ProPublica just published a big expose on the LCS, and as I'm going through it I was wondering what the shipfags make of the affair.
Was there ever hope for it, or was it a bad idea kept going by bureaucratic and Congressional inertia when it should've died in the cradle?
As i get deeper here, it seems the ships' shortcomings were exacerbated by the Navy being short on captains and crewmen. That hardly seems like something you can blame on the ship, and has deeper roots in recruitment problems that have been dogging the DoD for almost a decade.
why nobody want to join Navy?
Gay moron orgies
*lack of
how else you gonna cum?
Too much gay sex and barebacking going on.
Isn't that like the Zoomers' favorite thing? Surely this is a job perk in 2023, not a drawback
While progressive gobbledymoron is definitely a problem, my gut tells me they're trapped in a feedback loop right now. Years of being undermanned and overworked have created plenty of horror stories, and without additional incentives (or a draft lol) I think too many people are getting told by everyone other than the recruiters (who are now infamous for lying through their teeth to get you to sign) to find something, anything else. And when the government's gonna subsidize your college anyway, why bother giving them five years of your life?
they want Five? my recruiter said I could sign up for two if I wanted!
Rookie mistake.
If you give me your credit card information and social security number, I can get your contract back down to two years.
nah
it's mostly 3 things:
1. recruits are turned away for asinine things that are holdovers from the drug war (i don't just mean Lucifer's Lettuce - they turn away people with ADHD who could function just fine and even the waivers are refused if they've taken medication for it in the last year; it's entirely a drug paranoia thing)
2. zoomers are inherently suHispanicious of contracts. you just don't get the uncritical dotted-line signers you used to - horror of horrors, zoomers will actually read it first. maybe it's because they grew up with so many bullshit EULAs, IDK - but they're not scammable the way people used to be and recruiters and force leaders alike simply have not adapted to that loss of image by attempting to improve the terms or offer more.
3. something of an addendum to 2, zoomers talk to each other. a LOT. you give somebody a bad experience in the military who the zoomer knows and you may have ended up poisoning the well for THOUSANDS of potential recruits. the stakes of failure to retain or even simply engender respect for the force leadership have never been higher, and the old methods of quietly brushing things under the rug or finding a scapegoat have higher risks of catastrophically backfiring than ever (see: USS Bonhome Richard tribunal fiasco, Master Chief Petty Officer getting himself fired by telling the USS George Washington crew to lower their expectations after the crew had 3 suicides in a week)
it really, truly all boils down to making the force a more appealing place to work - and many solutions for that are actually clear ways to improve efficiency overall. if they don't fix the brass rot, they'll never be able to fix the force's image, and we're no longer in the 1990s when it could all be buried under a large enough marketing campaign. people take ads even less seriously now.
that first reply was supposed to be
i mostly agree with, but not for "muh culture war" reasons - it's just one of the marketing ploys they think can improve the image when all of that - regardless of culture war politics - stopped working well years ago
this. in a BIIIG WAY
Also, lets be real, tight labor market. If you're a dipshit with a GED, you can make as much or more than a boot by simply flipping burgers at maccy d's. Think about it, you have to get up to E4 until your take-home starts exceeding the average salary in the service sector
Progressive buzzwords are actually a symptom of middle-management marketing consultants. They shit that stuff out at boomers and they repeat it ad nauseum as though its insightful without believing in or supporting it or even knowing what it is.
That being said, its certainly a major issue. I think it is however subsidiary to the massive psychic trauma of COVID. Im in grad school and our year has the highest proportion of veterans of any year ever, all former officers and the ones I have spoken to have outright told me they left because of the jab. Not the fear of the jab per se but just how they were generally treated or saw how others who refused get treated.
Two of them talked me out of commissioning into the ANG (into a technical role) after graduation, their argument being
>the military is fucking gay now
These arent radical culture warrior magatards. Educated, middle of the road dudes.
>Not the fear of the jab per se but just how they were generally treated or saw how others who refused get treated.
Good riddance then. Antivax bullshit is a legit security issue, you need to get a ton of jabs in military, foreign service, whatever, because half the crew getting nuked by some plague for a week after a port call has been a huge problem for naval combat for fucking CENTURIES. No, individuals based on culture war make believe do not get to just decide whether they want to be vaccinated or not anymore then they get to decide whether to wear body armor or not or what guns. I'm way, way more sympathetic to people mad about gays or trannies then that. Not that the brass isn't retarded too, or that the .mil doesn't need to really really work at being a more attractive work environment. But that doesn't mean it makes sense to swing the pendulum to the opposite of radical individualism where you only listen to chain of command if you feel like it on any order at all.
Et tu, Goering?
To my knowledge they were all vaccinated. They got the jab and walked away when their contracts ran their course.
It's the way the army acted about the jab, not the jab per se
>As I explicitly said, gay.
Also
>Forcing quality personnel, officers no less, out
>Good
>Ever
I'm only talking about takehome pay because that's the only thing retard 18 y/o's think about. They aren't thinking
>muh free college/healthcare/loans
>Muh free room and board
Think about the target market: Financially illiterate children who blow their first paycheck on a used mustang at 15% APR
>Think about it, you have to get up to E4 until your take-home starts exceeding the average salary in the service sector
No, I'm tired of this absolute fucking retardation. You are only looking at take home pay which isn't anywhere near the full pic.
Military: McD pay but also free housing, free food, free insurance, GI bill,free education in certain fields and areas while you're in, preferential treatment when you're out for jobs, loans, houses, etc. Don't forget being able to legally delete people.
It's absolutely not a 1 to 1 thing.
>you're forced to live and eat as your employers say, but at least you don't have to pay for it LOL
>free insurance like fucking McDonalds didn't include that in the benefits, and much like with McDonalds GL HF actually getting a cent out of it
Cool "benefits" you got there, I'm still not signing.
>free housing
You call those roach spas full of black mold "housing"?
I have two branches of my family in the service and it is just as you say, problems start arising when your retard cousins start leaving the nest and don't enlist or head to an actual school, then the meaty tissue of benefits and free gibs quickly decays after they age out of tricare at 21.
mil service is a great way to start you on the path to generational wealth but you need to make sure the generations are aware of what the fuck is up or they're just going to sell your house and put you in a home after leeching off your pension for 30 years
You sound like the officer I had in charge for staff duty who asked disdainfully why my joe and I were planning to eat dominos for dinner. I dunno sir, are you going to cook us a meal before you head to bed in your nice house off post while we hold down the fort here pretending we don’t want to shoot ourselves? Because the dfac closes early today, our black mold encrusted, half-condemned shithole of a barracks doesn’t have stoves, and some retard shut down goarmy ed before the new system was done so now I have to either give up using tuition assistance or rely on the good word of the Army to back pay my university
Did I mention S1 lost my paperwork so now I’m getting promoted two months late? Fuck you sir, fuck you and fuck your retarded fucking Army
Really, really good post.
>it really, truly all boils down to making the force a more appealing place to work - and many solutions for that are actually clear ways to improve efficiency overall. if they don't fix the brass rot, they'll never be able to fix the force's image, and we're no longer in the 1990s when it could all be buried under a large enough marketing campaign. people take ads even less seriously now.
My personal opinion is that there are subtle issues too, that the military in many cases and Navy in particular has dug a deep hole for themselves over many years of unnecessary exemptions from normal private business requirements. They got Congress to sign off on ignoring decades of private workplace improvements in all sorts of basic ways that make people happier and healthier, I mean, shit nobody necessarily thinks about but humans appreciate like less/non-toxic cleaners where possible, quality lighting, more pleasant furniture even. Shit that business kicked and screamed over, but turned out to not even cost more at scale, and any initial management/hr/tech challenges got worked out pretty fast. Yes, there are areas that are more dangerous in the military of course, just how it is. But military went way, way beyond that. Now 30 years later there is a stark difference in quality of life between typical low level private and public, much more so than there was in the 60s/70s/80s.
Yeah more pay, better terms and such matter, but we're seeing lots of people decide they're willing to take lower pay in some cases for better QoL. I mean shit, PrepHole is full of us! I could make a lot more money in a big city then I do out in a rural area. I'm happy enough though and having my own clean land I can shoot on, neighbors I like etc is more important to me. You couldn't just offer me 20% more money to move to some urban area, money can't pave over everything.
Remember the 2002-2008 era when they dragged every damn person they could even if they were NG weekend warriors or old reservists to Irag or Afghanistan to participate in IED memes? And the new recruits who had been given promises of great benefits for serving, only to have those benefits revoked by sending them back home 2 days short of qualifying for them? I remember, I honestly would not trust the US military to give me any kind of decent life seeing what a bunch cucks who break their own balls without being asked, who say it was "good for them". And I don't mean them supposedly being "woke", I mean dudes who think suing for disability caused by failures of workplace safety is "being entitled" and "don't want no handouts".
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's kind of now considered dumb/cliche by my generation, but I unironically consider myself a patriot, I'd fight to defend America or even our allies. And I accept that as part of that maybe the enemy kills me, or unavoidable accidents from risk. It's war, not a video game. I appreciate that the military tries to be reasonable with soldiers/sailors lives in the actual act of combat, and even that if I got killed reasonable effort would be expended to bring my corpse home. That's good. But I dunno, also feel like that IF everything well, IF we won, or IF there was a tour of duty that was uneventful, I should come out the other end and be able to have the rest of my life, not unnecessarily poisoned or disabled just because some old brass thought GETTING CHEMICAL BURNS FROM STUPID SHIT IS GOOD FOR CHARACTER. That I'll receive reasonable treatment for tour disabilities if I get them, without bullshit. The real sense though is that enlisted are considered kind of expendable, just cogs, and that once out (preferably cheaply) who cares.
In white collar private enterprise, finance or whatever shit, that attitude even works, because nobody is risking their lives, you get your pay and you're done, don't like it move to a new company there are plenty. But even in private heavy industry nobody likes bosses who play fast and loose with worker health. Lot of work went into improving that, centuries of work even.
also
>And I don't mean them supposedly being "woke", I mean dudes who think suing for disability caused by failures of workplace safety is "being entitled" and "don't want no handouts".
Yeah I hate wokeshit honestly and thus hate to use anything close to the language but "toxic management" does sometimes to fit the brass uncomfortably well. As if they think this is some cartoon anime where if you put people into shit environments they level up and evolve resistance to them or something, instead of acquire permanent damage that will plague them the rest of their days once they're out.
The USS George Washington thing was so fucking out of touch.
>The Navy's response from Russell L. Smith, the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy, was that things could be worse, "at least you're not in a foxhole", and that the Navy was effectively unable to remedy the situation.
"suck it up, it could be worse and we're not gonna do anything to remedy our sailors mental fatigue"
God I fucking hate the Navys attitude, reminds me of the bullshit following the 16" turret explosion on the Iowa in '89.
>more appealing place to work
A good point since the ratio to support to combat roles is now massively biased to support. The old cultural norms worked well for root'in and toot'in in a swamp somewhere, but fail to translate when data analyst Jane just wants to get Starbucks without getting harassed for wearing the right uniform.
Solutions? Separate branches? Contract out? Different Gov Department?
I would also argue that a lot of the people who would traditionally have been interested in joining the navy were more interested in learning seamanship than spending five years sitting in a windowless broom closet aboard a carrier filling out digital forms.
Plus, shipboard life just plain sucks. You're crammed in a rolling tin can with hundreds of other men for months at a time, at the mercy of the weather and whatever hazards exist aboard the vessel itself. It ain't no picnic.
They’re fuckin desperate for recruits. I’m 36 and in decent (not great) shape. Went by the recruiting office to see if the rumors were true. Told the guy I was divorced (not) and looking to restart my life. Literally had calls and follow ups for almost 6 weeks. If you’re not a total degen and have a modicum social skills it’s like 2006 all over again.
Two words:
Blood.
Mushrooms.
Not enough rum, too much sodomy, and the morons are holding the lash instead of getting it
Another issue with the Navy more broadly and not the LCS in particular: Lockheed and General Dynamics apparently considered some of their shit proprietary, so only their engineers could work on it. Meanwhile, the Navy considered parts of the ship classified, so for all those times the contractors have to be brought aboard to fix whatever's broken, they also have to be escorted.
On ships with 40 man crews, this is likely a bigger problem, but I could see that fucking things up on a Connie or a Burke just as easily.
>Lockheed and General Dynamics apparently considered some of their shit proprietary
IP laws and their consequences have been a disaster for mankind.
It seems the modules are all LCS tho. The Freedom class's wake being too much for the towed sonar array is something that, presumably, would've been discovered and corrected if these ships had been less of a rush job.
So yeah, it seems like these things were lemons, but their problems were definitely worsened by broader problems within the Navy and perhaps the DoD at large.
>The Freedom class's wake being too much for the towed sonar array
this is news to me
>what the shipfags make of the affair.
there's almost hardly any point looking into the operational and technical details of why it fucked up, when the plan as it is was already majorly fucked: the LCS was literally the ship programme that tried to do everything and ended up doing nothing.
>Was there ever hope for it, or was it a bad idea kept going by bureaucratic and Congressional inertia when it should've died in the cradle?
The Constellation-class is what it should have been; a straight Perry replacement
The instant it became more than that, ie with thoughts of the Streetfighter concept, it was fucked. All the shit that got tacked on afterwards was just clubbing a dead seal.
I'm guessing that people kept working on it because they didn't want to see so much shit wasted and they kept trying to make it work. Admirable, in a way, but not wise.
Yeah, sunk cost fallacy is a dangerous thing.
The article also seemed to put a lot of blame on Ray Mabus, who was apparently a big fan of the LCS. He was a good politician, so he pushed to get the two ships in two locations thing going. With two different senators getting bennies for their constituents that way, the program became politically much harder to kill, even after others in the Navy soured on it.
Bob Work was big on LCS, too. I got the chance to argue with him about it online once; he was insistent that everything would work out.
>I got the chance to argue with him about it online once
Link it
Alas, it was on Information Dissemination, which has been gone from the Internet for several years now. There were quite a few high-ranking officers and high-level government guys on that site; Work only came by a few times, though, maybe a year or two after he made undersecretary. It was kinda surreal at the time--social media wasn't really a thing back then, and outsiders rarely got to talk inside baseball with the people actually in charge of stuff.
>Alas, it was on Information Dissemination, which has been gone from the Internet for several years now
Then it didn't happen and I have no interest in your stories
It was a retarded design from the get go, brain dead admirals needed more glory in the dust bowl so they fucked up the navy.
The LCS is a perfect shit storm of post-Cold War budget and staffing issues, contractor overpromising and underbidding, indescisive and directionless naval decision-making, unproven technology testbedding, mission creep, and Congressional fuck-fuck games.
Underrated posts.
Pretty much these.
The moment they bloatmaxxed them away from the US analogue of the Skjold class, they had to add the modular concept in order to pretend they could cover all those requirements.
A second fuckening came in the form of decisional undecisiveness. Specifically, they refused to choose a single design out of the two proposals, even though one of them was fundamentally more capable.
>indescisive and directionless naval decision-making
I suppose you could say it was rudderless.
It was doomed from the moment Big Navy turned the concept from a 500t corvette operating from a tender like a floating F-18 and turned it into a do-everything replacement for the Perry, Osprey, Avenger, and Cyclone classes. It was never going to work out, and a lot of us told them so at the time.
>propublica
>a left leaning anti-military ngo is going to have stupid shit to say
wow, what a shock.
the problem with LCS was pretty fucking simple - they didn't want to just pick one platform, and they couldn't go all in with the modular concept because rumsfeld and co tried to go with the cheapest bidder on everything instead of the companies that could actually perform. that's how you get a loitering missile system contracted out to a company that has no experience in manufacturing, designing or even operating anything that flies let alone a VLS
Funnily enough, besides some boilerplate shit about how the LCS program is emblematic of the DoD's fondness for boondoggles and the obligatory mention of how over-budget the F-35 is, they kept that out of it. It was very much a straightforward, factual listing of some examples of what was wrong with the ships, and the unsurprising tendency of Navy brass to shoot the messengers and the wounded before they were willing to abandon the project.
>a loitering missile system contracted out to a company that has no experience
what system was this?
NLOS-M
Err, it was LockMart and Raytheon. Between them, it should have been easy. I've never heard the full story on just how they managed to botch the PAM seeker so badly. I do remember that a few years later, LockMart twisted the Pentagon's arm over the JAGM program, getting the competition rewritten to drop the IIR seeker as a requirement when their cooled seeker flopped hard, and then somehow "won" against Raytheon's tri-mode seeker (which had a superior *uncooled* IIR seeker that actually worked in live-fire testing). I suspect there are some similarities between the two cases, with some ugly program management shenanigans involved, but I've never seen anything come to light.
Reading this, on top of the Freedom-classes issues, starts to explain to me why LockMart's found itself in the doghouse with the DoD recently.
>go with the cheapest bidder
Anon, are you that unclear on how government contracting works? Because that's how government contracting works. Meet the criteria, low bid gets the job.
>cheapest bidder
This argument never fails to amuse me, because its proponents never seem to stop to consider the alternative:
>Right, you both fulfill the requirements, but I'm gonna go with X, which is more expensive, and more expensive is better because... because... because it just is okay!!
It's also hilarious because the same people will also complain about "le MIC" and that procurement programmes are just pork for Congressmen
Nah
The problem is merely that really are people, lots of people, who thought that 1991 meant we had won the war to end all wars
>In particular, the JMAG vessel valued speed less
Yes, we know
The speed requirement came in when LCS was combined with Streetfighter
O.K., so we were partly just talking past each other; your issue is that some of us (myself included) weren't giving proper credit to the earlier stuff that existed *before* Streetfighter messed everything up. That's reasonable (goodness knows, I get irked at stuff like that myself).
>The problem is merely that really are people, lots of people, who thought that 1991 meant we had won the war to end all wars
Whoof. Looking back on it, the '90s were kinda nuts. Remember the Army requirement to have a medium-weight brigade deploy from CONUS to anywhere on the planet and be in combat within 96 hours, with the rest of the entire division only 24 hours behind it, complete with 30 days' supplies for medium/heavy combat? That gave us Pelican and lifting-body airships as proposed solutions, and eventually gave us Stryker and FCS (which managed to waste far more money than LCS has accomplished)... and yet, I can't entirely blame the guys who came up with those crazy concepts, because we really had no idea when, where, who, or what the next conflict would be about.
>The problem is merely that really are people, lots of people, who thought that 1991 meant we had won the war to end all wars
Fukiyama was one of the neocons leading intellectuals. He was butt fucking wrong.
>neocons
up until recently (Feb 2022 to be precise) the Dems were leading the charge
as a deep red Republican said to me last June, "if I didn't believe in the threat of war with the Russians and Chinese, and drugs, I too would be most concerned with social inequalities and climate change"
The essence of why Democrats clutch their pearls over how we treat blacks, trannies, beef, and oak trees is that they don't believe there are any other threats, because "we've won the war".
neocons switch parties whenever it is convenient. They only care about spending other Americans flesh for their own personal geopolitical goals, and they dont care how it happens, how many millions are killed, or how many trillions are spent.
Even in theory LCS is a bad design
how did it ever left a drawing board let alone two classes build in such big numbers is beyond me
The fact that these ships are getting decommissioned after 5-10 years tells you everything
Some ships stay in the navy for 40+ years
If the us used the money that they had spend on the LCS program on something actually useful they could have a class of modern frigates by now
George Bush is the answer.
>the LCS
>the ship
It makes the same critical error that all these sensational pieces always make. And even more damning its just a rehash of the same shit from years ago that we've already known about. This is the EXACT same shit as with the outrage press surrounding the F-35 a decade ago. Now, before you flip your 'tism lid, I'm not saying this will turnout as good as the F-35 (though it could f they made some important changes) but rather that the media reporting from "journalists" is exactly the same with the same motivations behind it.
tl;dr Independence best, stay mad
>LCS could be as good as F-35 (with some important changes)
Oh boy. No. Not even with changes. The issue here is a market issue. F-35 is a stealth plane for carriers. Guess what? No one's making stealth planes for carriers other than US so F-35 has literally no competition and carrier planes have to be multirole so the F-35 had an easy market.
The LCS is trying to be a multirole stealth ship of the line (aka frigate/destroyer).
People are already making frigates and destroyers with similar amounts of stealth. And the amount of specialization needed for such ships to perform many of the needed roles like antisub warfare means the sacrifices needed to make it multirole make it completely unfitting for most navies to begin with.
This is a market issue. There's 0 market for the LCS. The F-35 was a good idea. The LCS was dumb as fuck.
>F-35 is a stealth plane for carriers
>the most common variant is the land-based on
>the carrier variant is the only bought by the US Navy
You're too emotionally invested in the "LCS bad" narrative to have a constructive conversation with. I am not interested. Have a nice day.
>LCS is actually good because it... because it... it just is okay!!
Holy fuck, talk about yellow
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-littoral-combat-ship
This is just a bunch of big claims and doomsaying interspersed with contextless sound bites.
>help, the well sourced (often literally direct from the parties with egg on their face here) facts frighten me
i hope you get better someday, anon
>In response to questions, the Navy acknowledged the LCS was not suitable for fighting peer competitors such as China. The LCS “does not provide the lethality or survivability needed in a high-end fight.”
What are the questions? What was this unnamed person replying to?
Funny how LCS wasn't included in the quotation anywhere and had to be presented by the article author.
Where is there a single link to anything at all that is claimed in this article so that a person could review the conclusions for themselves.
Hate the ship if you want to, there is due cause, but this article is absolute trash and SO VERY CLEARLY externally motivated.
there are quite a few links directly in the article, are you blind?
Sorry, I wasn't clear. No links on any of the new info. I have the GAO reports and SECPRs to reference for the earlier issues.
Did you want to address any of the other concerns I raised or are we just skipping over them?
I didn't see anything that was false in the story, but it was clearly written for casual readers who neither know nor care about any of the actual details behind the LCS debacle.
The only new information (new to me, at least) was the difficulty in recovering the UUV and the tail. I guess those might have been partly caused by the shallow draft, which placed the propulsion too close to the surface?
Literally everything here is sourced and verified, it is the opposite of yellow journalism you muttonhead
Independence vs Freedom, which class is better?
>Was there ever hope for it
I don't remember a single person ever caring for this ship, ever. In fact I've seen nothing but endless shit talking about it.
>I don't remember a single person ever caring for this ship, ever.
Shipyard workers in Marinette and Mobile. Maybe they're ashamed, but at least they got a paycheck.
ray mabus is a deranged chud
It's kind of the f 22 of boats. it's still being made and will kept getting made quietly. They had to develop alot systems for it and the og models were something completely new. They decommissioned the ships after 15 years of constant moving. What do you want
LCS isn't anywhere near mogging the fuck out of the sea in the way the F22 dominates the air
Big difference
>>LCS isn't anywhere near mogging the fuck out of the sea in the way the F22 dominates the air
That's what they want you to believe. LCS is actually a highspeed death machine with hidden weapons and elite crews. One can take out entire battle groups and no submarine stands a chance. Fear the LCS.
Motherfucke why do fat white trash and Indians hate this thing so much. They have 1 openly being built, another the parts are being set up and it looks like a possible 2 more. That's like 20 of three things built. Just do the most basic research it's still running fuck
.you idiots a Twitter or click bait article is not a source
>They have 1 openly being built
The article touches on that. It's only being built because a Wisconsin democrat senator demanded it be added into the budget so that a Wisconsin shipyard wouldn't lose jobs
Interesting that the one being built is in Alabame then...
Almost like the article is dogshit...
not as dogshit as the """"Littoral"""" """"Combat"""" """"Ship""""
Good to see you so openly admit you were full of shit and have nothing worthwhile to contribute. Big of you to own what a complete failure you are.
at least I didn't give the Chinese an advantage in the Pacific while costing hundreds of billions and dollars.
It is okay to make mistakes but to learn from them, they have to be recognised.
It is not okay to refuse to recognise and learm from mistakes.
>It is not okay to refuse to recognise and learm from mistakes.
Tippity top irony
where ia the irony?
Do you know what that word means?
>where ia the irony?
>It's only being built because a Wisconsin democrat senator demanded it be added into the budget so that a Wisconsin shipyard wouldn't lose jobs
>Interesting that the one being built is in Alabame then...
you are not quoting me btw. Anyways you argue like a woman.
Your organisation committed an conHispanicuous expensive embarrassing failure and denies it while you cheer on this catastrophe.
It would be better to accept mistakes were made and support acknowledgement of the mistakes so reforms can be put in place.
But no, instead we are all to pretend there is no problem and if there is there is no larger problem with military industrial congressional corruption.
your attitude and the incidents mentioned here
are indicative serious problems with the military.
>you are not quoting me btw
x
Some LCS had to be built even after it was "cancelled" while they were looking for something else, and once the long lead items had been ordered. It can yet still be repurposed as MCM, SOF transports, or even CG cutters, PROVIDED there is manpower for them.
Its technical unsuitability as a Perry replacement however is fact and stands starkly when compared to the Constitution class. And it is a definite failure in that sense because it was meant in part at least to be the Navy's Constitutions, before the Constitutions had to be introduced to fill in for the LCS not making the cut.
God you people are so fucking stupid. I can't if you just make up this blatantly false shit or if someone is feeding it to you as you myopically lap it up.
1) prove it's better than the Constitution, fuckhead
2) you don't know fuck all about shipbuilding and contracts so don't even try
Why would I try and prove a thing that I don't think is likely to be, that I never said, and is literally impossible for anyone to know since the Constitution doesn't even exist yet? Are you having a stroke?
Oh so you were just chimping out with nothing to back it, gotcha
Stroke it is.
Holy shit, does your dad work for Austal or something? I’ve never seen someone shill for the dumpster fire that is the LCS this hard before.
the US department of "defense"is so stupid they think covering up a terrible mistake and attacking criticism is how you maintain prestige online.
Christopher Lasch said that nothing succeeds like the image of success. This is the creed of advertisers. However, when that image of success is lost the best thing to do is to own the failure and follow up with changes for success. Yet the morons at the DOD can't have any failure and subsequent reform, so they just fail and fail. The LCS, the hypersonic missiles, the bonhomme richard catching on fire, the lack of recruits, the suicides. The Navy will soon have a Kursk like accident, they already damaged a submarine on the ocean floor in the South China sea
at least one of those posts is not what you think it is, retard
KYS immediately
Aluminum and corrosive (salty) atmospheres do not mix.
It was a flop before it even started.
This was only an issue near the waterjets. Austal had a fix for it, but the USN rejected it because it would have added weight and money, and LCS-Even was overweight and over-budget at the time. So they built the first few ships without the fix, and surprise!--galvanic corrosion. So, they had to pay Austal more money to retrofit the fix in than it would have cost to have done it right in the first place.
There's plenty of blame to go around in this mess.
Thread full of Austal shills. Do better, PrepHole.
If a contractor claims they can do X with Y budget, and fail to deliver, why arent they sued for breach of contract? If that happened, then contractors would realise that lying about what they can deliver is a bad idea.
Because these are R&D, they're being paid to invent something
Ponder that for a moment
Its totally different; there is no finished working product
This. These aren't hard and fast budgets, these are guidelines with often built-in flexibility for inevitable unexpected difficulties. Now, you might have a case when things get really off the mark, like the LCS or the F-35, but it's worth remembering that in both cases the government has a hand in the budget-busting by tacking on additional requirements during the development.
>the F-35
its fucking bamboozling how after all this is done and dusted, the LCA will still be a boondoggle 2 orders of magnitude lower than the F-35 debacle. Meanwhile $100b in desal would solve the Western US water shortage permanently and $100b in phase 4 nuclear power plants would permanently cut fuel prices by 30% and hit emissions targets 10 years early and you can't even get that shit an honorable mention in the federal budget
>the F-35 debacle
opinion discarded
>$100b in desal would solve the Western US water shortage permanently
What, you gonna pump that shit thousands of miles from the Pacific or the Gulf to help the states missing water from the Colorado? What a fucking moron.
its ~600 miles from phoenix to sandiego.
if california could rely more on desal, the colorado could be allocated more to AZ.
anyway he is right. We spend too much money on killing illiterate brown people, who actually ARE thousands of miles away from us. And we dont spend enough on improving the lives of our people.
Anyway, a aqueduct from the missouri river to arizona would also work and would actually benefit the american people instead of pissing money into blackrock's shareholders. which is why projects like that dont happen.
I will probably regret asking this, but
How does blackrock profit from a lack of transcontinental aqueducts?
https://www.blackrock.com/us/individual/products/227583/blackrock-strategic-municipal-opportunitiesa-fund
Scroll to holdings and select all holdings there’s a few that are applicable in there.
He's schizophrenic and doesn't realize elevation exists lol bro thinks we can easily pump 40 million people water up 500 feet elevation accords 100 miles on several branches branches of pipeline not built in California.
And
He thinks it's not going to fuck up the fishing on the coast. It's silly. It would create a giant dead zone off the Cali coast then lead to massive desertification meaning more water would be needed leading to just deserts with pipes only. He's.. schizophrenic.
And also
The Cali ocean current keeps California from burning up. It's cold water. So you desal cold water kick it back into the land and it comes back way hotter and that current goes north to sound. Meaning the entire coast gets way hotter water with constantly changing salt amounts with random run off.
Meaning Cali turns full desert and the coast fishing dies..
But he will say it's the garden gnomes.
do you not understand how big the ocean is?
actually the size of life sustaining oceans is relatively small compared to the absolute scale of the ocean, anything that affects the coast will have disproportionate effects on ocean life. not to mention that the absolute size of the ocean is of little help to fishing in california, the fish from the bay of bengal isn't going to go on some sort of schizo vacation to california just to be fished up by american sailors.
I think above poster was a troll, though i respect you for the time you took explaining life to him.
In addition to this I can add that waters of different saliniities and temperature mix very poorly and your warm, saline water will stay here.
Israel is starting to see the impact of all their desalination along their coast.
All fish stocks are trending northward as global wRming increases. Desal won't make a dent in that. The only environmental downsides silk be if someone puts one in a saltwater marsh or something.
Its hurting Israel so badly they just broke ground on another plant and will be generating water surpluses in 10 years, and the water table underground has reached per industrialization levels
Maybe they should allocate less fucking retired boomers with lawns and swimming pools to Arizona deserts. Another thing to consider might be planning entire water use policy of entire Colorado river basin on something other than wettest 30 years in last millennium. It was first 30 year period in actual measurement history, but now we know it also happens to be very abnormal 30 year period when it comes climate. Last 20 years might be abnormally dry period, but effectively permanent water use policy is based on opposite of that.
The Colorado river supplies roughly 1/3 of the water to cities in Southern California. If they had plenty of water in SoCal wouldn’t Colorado be able to keep more water in Colorado? Or does logic not factor in to your arguments?
NTA but desalination could easily solve all of California's water problems. Israel does indeed export water, desal is so fucking cheap. If California then completely gave up on drawing anything for the river then yeah that'd be a huge boost.
Desal is only "cheap" in Israel because of their enthusiasm for nuclear and solar energy. Getting the US public to agree to those kinds of energy projects at the scale needed to supply desalinated water to ~40m people is a political impossibility in the US. However if the CO River continues to dry up and all the cities that rely on it for drinking water face a crisis, public opinion might turn.
there are 2.6 million miles of oil pipeline in the US alone you retards.
and it's not ONE GIANT DESAL PLANT in venice beach, it's 50 small ones all the way up and down the coast.
or 200 even smaller ones. minimal effect on the local ocean.
but the facts are plain. we could spend the money on $300+m planes that will never dogfight in their entire existence, or we could spend it on solving problems that affect everyone
Now ask yourself why the Government can't pay for this out of the budget allocation for shit like this
>blackrock blackrock blackrock
Blackrock holds shares for you in the same way banks hold money for you, dipshit
>LCS has been sailing a long time
Tell me moar about its combat capabilities and why it's better than the Constitution-class project
Yikes
The LCS made sense if you didn't think about it too much.
Never a good sign.
It was an incredibly progressive program that was outright sabotaged by Congress.
Every single politician involved should be investigated and made to pay out of their own pocket for the rest of their life.
The navy should have just made frigates and maybe a new model battleship with long range guns just to mog on thirdies.
You can fit an armament that slightly outclasses the Independence-class on a little 250t boat 😀 Just hide among the island's and pop out to missile spam, U in the littoral's lmao
>I was wondering what the shipfags make of the affair.
disgust that the navy has fallen so far
sadness that china is catching up
hope that we will open some more fucking dockyards in the future
assurance that however much technology the chinese steal from us and old soviet archives they're still fundamentally retarded
They are currently making one under projected cost, have another being assembled and two more being preset.
I know. It's weird. You have to spend money on research and prototypes to build new ships before you can mass produce them. Just wow.
Wowwwei
Oh my god
They retired a shit after 15 years of constant usage that was a prototype that was built to fail in 5 years but it lasted 16
Total failure. It's all over. The f 35 total failure. Falcon 9 total failure. Starlink failure. Starship failure. It's all over man china got us beat 🙁 better give all the white women to short brown ugly men in Asia:(
Erm... it was supposed to last 20-40 years, ships that cost half a billion dollars aren't supposed to last just 5 years.
You conveniently omitted the other issue, though, which is that LCS failed to perform any of the missions that it was intended to perform.
LCS is flawed design on conceptual level. Most modules intended for LCS don't work, but it doesn't really matter because modularity doesn't work. It is frigate sized glorified fucking corvette that sacrifices lot of actual combat performance for gotta go fast. Automation to reduce crew complement sounds nice on paper, but in reality it goes to level where damage control capability of LCS is compromised.
Everything come out SC-21 is retarded, but hey, at least they didn't go forward with arsenal fucking ship.
>It is frigate sized
>like half the displacement
>almost a third of the crew
>not even factoring in that ships have universally grown across the board in the last 50 years since it was built
What ship was braindamageanon comparing it to because it clearly wasn't the OHP? It wouldn't just be that he was blindly parrotting things he read once online...could it be?
3000 something ton displacement was pretty normal for frigates even in 90's, both LCS classes are about 3500 tons fully loaded. Ship sizes have ballooned like crazy in last two or three decades, but that doesn't make LCS any less retarded. Replacement for OPH should have always been properly armed frigate with normal about 30kt top speed, one done in 2000's might be bigger than OPH.
>maybe sorta like PT Boats or S-Boats that sorta sucked at their intended mission of being 'giant slayers'
Motor torpedo boats were coastal defense assets that weren't supposed to operate halfway across the world from home port like LCS. Those were actual littoral combat vessels.
>3000 something ton displacement was pretty normal for frigates even in 90's
Not for US frigates, which is what we are clearly talking about here. It may surprise you to learn that not ever nation uses the classifications in the same way; shocking, I know.
>half the displacement
>Perry: 4200 tons
>Freedom: 3500 tons
Why lie?
> Independence: 2,543 tons
Sorry, I barely even consider the Freedom class, its so trash. You're right, I should have check it as well.
Still - Its smaller when it should be bigger due to sizes increasing over time.
Now consider the Temptress/Action class ships. They serve the same role (roughly) and are as equally removed tonnage-wise but it makes a lot more sense in this direction due to size inflation.
>Why lie?
Just so its clear, I'll repeat: It wasn't an intentional lie, I just messed up. I was going off the Indi and didn't check the Freedom.
>I'll repeat: It wasn't an intentional lie
I think it is unintentional mental retardation.
>Displacement 2,543 tons light, 3,422 tons full
Not related to the freedom itself but Marinette Marine absolutely butfucked me with a predatory apprenticeship deal.
still SOUNDS like sound idea.
maybe sorta like PT Boats or S-Boats that sorta sucked at their intended mission of being 'giant slayers' with fish but good for lots of other missions. IDK.
Maybe redo designs from Clean Sheet and detune everything for better durability.
Missile boats are a thing in many small navies like the Israeli. You can pack Joint Strike Missiles, Gabriel 5s or RBS-15s on "little" 250-500t boats for anti-ship, and RIM-116s or something for AD, and some ASW torpedoes.
They tend to have very short range, and terrible crew amenities (which is considered acceptable due to the short-term nature of their missions).
yeah, better suited for conscript navies who only have to serve 6-12 months on them. fits the profile of big threats on small budgets :--D
The original concept was called StreetFighter, and it called for a family of 500t corvettes operating from ports or tenders. The idea was that they would essentially be like floating F-18s; if they took a serious hit, the emphasis was on rescuing the crew, rather than on saving the ships. This was intended to compensate for the improved accuracy of modern ASMs.
Big Navy hated the concept, and twisted it into a pretzel, adding in requirements like the ability to self-deploy across the Pacific. This required a lot of fuel, which meant a much larger ship... which clashed with the speed requirement (50kts+) that was barely achievable with a 500t corvette but not at all with a 4000t frigate-sized ship. And *so much* was sacrificed in the ship designs in order to just break 40kts.
And because there wasn't enough money to go around, the new ship got mixed in with the very necessary replacements for all of the *existing* smaller warship classes that were getting too old and too expensive to maintain: the Perry class with their ASW and light AAW, the Osprey and Avenger classes with their MIW, and the Cyclone class with their speedboat-popping and SOCOM support. This was supposed to be accomplished with swappable modules... except the modules took years to develop and never worked right.
And I haven't even touched the "minimal manning" craze.
>The original concept was called StreetFighter
The LCS concept predates the Streetfighter idea; this dogshit myth needs to die.
Streetfighter pre-dated 9/11. LCS came afterwards. Where do you get the idea that it was the other way around?
LCS was conceptualized for JMAG in '95. Streetfighter is from late 90s.
Details? I've never heard that claim before.
First google return, should get you started
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2012/september/birth-littoral-combat-ship
Thanks for the link. It sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole; CAPT Powers definitely had a different and useful viewpoint on the history. After reading the whole thing, I still kinda question the lineage of the "LCS" that was envisioned in JMAG compared to the requirements that were later laid down. In particular, the JMAG vessel valued speed less than "warfighting capability", emphasized stealth characteristics, and carried medium-range SAMs and ASCMs, none of which were true for PEO LCS's requirements. It feels a bit like the '90s NGFS requirement that led to a number of concepts, but only resulted in DDG-1000, which totally botched the execution.
I won't deny that the USN had a big littoral fetish throughout the '90s; it was a product of the strategic and budget environments, where basic SLOC mastery was undervalued and helping the Army win land wars was valued at a premium. I would certainly like to see more inside baseball on how LCS (and DDG-1000) wound up with the exact requirements that they did; in particular, the reasoning behind the hard speed requirement for LCS, and why Standards were dropped from both designs in favor of nothing but RAM+57mm for defense.
>why Standards were dropped from both designs in favor of nothing but RAM+57mm for defense.
The "initial" ships were never the intended loadout, they were always going to be up-gunned. They took an approach more like what you would see in aerspace where the first 4 off the line (2 of each class) were intended more as prototypes or test platforms. But that doesn't sync up with the "EVERYTHING ABOUT LCS BAD AND WRONG" narrative so it gets left out.
Also, no one likes to talk about the active defenses because its not as cool as gun and rockets.
> I would certainly like to see more inside baseball on how LCS (and DDG-1000) wound up with the exact requirements that they did
Its out there but you have to dig hard, there is a LOT of clickbait sensational doomsaying that just mindless repeats the same points in a mass woozle effect.
>In particular, the JMAG vessel valued speed less than "warfighting capability"
>and carried medium-range SAMs and ASCM
Recall that the LCS program was coming together in the early days of VLS conception. They thought the LCS was going to be fully interoperable in the "VLS ecosystem." Instead, it got left out on the low end and thus never got anything more than Hellfires. Thats 24 "miniVLS" cells that basically got critically undergunned, which is a huge portion of the capability on ships this small.
>emphasized stealth characteristics
I don't think that most people realize it but the Indi class is one of the most low-ob ship on the seas, even more so when you consider its size. But that would again be inconvenient to the narrative that they are useless and nothing but deathtraps.
>I still kinda question the lineage of the "LCS" that was envisioned in JMAG compared to the requirements that were later laid down.
You're right that its not 100% 1:1 but I think its an easy 90%, straight from the mouth of a guy who was there and important to the process. Its not really that unusual that things would get a little altered as a few years past and more eye (and hands) got on it.
>CAPT Powers
Are we capitalizing Captain for a reason or just odd formatting from a paste job?
>Thanks for the link. It sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole
No problem. Hope it was enlightening.
One of these days I need to track back down the report they released on the modules and where they all went wrong (spoiler: most of it was the Freedom class repeatedly fucking up); its a really illuminating read that I don't think most people are even aware of
>The speed requirement came in when LCS was combined with Streetfighter
Absolute retard
>Are we capitalizing Captain for a reason
Sorry, old habits from the old days. Used to be, ranks were abbreviated and capitalized, although that might have been more of an Army thing than a Navy thing. I have no idea what folks do these days.
I'd really love to see more details on the stuff we laymen didn't hear about at the time, if you can manage to dig them up. There are some old sites out there like gCaptain or Cdr Salamander that would almost certainly publish a history/lessons learned on LCS.
BTW, by "VLS ecosystem", do you mean using NETFIRES as the basis for a VLS, or were there solid plans for adding Mk 41s from the beginning (as opposed to the FF variants that weren't offered until well after the program was in trouble)? One of the things that I objected the most to back in the beginning was the lack of a Mk 41. Even just a pair of them would have completely changed LCS's ability to prosecute targets without being almost completely dependent upon the helo. Heck, ESSM now has basically the same range as the Perry's old SM1-MR, and VL-ASROC, although short-legged, is a decent replacement for triple-tubes.
>by "VLS ecosystem"
My diction, I can't remember all the correct acronyms and phrases in my dotage.
>do you mean using NETFIRES as the basis for a VLS
Assuming you mean the NLOS-LS, that came later as an easy "fix" when they realized they weren't gonna be able to get full VLS (mk41) cells on there.
>or were there solid plans for adding Mk 41s from the beginning
Early on, there wasn't a mk41 yet or at least all the dimensions/requirements for it hadn't been finalized. There was also some intent to have different "sizes" but have them all compatible to a degree. You can see the other side of this with what would become the mk57s on the Zummies which are basically "supersized" standard mk41s. There are also other weird sizes like the mk48 and mk56.
But somewhere they settled on what would become the mk41s and got rid of the modular up and down sizing (fun how this idea was ig in the oughts and failed hard everywhere).Then they realized that the LCS wasn't going to be able to fit that in the initial design (at this point well into first production). Shortly, there after that's where NLOS-LS came in to try and fill that gap/oversight but then the Army dumped the program and the Navy was so strapped they weren't gonna fund it all themselves just for the LCS (which people had always been grumpy about and would only grow from here).
>(as opposed to the FF variants that weren't offered until well after the program was in trouble)
If you go looking Lockheed was selling the Israels on a version of the Freedom in the early 00's for them and it was supposed to have mk41s because at that time it wasn't clear yet that it wasn't gonna work. Shortly after that became clear the Israelis passed. And then yes latter came the larger "frigate" LCS idea which was supposed to get mk41s but we all know where that went.
>got rid of the modular up and down sizing (fun how this idea was big in the oughts and failed hard everywhere)
Isn't that basically SYLVER? That one has several different lengths (A35, A43, A50, A70, numbers being length in meters) and can be mixed on the same ship.
>being almost completely dependent upon the helo
Its not a dependency, its an intended feature. You're fine to disagree with the choice, but having that helo was very much an intention and they knew they were trading off to get it. And it makes a LOT more sense than VLS for littoral warfare if you had to pick one (not that its that easy). Fun fact, LCSs are certified to land V-22s.
>ESSM now has basically the same range as the Perry's old SM1-MR
I don't think its a useful comparison to do between cannister launch and open mmount, least not when talking about what a seaframe can field.
>VL-ASROC, although short-legged, is a decent replacement for triple-tubes.
Don't get me started on the Navy seemingly ignorning surface and aerial ASW.
Dumbass
I don't disagree with the helo. In fact, I feel that helos are almost a hard requirement for anything bigger than a corvette. And I did always appreciate the ability (especially with Indy) to land V-22s, which offered a "lilypad" option for extending the range of 'phibs (plus lots of SOCOM possibilities).
What I disagree with is being completely reliant upon a single helo. There's a reason most warships, including the Perrys, carried two, plus ship-mounted systems. Downtime for Seahawks can be fairly significant, and they can also be limited by heavy weather. One plus some drones never seemed adequate to me, especially with how the Fire Scout program has been run. And the ship itself needed some ability to fight without the helo, which a couple Mk 41s plus some Harpoon/JSM cans would have solved.
Now, if you argue that LCS is supposed to operate in squadrons and thus there should always be at least one helo available for ops, that would make some sense, but I don't recall seeing much in the way of attempts to operate LCS in squadrons.
>I don't think its a useful comparison to do between cannister launch and open mmount
Could you elaborate on this? I feel like I'm missing something really important, here.
>Don't get me started on the Navy seemingly ignorning surface and aerial ASW.
A VLS SeaLance--or even just a VL-ASROC with a bigger motor, produced in sufficient numbers for every CRUDES to carry a couple--would make such an obvious difference in an emergency that it makes me want to cry.
>What I disagree with is being completely reliant upon a single helo.
Its the future gramps. Drones are force multipliers, esp when you get 2 for the price of 1
Please remind me exactly what VTOL drone options are currently available to the USN, which has spent the last 20-odd years pretending to be interested in drones, but never really doing much with them (see: X-45C, MQ-8C). Also, note that the USN is primarily operating at ranges at which light quadcopters are useless for anything beyond VBSS support, and needs heavyweight drones in order to carry the heavyweight payloads needed to prosecute ships and subs at naval combat ranges.
In short, as far as Big Navy is concerned, it's not the future yet, and they're not really all that interested in catching up to it.
>if you had to pick one
Nice weasel words
Now tell us why we had to pick one and not both.
The heyday for littoral combat vessels was prior to the proliferation of aircraft. The fact much more capable ships got sunk in Ukraine by drones reiterates that in a shooting war, the LCS would be the first thing to sink.
That they were poorly-designed from the start might have been for the better, as it means no crew has to go down with these deathtraps.
Maybe the idea of a small ship armed with lasers slaved to a tender like the Freedom could be retooled as an anti-drone/missile screener once the tech matures.
Doesn't the Freedom have a laser weapon and SeaRAM? That would at least let it swat drones out of the sky pretty effectively.
>Doesn't the Freedom have a laser weapon
No? Where did you get this idea from?
>and SeaRAM?
Both LCS classes do.
>That would at least let it swat drones out of the sky pretty effectively.
Plus the Hellfires plus the two 30mm chainguns. Its literally designed to take on smaller swarm attackers so anyone claiming that drones are its natural counter just instantly out themselves as entirely uninformed.
Let's go with I was completely wrong on the figures and am the biggest retard in the entire world now and forever.
...its still smaller than an OHP while it should be bigger if the original comparison held any water. Do you want to address that? Or any of the other points I raised? Or are you conceding that I was accurate it pointing them out and have resorted to just nitpicking?
Dumbass, so many parroted myths
>Let's go with I was completely wrong
Nice that you can admit that you are wrong.
>...its still smaller than an OHP while it should be bigger if the original comparison held any water. Do you want to address that?
Both LCS classes are pretty close to displacement of frigates of not that long time ago from the time design process started. Yet, for combat capability those are bit more capable than usual corvettes. Those are as big as those are because two requirements. Long range and high speed. High speed requires big engines and more fuel. Long range requires more fuel. Two together requires even more fuel. This how glorified corvette became roughly frigate sized, lot closer to a frigate than typical corvette in size.
When it comes to the role of LCS. The idea US Navy had about replacing OPH-class frigates in 90's that there will be no direct successor, but older less capable destroyers would be relegated to escort roles and lower priority patrol roles frigates used to have. LCS was supposed to be modular, mission configurable and take over roles of all kinds of smaller warships from mine sweepers, ISR ships, transport ships for special forces, anti-surface warfare to anti-submarine warfare. The anti-surface and anti-submarine mission sets are set squarely on traditional frigates territory. So in reality it became de facto frigate replacement.
Yes, it is it might more capable that OPH for anti-surface mission or anti-submarine mission, but not at same time as those are two different mission modules. So it isn't a general purpose frigate. From one perspective it modest half frigate when equipped with anti-surface or anti-submarine warfare module. But as it very small for a modern frigate, that gimps its sensor capabilities when compared modern frigates. This why I call LCS a glorified corvette.
Whole concept for LCS is silly and USN going for real modern frigate with Constellation-class.
>doesn't understand hypotheticals
Hey, let's talk about your breakfast yesterday
>Both LCS classes are pretty close to displacement of frigates of not that long time ago from the time design process started
No
>Yet, for combat capability those are bit more capable than usual corvettes.
No
>Those are as big as those are because two requirements. Long range and high speed
No
>This how glorified corvette became roughly frigate sized, lot closer to a frigate than typical corvette in size.
No
>When it comes to the role of LCS. The idea US Navy had about replacing OPH-class frigates in 90's that there will be no direct successor
No
>take over roles of all kinds of smaller warships from mine sweepers, ISR ships, transport ships for special forces, anti-surface warfare to anti-submarine warfare.
Incredibly misrepresentative wording, highly suspect you are parroting something you heard without understanding the original concepts. Congrats on it not being a "no" though.
>The anti-surface and anti-submarine mission sets are set squarely on traditional frigates territory. So in reality it became de facto frigate replacement.
The anti-surface and anti-submarine mission sets are set squarely on traditional frigates territory. So in reality it became de facto frigate replacement.
>The anti-surface and anti-submarine mission sets are set squarely on traditional frigates territory. So in reality it became de facto frigate replacement.
No
>Yes, it is it might more capable that OPH for anti-surface mission or anti-submarine mission,
No
>So it isn't a general purpose frigate.
Glad we agree but funny how that is all you want to talk about.
>From one perspective it modest half frigate when equipped with anti-surface or anti-submarine warfare module.
No
>that gimps its sensor capabilities when compared modern frigates.
No
>This why I call LCS a glorified corvette.
Then why are you talking about frigates
I have asked 3 times for you to engage with a single one of my points and you haven't even attempted to do so once. All you get is non-answer answers
Wikipedia lists a 150 kW laser as standard armament.
They tested an experimental weapon 3 years ago on one ship and then unistalled it. We haven't heard dick all about it since. It was more a test of the weapon than of integrating it into the class. Wikipedia can be editted by anybody, don't treat it as gospel.
It was a mission profile already obsolete by the time the 21st century hit. But even under its constraints the LCS sucked:
>Fighting in the littoral theater dominated by increasingly sophisticated shore defenses while having no protection: the shittiest coastal artillery could pop either class like a balloon with a 500-dollar shell
>Barely seagoing with undersized crew making it unable to perform maneuvers with the rest of the fleet
>x3 times the crew-size of a cutter
>AA suite is identically anemic to the destroyers that were sunk in the Falklands, would get murdered by an F-5 looking at it funny
>None of its modules solve any of these problems
>In fact, both were so flimsy they couldn't structurally support themselves and warped at sea like a badly-made wedding cake, suggesting inadequate compartmentalization and internal reinforcement
Wait, so what is the problem with LCS? They tried to be Jack of all trades and failed?
Neocons thought they should build ships for killing 3rd worlders instead of china.
So the mission was stupid from the very start.
But then the weapons were broken.
and the engines were broken.
and the trasmissions were broken.
and the sonar was broken.
and the crewing was broken.
and the hulls were broken too.
an aqueduct from any of several wyoming rivers and lakes to the greenriver would be relatively painless.
In short, yes
>what is the problem with LCS? They tried to be Jack of all trades and failed?
yes, we already had littoral combat ships they are called Coast Guard cutters but the blue water USN decided to try and reinvent the wheel and failed on every level, while CS cutters still have the most active duty service time of any naval vessel in the fleets
forgot pic.
This is the USCGC Dependable, so named because it is, y'know, dependable
>Program name is Littoral Combat Ship
>Ends up with two concurrent designs of Global Reach Fast Oceanic Auxiliary Ship (with half of the Auxilliary mission-specific equipment lacking, on top of that)
>People in power who signed for this are somehow surprised it doesn't do combat in littoral space very well
IT1 here, (or I was, got out in 2019). I was stationed at NAS JAX and spent a shit ton of time at Mayport, I was a EKMS/KMI Manager and routinely floated around and did the bidding of our local NSA overlords out of the nearby NCTS station that fed into NCTAMS LANT. From what I can tell, it was an absolute nightmare working on the LCS at Mayport.
>Deployment schedule and even underways were shots in the fucking dark and sometime the crew got 24 hours of notice before going out for months. Which is fucking wild if you've been in the fleet.
>LCS out of Mayport were CONSTANTLY getting tasked to 4th fleet ops but the communication between senior officers seems to have been through fucking morse code or something. I have heard numerous stories of LCS sailing to link up with 4th fleet assets at interdiction points and nobody was there. Every CO gets told to port or move somewhere else and somehow they'd forget to tell the fucking LCS CO.
>Terrible contractor support where the contractors hated the crew and vice versa. Drive shafts and other critical stuff was always breaking and there'd be weird tribunal's where they'd "blamestorm" who's fault it was. And then it wouldn't get fixed properly for weeks at a time.
>Mayport leadership also fucking hated the LCS program or at least that's the vibe the crew got because they were ALWAYS targeted with spot inspections that would be publicized and used to shit talk to program.
>My good friend was an SWO on a Patrol Craft and he said he thought he had it bad but spending 3 weeks on LCS was like a nightmare of just convoluted politicking that made life miserable for the enlisted sailors onboard.
Fun Times!
More evidence for my hypothesis:
LCS was a method for neocons to intentionally sabotage the navy, to make it only capable of fighting iran.
So the navy intentionally counter-sabotaged the LCS to force the creation of a new blue water ship instead.
I think there's a little more to it than that, since the frigate winner was the FREMM. I can't see a way to that being anything other than a giant slap in the face for the US contractors who are so used to home-field advantage their designs never lose. Somebody must've fucked up big time for it to merit a foreign design winning out.
LCS originated as an idea out of the NAvy wargaming and seemingly to give itself purpose after the collapse of USSR. 9/11 was just the confirmation they needed to keep going that way.
what the fuck is that thing he's firing
it's like a slow motion rocket sled
homebrew recoil-compensated shoulder-fired black powder "rocket" launcher