Navy’s Ships of the Future, Sunk......

Now down to just 40 of them and knowing they have problems. What say ye?


The Littoral Combat Ship was supposed to represent the future of small, fast, and flexible warships. Instead it was beset by significant flaws and questions of reliability.

After years of work costing billions of dollars, the U.S. Navy is scaling back its controversial effort to build a fleet of small, speedy, flexible warships for near-shore patrols—a fleet plagued by design flaws, mismanagement and technical malfunctions.

But the Navy’s not cutting the fleet by choice—and not everyone is happy with the change. The decision to reduce the Littoral Combat Ship program from 52 ships to 40, while also building them all at one shipyard, reflects an ongoing conflict inside the Pentagon over America’s military strategy.....snip~


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...s+(The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles)&ref=yfp

 

Having 12 more boats that can be refitted in 72 hours to ASW missions would come in handy should we ever need to track down and sink the Red Oktober, but whatevers.

 

Bringing up the design flaws again.....won't help those who have to serve on them.

 

Those can be sorted out in time. Too many metal shavings shutting down engines is probably more a manufacturing flaw and not a design flaw. These boats were never envisioned to sail into battle like a battleship and shell in land. They are little more than gray version of coast guard cutters.

 

We can't afford to be getting it wrong with ship design and malfunctions. They also still have the bonus of carrying a chopper or two. Either way the issue needs to be resolved on where ships are built and worked upon.

 

It is part of the corporate payloa. We have to subsidize multiple contractors or we won't have contractors to build, or something like that.

 

There's a design flaw with the U.S. Navy's Little Crappy Ship (LCS)

In fact there are numerous problems from using aluminum which is a no no for warships to the Bofor 57 MM pop gun that doesn't pop.

Re: Aluminum being used in warships. The British Royal Navy learned a painful lesson when they lost the HMS Sheffeld that had an aluminum superstructure.
file:///home/chronos/u-b0705d1faf56c6f81959b1f472cf69a4c1462df0/Downloads/ADA133333.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/10/world/falkland-aftermath-a-naval-debate.html

But the first major problem that surfaced with the U.S. Navy's Little Crappy Ships was electrolysis.

 

New to the Warship building industry. Oh and then more glitches did pop up. Time to run Austal out of this market.

 

A while back I picked up some 7.62 from the 1960's sealed in packaging. I opened it up and the steel from the stripper clips had corroded to the brass casings. Keeping dissimilar metals in close contact can be an issue, when electricity comes into the equation its even worse.

I have to wonder what the navy was thinking.

 

And why do we need grey Coast Guard Cutters?

This is where many of us question the ship at all. The purpose of ships in the Navy is either to conduct offensive operations as capitol ships (carriers today, carriers and battleships in the past), or to protect and dedend those ships (cruisers, destroyers, frigates). I just don't see what the need is for a "littoral ship", which has almost no firepower.

As I have said for years, this is a ship in search of a mission. And I just don't get it. Neither Flesh, nor Foul, nor Good Red Herring. It is not a combat ship, it is not an escort ship, it is not much of anything, just new and cool.

This is why I have said before, just give the damned things to the Coast Guard. Or set them aside as part of a US-UN operations group. Cause other then hunting pirates off the Horn of Africa, I see no purpose for them.

I say abandon these ships, and return to the Oliver Hazard Perry class Frigate. Modernize it, update it, but it does more then these overpriced things do, at a fraction of the cost.

I am seriously worried for the future fate of our Navy. The Frigates are all gone, the Cruisers will soon be gone. The Battleships are not only gone but can not be returned ever. Pretty soon our surface fleet will be nothing but carriers and destroyers.

 

They could be used as part of shore patrols and ASW ops, drug interdiction and refugee stuff. As for whether or not any of that is needed is open for debate. I personally think CVN's have diminishing utility for the cost.

 

We do need ships that can go up river. Until we can come up with hovercraft that are weaponized.

 

I wouldn't have thought about that or have heard about the brass shell and steel stripper clip becoming corrosive but I suppose it happens.

All of the military surplus ammunition I have purchased over the years were bulk without stripper clips. But I've only purchased 8 MM Mauser ammunition that was manufactured during WW ll and 30-06 that was manufactured during WW ll and the 1950's. I still have a couple hundred rounds of German 8 MM with 1944 dates and after over 70 years haven't had any problems. But the primers are corrosive primers but that's the whole idea of the corrosive "berdan" primers, extremely long shelf live, maybe good for a hundred years (???)

When it comes to electrolysis in construction it's extremely important for electricians and plumbers to work closely together with each other and both understand what electrolysis.is. It could cost a home owner or a business owner a whole lot of headaches and money in the future. Having an electrical aluminium conduit crossing over or touching a galvanized water pipe is a major disaster in the future.

I have no idea who designed these LCS's, the Aussies are blaming the U.S. Navy since they designed the "Little Crappy Ships" but should have pointed out to the Navy you can't have steel coming into contact with non ferrous metals like aluminum.

Back to the LCS:

Check out the photos on the link below.

 

Remember the Navy's PBR's, not referring to the beer.

 

Mornin Apache. Yeah, we will need something with speed and stealth, for rivers and deltas. We can't just use choppers or aircraft.

We could use some Mini Subs to.....although I heard some Navy talking about drones that they will be using.

 

ASW ops? When they are not even designed to handle that well out to sea?

And what do you think the OHP class frigates were designed to do?

*blinks*

Up river? Really?

OK, now here is where I am probably going to shock a lot of people. Ready for it?

The draft of the Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate (the ship this is replacing) is 22 feet.

The draft of an Arliegh Burke class destroyer is 30 feet.

The draft of the USS Zumwalt is 27.6 feet.

In other words, it rides much lower then the current class of frigate, and only a little better then our current destroyers.

But let's look even more, shall we?

Beam of the OHP class frigate: 45 feet
Beam of USS Zumwalt: 80 feet

Length of OHP class frigate: 408 feet
Length of USS Zumwalt: 600 feet

So by looking at the most important stats of this ship, it is less capable of this ability of "going up a river" then the ship it replaces.

So in other words, this claim is pretty much nonsense.

 

I didn't think the LC was better. I was just saying we will need something to go up rivers and deltas.

 

We do, the PBR.



Funny thing is, I used to see PBRs training when I was at Mare Island in the 1990's. They operated out of Mare and Skagg's Islands. And today, the PBRs are stationed in Sacramento, just up the river.

We also have the SURC, these were used quite a bit in Iraq.



We even own a single Swedish CB90, which is designated as a "Riverine Command Boat".



We have plenty of boats that are made to operate on rivers.

 

Yeah, and they said we will have some that are drones too.

 

“Not expected to be survivable in a hostile combat environment.”

Says it all, doesn't it.

The military has seen significant reductions in spending under this POTUS, we just can't afford this type of thing.

 

And they keep on building the Crappy Little Ship.

The Obama administration got tired of sailors calling the LCS the Crappy Little Ship that they decided to reclassify the LCS as a fast frigate. It will always be a crappy ship. A frigate with a main gun armament of one Bofor 57 mm pop gun ???

If the Navy wanted a ship that could operate in the littorals they should have done what most other navies have done, corvettes.
Corvettes are heavily armed small warships only displacing between 500 tons to 2,000 tons that have a real naval gun and anti ship missiles and air defense missiles like the Germans Baunschweig class corvette. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braunschweig-class_corvette

 

Braunschweig class looks pretty mean to me. And I doubt its got the inherent issues of the LCS.


All this talk recently about our nuclear triad, and if one of the 3 should be cut-and yet the Navy is wasting money on this type of thing.

 

The U.S. Navy never got into building corvettes, it seems to be a European thing. The smallest blue water warships the U.S. Navy has built was always frigates that were classified as destroyer escorts during WW ll. So there was nothing to really fill the gap between the destroyer escorts and the PT Boats.

It's like Battle Cruisers, the British, Germans, French built them but the only battle cruisers that the U.S. Navy ever built were just two of them, the USS Alaska and the USS Guam both built during WW ll. Mushroom is well read on the U.S. Navy's battle cruisers.

Corvettes are small but heavily armed warships. The corvettes have more firepower and can actually fight at sea than the LCS can. A freaking 57 mm main gun armament !!!

 

The US never really looked into Corvettes because it was able instead to concentrate on Destroyers and Frigates. Corvettes are a good compromise if a nation only has the resources to build and maintain a modest fleet, but the US has never really had that problem. And not just in capability but in manpower.

Where as a US Frigate will have a complement of around 200 sailors, a Corvette is typically manned by 50-75 sailors. In the navies of most nations these actually assume the duty that is typically done by the Coast Guard in the US. Patrolling national waters and detecting incursions. Since the US has the USCG and it's own fleet of cutters to do this job, there is yet another reason why the US has never persued this class of ship.

And the reason I know quite a bit about our Battle Cruisers is because of both my interest in WWII, as well as my long held belief that a modernized Alaska class Battle Cruiser would be the perfect blueprint for a replacement in the role of a "Battleship". Of course, my definition of a "Battleship" being the description of it's mission and not a specific class of ship often confuses those that do not understand such details.



However, to be perfectly correct, the US did "build" 2 other Battle Cruisers. However, because of the previously mentioned Washington Naval Treaty both were changed half way during construction to become the fleet carriers USS Lexington and USS Saratoga. The 4 others were already in progress (Ranger, Constellation, Constitution, United States) were broken up in the construction docks in 1923.

 

Copy that. Im aware of shroom. He's good on missiles and strategic national defense as well.

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I know a girl from Alaska. She was a bartender, then EMT, now nurse. Ive always called her Alaska.

Its time to bring the pain. Alaska style.