure since I’ve been retired for over a decade now. I know they tried to foist the Patrol Coastal class boats on us back when, worked for a little while but the maintenance requirements were way too expensive for our meager budget. Never mind that the manning levels were also too high………………..
As to the LCS concept – ‘might’ have looked good on paper but sure hasn’t been workable in the real world.
Fundamentally, the over all situation probably cannot continue indefinitely.
Procurement politics is an artifact of national politics; if national politics sufficiently changes, procurement politics may no longer be meaningful.
I just saw a thing on Redstate, usual flavor of politicized hype, about shifting NCO promotion to review boards, or something. The practical downside case that one can make to the woke about shifting processes to favor woke results is that the new process will not always inherit the trust, acceptance and political compromise of the previous process. Politicizing promotions in a bureaucracy in one direction means you lose the case for the status quo when the political winds shift. It is a tactic that is strategically bad when you are in the process of losing.
Fundamentally, not dismantling the current procurement and promotion systems depends on several arguments. If the situation becomes screwed up enough, many of these will no longer hold.
In particular, I would note that our current ‘countermeasures’ can only be effective against a viral weapon, and make us more vulnerable to bacterial weapons. Other military capabilities are only theoretically useful if the next war involves bacterial weapons delivered over the northern or southern borders, or by way of graduate student.
The theoretical goal chased by our defense organizations is covering all of the contingencies. Very impressive work has been done in pursuit of this. However, if the cost of these efforts was not backing Trump in starting the civil war, and hence letting the Biden satrapy compromise us wrt PRC bacterial weapons, a different trade off with less expeditionary capability might have been better.
There may come a point when the cost of dismantling and rebuilding is not too high to bear.
Yet the Navy is getting rid of its armed patrol boats to further pay for the little crappy ships. Great. Get rid of a ship that actually fights for one that can’t even on a good day.
Seriously, to make the LCS work they’d do better strapping the gun system off the Stryker Gun System (which just got retired) onto the foredeck and have 4-6 Marines with Javelins and Stingers and another 8 or so with .50s and maybe one of those 120mm automortar systems on the rear deck. Now that would fight!
Hey, be nice. The Navy is focusing on more important things, these days. You know, like flight suits for pregnant pilots.
https://moonbattery.com/navy-introduces-flight-suits-for-pregnant-pilots/
All- Thanks for the comments! I can’t disagree with anybody… Sigh. Pregnancy flight suits??? Really???
I see no reason for complaint. They’ve managed to create another flag bill in support of the LCS. They got the important stuff down.
Commander Sal has a little blurb ovee at USNI today.
The LCS was doomed before it was ever built, let me count the ways. I think we complained about it at Hodads over a burger and a soda (mumbles) years ago. All one would have to do to ascertain that the idea sucked was to ask somebody who’d pissed more salt water than the Admirals who pushed the program had sailed over.
It’s a pity we were so right.
Working at one of the 4 Public Shipyards I can Say:
LCS = Little Crappy Ship
Concur with all criticisms, without exception.
If the “ship” is going to spend more time tied up to the pier than on the gunline, it’s not a ship, and it’s not a reliable support. Speaking as Marine NCO, the commitment to the LCS means that I cannot trust the Navy to provide me with the support I will need to take a hostile shore if that POS is supposed to support the landing.
Marines are supposed to be a part of the Department of the Navy. Ask yourselves how I can continue to believe that when you squids betray us this way… Then ask yourself: Can YOU say internal strife and morale issues? Or has everyone forgotten about Guadalcanal?
I counted 7 LCS docked in San Diego Harbor on Google Map once.
Little Crappy Ship.
Working at Pearl Harbor, we see them come through. More money that they’re worth