USS Little Rock
USNI News reports that the nine Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) currently in Navy service – the youngest of which commissioned in 2020 – have been marked for disposal as part of the Department of Defense’s Fiscal Year 2023 budget proposal.
The ships – USS Fort Worth (LCS-3), USS Milwaukee (LCS-5), USS Detroit (LCS-7), USS Little Rock (LCS-9), USS Sioux City (LCS-11), USS Wichita (LCS-13), USS Billings (LCS-15), and USS St. Louis (LCS-19) – are part of the 24 ships the service has chosen to decommission in FY 2023 for an estimated $3.6 billion in savings.
In the Navy’s last plan for the Littoral Combat Ship program, the Freedom-class ships had been tapped to shoulder the anti-submarine warfare role with the LCS ASW mission package. The towed variable depth low-frequency active sonar (VDS) didn’t perform properly, so the ships were left without a mission, in addition to propulsion plant problems that have plagued the Freedom-class ships.
The Navy intends to take the remaining six Freedom-class ships under construction and fit them with a variation of the surface warfare mission package for missions in U.S. Central and Southern commands, a service official told USNI News.
The Navy also plans to decommission another 15 ships during the fiscal year, USN officials said during a briefing – five cruisers, four dock-landing ships, two submarines, two oilers, and two expeditionary transfer docks.
Sixteen of the ships, including the LCSs, will require a waiver to be decommissioned before the end of their service lives. Relatively new to the fleet, the ships cost about $500 million per vessel to procure.
How did this happen, any planning and testing involved in these build plans. Makes you wonder how much more of this is going on. 500 mill per vessel , crazy.
I’m surprised that this decommissioning is not being shouted from the mountain top. Unbelievable waste. The vessels did not work for their intended purposes nor were their propulsion systems adequately designed. It’s absolutely crazy that the US Navy spends money like a “drunken sailor” without reprimand
Contact Canada…..it is looking for a few vessels to form a navy. Canada has the finances to do a deal…it is anxious to retire the (5) row boats that it now uses for naval patrol
I bet Ukraine could use these littoral class ships, replace the main engines and power train with a simpler design and give it to them.
The Navy needs to wake up. Stop dealing with naval architects and marine engineers that are whacked out crack monkeys. I’ve seen the punk faced NA’s that have never sailed put all this crap on boats with their cad-cam programs. They bury the Navy brass in paper. The Navy brass is so impressed that they hit the buy button!