Well, it appears that it's official now. The Navy is adding 20 to the core crew size as predicted in one of our earlier posts. Of course, finding room to fit the additional berths, galley capacity, showers, heads, laundry, water storage, food storage and all the other things required to support each sailor will be a challenge.
This is also just about the last nail in the coffin of the original LCS concept. Let's check the original design scorecard ...
* low cost - failed
* minimal manning - failed
* high speed - passed
* mothership to off-board sensors and weapons - failed
* littoral dominating warship - failed
Hopefully, this program will be terminated after the initial 24 LCS are built, if not before.
Hopefully at the current amount built and underconstruction. Put them in the gulf of mexico to run down speed boats.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget survivability... would also score a big fail if someone was keeping score. But the problem is there is no scorecard.
ReplyDeleteAs the Undersecretary has said, we bought this ship with R&D money. And we started building it before we knew what we really wanted.
It's as if the LCS spent the last 10 years in college trying to 'find itself'. It took a lot of basket weaving and art-history courses, but has no real skills or abilities. Unfortunately, this ship is about to be released into the work force...
To be fair on the survivability, the Level 1 (or less) was actually the design criteria so that's not a failure. It's a pretty bad design feature but it is exactly what was intended.
ReplyDeleteGood point - so maybe more a failure in conceptualization vice execution.
DeleteOne would think that a $600 million 'combat' ship should have a reasonable degree of survivability.