USS Little Rock
We posted back in February, about the Navy’s plans to decommission four relatively new Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). Congress granted approval to decommission two, the USS Independence and the USS Freedom. The Independence was decommissioned on July 29, 20201 and the Freedom is slated to be decommissioned on September 30, 2021. The ships are 11 and 13 years old, respectively.
The two ships were the first LCS built of two variant classes. The Freedom-class ships are 388′ long monohulls, while the Independence-class ships are 418′ long trimarans.
In its new budget proposal, the Navy wants to decommission an additional four LCS — USS Fort Worth, USS Coronado, USS Detroit, and USS Little Rock. The last two ships, both Freedom-class, were only commissioned in 2016 and 2017, respectively.
The decision to decommission four and five-year-old ships was attributed to “major propulsion train casualties.” Earlier this year, the Navy acknowledged that key propulsion machinery, the combining gear that links the gas turbines and diesel engines together on the Freedom-class ships, suffers from a class-wide “latent engineering defect,” that resulted in the failures in the USS Detroit, and USS Little Rock.
The Navy will be testing a class gear fix in September. Even if all goes well, it is expected to be several years before the repairs reach the rest of the fleet.
There are currently 10 Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ships in service in the Navy fleet, with an additional seven hulls still under construction, according to the service’s fiscal year 2021 budget request. Each vessel costs around $520 million, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report on the line.
Thanks to Larry Witmer for contributing to this post.
Many of the features of these ships were good ideas. Making ships with versatility is a real plus in my book. Alas trying to use drive systems for pleasure vessels I feel was a step too far. The Cat Ferry has jet drive that is functional. The only problem that the locals have seen with the cat ferry is the company cant come up with the monies to keep the boat operational.
Perhaps the navy should stick to steel hulls that wont have the brittle nature of aluminum
LCS was a bad idea from the get go. A multi role anything is not good at any one of them, they haven’t enough crew aboard to perform any real mission, maintenance, or damage control if they did get hit. Basically, LCS is an empty shoe box
you throw stuff in when you need to. Fine. Except you’ve gotta have six months’ notice of a crisis to get all the pieces up and ready, and delivered, set up and working on board. During my
decades of service, both Navy and Army, we rarely got six days’ notice of TSHTF somewhere. When things happen, they happen quick. After the Navy
I became a Paratrooper. We were Light Infantry and lacked all the heavy stuff to stop tanks and
reduce field fortifications. We had our rifles and what we carried. That would be the exact situation LCS would find herself in. You fight with what you brought. Any tin pot with a third hand WWII destroyer could and would put paid to
any LCS caught out like that. The idea that TSHTF
and you go meet up with a Tender to be rearmed and restored and be on scene in time to make any difference is just dumb. McNamara dumb.