US Navy Drops LCS Plans, Concept After Latest Failures

PARIS --- After spending billions of dollars, the US Navy has finally abandoned the Littoral Combat Ship concept, saying it will turn the first four LCSs into training ships and that all future vessels will be equipped for a single combat mission.

Although deliberately worded to minimize its import, the US Navy statement below is a clear acknowledgement that the LCS concept has been an abysmal failure.

But, even as it looks to mitigate the disastrous effects of having ordered a dozen LCS at once, before checking whether they performed as claimed (they have not), the Navy makes no mention of having found the technical faults which have struck four LCS ships this year.



http://www.defense-aerospace.com/ar...lcs-plans,-concept-after-latest-failures.html

Better to use for training, I say. This was an expensive failure.

 

That's why they have always been referred to as the U.S. Navy's Little Crappy Ships.

Obama's PC Navy sure isn't turning out the way Obama and his worse Secretary of the Navy in America's history, Sec. Ray Mabus planned.

29 Zumwalt DDG-1000 class destroyers were canceled after only two being built.

The carrier USS Gerald R. Ford is still having problems with it's magnetic catapult and arresting gear. I wonder how much it's going to cost when they come to the conclusion that new isn't always better and have to switch over to steam catapults ?

 

New is certainly not always better. Often its not even close. Sometimes it is.

But this whole project stinks to high heaven.

The first I heard of this project was from you-and you were correct.

Think of the actual combat worthy vessels we could have instead of these duds.

How can Obama defend his "Asian Pivot" with this crap?

I will keep a close eye on the Zumwalt.

 

Yes, Obama's PC Navy...

...Ships designed and approved for construction under George Bush.

 

Ships designed and approved for construction by Congress by naval architects and engineers who just don't own a slide rule and wouldn't know how to use one if they had one in their hands.

If the Democrats and the Clinton administration hadn't demanded a "peace dividend" after Reagan and the Republicans won the Cold War and dismantled the Reagan military and over sown sized the military < http://humanevents.com/2006/12/21/bill-clinton-and-the-decline-of-the-military/ > We wouldn't have needed a Zumwalt DDG or a Little Crappy Ship.

Have you looked at who the Democrats are that sit on the House Armed Services Committee ( Loretta Sanchez, Susan Davis, Jackie Speier, etc. ) and the Senate Armed Services Committee ( Jeanne Shaheen, Claire McCaskill, Mazie Hirono, Tim Kaine. etc. )

Tim Kaine says he has a son serving in the military so he thinks he knows everything about the military. "Semper Fi Nat"

Mazie Hirono noticed there's a navy base at Pearl Harbor so that qualifies her on national defense.

Loretta Sanchez ???

Anyone who's old schooled knows you don't use aluminum on warships.

Before liberals dumbed down our public schools, high school shop class level, you don't butt steel to aluminum !!!

 

So Bush opposed the design and their construction but Congress forced them on him?

Anyone who's "old schooled" also thinks battleships have a place in warfare 3 decades after anti-ship missiles made them obsolete. Your thinking is a dinosaur. The fact that you deride engineers as not have slide rules when they have CAD/CAM software that can do calculations a billion times faster than any slide rule demonstrates that perfectly.

 

Just welfare for the rich. Carriers are the new battleships.

 

But carriers still need escorts and the Navy need warships that can operate in the littorals and be modular enough to conduct different missions.

 

Per Janes, the LCS are not being cancelled.

It appears the OP article is not correct.

http://www.janes.com/article/63633/...e-up-lcs-crewing-basing-and-operational-rotas

 

What possible defensive role could a ship designed to operate on rivers have? Are we expecting invasions up the Mississippi?

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I guess the escorts can pick up survivors during the opening volley that sinks all the carriers.

 

1. The Littorals include more than rivers.

2. The escorts do things like carry SAM systems to shoot down the "opening volley" you speak of.

 

We don't have anything that will "shoot down" a ballistic missile.

 

Yes we do. The AEGIS radar and SM-3 missiles are capable of doing just that. The Rolling Airframe Missile could theoretically destroy a ballistic missile warhead in the terminal phase.

 

Its just another sign of the bloated, politicized, bureaucratic and corrupt defense department in which programs are really jobs programs and are made as big as possible and spread out to fund as many politicians districts as possible (and no doubt a good bit of that funding makes the round trip back to the pols as campaign "contributions"). The F-22, F-35, are the same.

 

Kinetic defenses against the DF-21D would be difficult. The Navy's primary ballistic missile interceptor, the SM-3, would not be effective since it is designed to intercept missiles in the mid-course phase in space, so it would have to be launched almost immediately to hit before reentry or from an Aegis ship positioned under its flight path. The SM-2 Block 4 can intercept missiles reentering the atmosphere, but the warhead will be performing high-G maneuvers that may complicate interception.[24

 

The op article did not say they were being cancelled-it said they were dropping the mutli-mission role and were to be used for training/testing and specific missions.

 

The DF-21 has never even been tested in an anti-ship role, let alone proven to work. How can you claim it can perform high-G maneuvers when it's never even been tested?

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Which doesn't equal a failure.

 

No its multiple incidents and inability to meet its assigned tasks make it a failure.

 

Which are examples of corporate corruption. We need to try the executive boards of Lockheed, Boeing, Austal, and Ingalls Shipbuilding amung others for war profiteering.

 

There are legitimate criticisms of these companies-but the military made this.

 

Mr. Questerr, I want to read more, I really do.

Could you dig into your pockets and turn me on to a couple of thousand dollars so I can subscribe to Janes and read more ?

Thank you.

 

Bush was a F-102 fighter jock not a squid.

The whole idea of having a Crappy Little Ship was to have something that could operate in shallow waters in the war against terrorism.

Instead of building a corvette which the U.S. Navy has never built or deployed before, some young geeks thought they could come up with something new ignoring that many European navies already had some very excellent corvettes in service.

Red flags started showing up not during the Bush administration but during the Obama administration when the LCS's were still in the shipyards under construction. The first LCS was already corroding before it even entered the water.

Obama's incompetent Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, the worst Sec. of the Navy in America's history made the LCS his pet project. The U.S. Navy's first warship with no urinals !!! How PC could it get ?

Anyone who's old schooled has probably been there and done that and already knows what the purpose of a BB is and how to use a BB and understands A2/AD, it's nothing new.

 

The military didn't build them or design the tech or use substandard parts. Corporations did that.

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The US built hundreds of corvettes. We just called them "Destroyer Escorts" instead.

 

The military just ordered and purchased them. And here we are.

 

Congress and the President ordered them and purchased them.