Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Now you can visualize the poor quality of the Littoral Combat Ship

I read Cdr Salamander’s post before looking at the photo. I thought, while reading, “well he knows this stuff, maybe it is some minor detail that only subject matter experts could pick out.”

Go to his post and look at the high-res photo.

We spend more and more insane billions on the Navy. What do we get? Well, I don’t think we are getting quality.

On another note, this from insidedefense.com (subscription).

Pentagon Waives Testing Requirement For Navy's Littoral Combat Ship

The Pentagon has waived the statutory requirement for full-up, system-level survivability testing of the Littoral Combat Ship because it would be "unreasonably expensive" and "impractical," a decision blessed by the Defense Department's top weapons tester, DOD officials say.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's not just cost and quality, it's the entire philosophy behind the LCS. The ship was designed with a skeleton crew in mind, which means that maintenance suffers. You need more sailors to keep the LCS ship-shape than the LCS actually carries.

Unknown said...

Yeah.

Well, it is time to ditch this loser of a ship program.

asdf said...

just buy the MEKO

Anonymous said...

The LCS is a 'one-hit wonder' after one hit, the rest of the fleet will wonder where it sank.

Goldeel1 said...

I think Cdr Salamander is being a little too kind to the crew here in regards to ship maintenance. There are large areas of the port side near those two rust streaks that reach to the waterline that are missing paint. Are we seriously saying that the ship crew is so over-worked that the officers cant get a couple of seamen out with some brushes and a few cans of warship grey?

To me it looks almost like a deliberate attempt to either push the ship to it's limits and see what starts to break or degrade over time (as part of an operation evaluation), or maybe someone in the Navy wants to find an excuse to kill the project by not allowing maintenance. This latter excuse is what I suspect has been used by some in the RAN to justify decommissioning of HMAS Manoora. Thereby ensuring that the new Canberra class are guaranteed an additional source of funds for any of the standard "oops we forgot about that" shenanigans the DMO like to deliver.

DesScorp said...

"Just buy the MECO"

I've got a better idea. Let's forget the whole "littoral" fad. The Navy has been in the business of littoral dominance ever since there's been a Navy. All you need are smaller vessels with some Marines onboard. Amphibious ops are by definition littoral ops. The Barbary Wars started as littoral ops... we sailed some frigates up to Tripoli, and dropped some Marines on the beach. The whole LCS idea was defense procurement faddishness.We'd be better off stretching a Perry to make room for some Marines and putting small AESA systems on it. Then build new ones.