Article

2022-05-14 Science & Technology

US Navy scraps NINE anti-submarine warships that cost $3.2 billion to make - some under three years old - because their technology is already obsolete

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Posted by Skidmark 2022-05-14 00:00|| || Front Page|| [7 views ] Top

#1 Not ASW. These were the LCS littoral combat ships, with supposed modular payloads. And they also had gearing design problems that limited their top speed to 15knots. The Independence class LCS are also being decommissioned because of cracks in the deck between the deck plates and the vertical hull frames which limit the affected ships to max speed of 15 knots and limits them to SeaState 4 max!

Theyd have almost been better off building old Perry class frigates, sheesh

Posted by Greater the Anonymous5721 2022-05-14 05:29|| 2022-05-14 05:29|| Front Page Top

#2 Yes, but all those Captains and Admirals involved got pretty medals and a good retirement for delivering this upon us. They'll be no lessons learned from the failure either.

Posted by Procopius2k 2022-05-14 07:41|| 2022-05-14 07:41|| Front Page Top

#3 That's what happens when airplane designers tried their hands and designing ships.

Hint: airplanes don't float very well in rough seas.

Posted by Seeking Cure For Ignorance 2022-05-14 10:27|| 2022-05-14 10:27|| Front Page Top

#4 At least on a hulls-in-the-water basis we've got a serious and growing problem.

Posted by Matt 2022-05-14 10:32|| 2022-05-14 10:32|| Front Page Top

#5 Well the first thing which stands out why they won't be continued is not one is named after a politician or Harvey Milk.

Posted by swksvolFF 2022-05-14 11:02|| 2022-05-14 11:02|| Front Page Top

#6 You mean, the LCS Che Guevara would have saved the program? That goes under "Lessons Learned".

Posted by Matt 2022-05-14 11:23|| 2022-05-14 11:23|| Front Page Top

#7 I always thought they seemed to be under-armed, floating warehouses with a small parking lot.

Posted by NoMoreBS 2022-05-14 12:11|| 2022-05-14 12:11|| Front Page Top

#8 Nobody cuts the Admiral Levine.

Posted by swksvolFF 2022-05-14 12:38|| 2022-05-14 12:38|| Front Page Top

#9 In theory the LCS would have been the wet dream of the Pentagon bean counters ... in theory.

The whole "plug n' play modules" multi-role idea meaning we don't have to maintain both specialist minesweepers (not sexy!) and small ASW ships (the Surface Warfare career track went out with the battleships so double not sexy!) -OR- the source of institutional knowledge embodied in their crews. Just wave a magic wand in the 5-sided Puzzle Palace and *Presto change-o* and all that lost institutional knowledge will reappear...

#3 Seeking has the point: ships are not an airframe that you can just hang a new "mission pod" off of. They are a mixture of humans, machines and doctrine that takes time to work all the kinks out of.

Posted by magpie 2022-05-14 13:50|| 2022-05-14 13:50|| Front Page Top

#10 Magpie: the Danish ships built to the same idea were successful. The problem the Pentagon had was that they decided they wanted a version of the Danish ships, but half the size... and twice the speed. And they never actually bothered getting the modules working, because they could procrastinate "We'll get them later."

Posted by Thing From Snowy Mountain 2022-05-14 15:20|| 2022-05-14 15:20|| Front Page Top

#11 The money on the LCS project was lost when it was designed. Fer instance, the ASW module couldn't perform because the sensors and coutermeasures need to built into the hull, not bolted on later. Similar issues with the other versions, but you couldn't do working capability in the volume.
Everything was a compromise aimed at making political points (i.e., we need to keep x shipyard and y contractor with plant in z state in the money flow).

Posted by ed in texas 2022-05-14 15:41|| 2022-05-14 15:41|| Front Page Top

#12 My layman's undertsanding is that a source of the problem is the Navy deciding to go with ''transformational" designs -- "this is a vast leap over what we have now" -- rather than incremental designs, like a new flight of Burkes or Perrys. Build a little, test a little, build some more. But hey, I'd be happy if they could just get the rust under control.

Posted by Matt 2022-05-14 16:20|| 2022-05-14 16:20|| Front Page Top

#13 Hull cracks sound like a bad thing.

Posted by Matt 2022-05-14 16:27|| 2022-05-14 16:27|| Front Page Top

#14 Matt, everything I have read says that the FREMM Frigates (I believe that's what you are talking about, yes?) were received very favorably.

Posted by magpie 2022-05-14 16:36|| 2022-05-14 16:36|| Front Page Top

#15 magpie, yeah, I think the FREMM'S are the basis for the new Constellation-class FFG's. Construction has just started. What I like about them already is that they're going to have real Original Six frigate names (Congress, Chesapeake, etc.) as opposed to Mayor Ted Wheeler or other commie BS. Who wants to go in harm's way on the Harvey Milk?

Posted by Matt 2022-05-14 17:22|| 2022-05-14 17:22|| Front Page Top

#16 Ian Toll: Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy.

Posted by Matt 2022-05-14 17:29|| 2022-05-14 17:29|| Front Page Top

#17 /\ Matt, I was thinking of that book, actually and that the LCS was the opposite of those ships: "Underarmed, Undermanned, and undersailed ...!*"
(* the professional opinion of the British Navy was that those US Six Frigates were 'overgunned, overmanned and oversailed' and yes they were, but then the British idea of a Frigate was different and how it fit into their much larger navy.)

Posted by magpie 2022-05-14 18:19|| 2022-05-14 18:19|| Front Page Top

#18 ^ I've stood on the deck of the Constitution in Boston, and that is one sturdy beast. I felt like I was in a bunker rather than on the deck of a ship. As I recall Toll's book explains the considerable effort that went into finding just the right timber. Of course we had no ships-of-the-line.

Posted by Matt 2022-05-14 18:28|| 2022-05-14 18:28|| Front Page Top

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