There is some speculation in Romania that we will buy two of these retired LCS, to use in the role of corvettes/OPVs. You figure these would work better in the Black Sea with Russia on the other side, than they would for the US against China?
There is no solution for, not just the Navy, but for DoD as a whole, but to shut down the services a piece at a time, permit no one who prospered under the current system even through the door of DoD 2.0 (or the War Department and Department of the Navy),and rebuild almost from scratch.
Absolutely sell or even give them away to an allied/partner navy. Perhaps to the Philippines for use in the South China Sea, or Mexico and Columbia to interdict drug smugglers.
Salute to CDR Salamander for his excellent efforts on bring these incidents to light.
Department of Defense material & equipment acquisition process has stopped being about providing the best product to the warfighter and has turned into providing the best process to whet the beaks along the way. Not only regarding the LCS program. There are numerous examples of the military boondoggles.
This has created a bloated expenditure system that helps civilian defense company executives and politicians acquire a vacation home on the lake, but the dysfunctional practice is to the extreme detriment to our military members and national defense overall.
"The entire manning CONOPS was founded on the abuse of Sailors - “How long can we work these people non-stop until they burn out?” - and unworkable PPT-thick understanding of how you can have ships only manned by experienced Sailors. "
That was certainly the peacetime CONOPS. I suspect the wartime CONOPS was that the overworked, sleep deprived crew was one-and-done expendable. At least they were honest in calling it a seaframe. The complement, as orginally proposed or currently modified, is likely insufficient to fight the ship and preventing a mission kill from becoming a hulk on the sea floor. Three hundred was the complement for a similar tonnage Sumner, Gearing, or Fletcher. Losing 30 crew on an EP-3 to the enemy is the cost of doing business in combat. They are airframes after all. Lose three hundred crew an people will notice - but you can call it a seaframe.
It seems easy to diagnose as I head back to my 50th at Navy tomorrow. The world has radically changed but we continue to use the same Power Point logic of the 1990s. Our senior officers are trained early not to stray too far from the herd. This leads to one disaster after another and mountains of "lessons learned" but never corrected.
Most likely, probably not. Maybe if the initial cost was right (i.e. free), and we helped as part of a foreign aid package. Based on this GAO report https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-22-105387.pdf the annual cost to run one seaframe is roughly $70 million per year. Ouch!
does anybody believe that $7b opportunity cost? If so, it's only labor, and they wrote down the hull values.
What is missing for me in the decommissioning story is the part about how we are going to make a reef out of one, and zip tie every member of the LCS PM/PEO team to the anchor chain.
Some years ago we good CDR Sal said something to the effect we have them we need to use them. We’re retiring PC’s in Bahrain. Despite all the issues posted here for years I think it’s a terrible decision to not at least put freedom variants in Bahrain - visibility matters. What about anti piracy patrols in the 5th Fleet Somali area of operations?
Gotta use them in low threat areas and move more DDG’s to the Pacific Fleet.
I went by Bremerton in early August and it was jarring to see LCS 2 and 4 right on the road where Kitty Hawk and Independence were when I visited my son there in 2016-2018
"...well-meaning people assumed that the Navy that won the Cold War had enough institutional knowledge and inertia of excellence to properly develop the fleet of the future."
Oops, indeed, Commander. Inertia applies to bodies at rest and those in straight line motion. In the case of the LCS it was a well-fed cash cow creating a cow patty. It was met with a resistive outside force (call it: a b_tch-slap of grounded reality) and thence became a hot steaming pile.
So wasn’t the original sales job on this conceptual ppt project “Big ships are too valuable to push into The Littorals, and that’s the only war the Navy will ever see again because (wishes), so we need less expensive hulls, which means smaller, which means all the toys won’t fit, which means swappable toys modules, and lots of hulls means lots of bodies, which we don’t and won’t have, so minimal manning, and blue/gold...” and so on, with everything rooting back to “push the fleet into The Littorals otherwise the Navy is useless” as the underlying premise.
But now we are facing a light blue water naval adversary with aspirations to dark blue.
Doesn’t that mean the folks who are supposed to be figuring out the next war are the real root cause of this fiasco?
I have to chuckle. Why say “Good bye” when we never really said “Hello”? Evidently, we did not enunciate clearly and they mistook “Hell no!” for “Hello.”
Hopefully they don't f#,k up the Constellations with improvements. But that probably won't happen.
There is some speculation in Romania that we will buy two of these retired LCS, to use in the role of corvettes/OPVs. You figure these would work better in the Black Sea with Russia on the other side, than they would for the US against China?
There is no solution for, not just the Navy, but for DoD as a whole, but to shut down the services a piece at a time, permit no one who prospered under the current system even through the door of DoD 2.0 (or the War Department and Department of the Navy),and rebuild almost from scratch.
Absolutely sell or even give them away to an allied/partner navy. Perhaps to the Philippines for use in the South China Sea, or Mexico and Columbia to interdict drug smugglers.
Salute to CDR Salamander for his excellent efforts on bring these incidents to light.
Department of Defense material & equipment acquisition process has stopped being about providing the best product to the warfighter and has turned into providing the best process to whet the beaks along the way. Not only regarding the LCS program. There are numerous examples of the military boondoggles.
This has created a bloated expenditure system that helps civilian defense company executives and politicians acquire a vacation home on the lake, but the dysfunctional practice is to the extreme detriment to our military members and national defense overall.
Will anyone be held responsible for all the waste?
Not likely, as they are all retired by now.
"The entire manning CONOPS was founded on the abuse of Sailors - “How long can we work these people non-stop until they burn out?” - and unworkable PPT-thick understanding of how you can have ships only manned by experienced Sailors. "
That was certainly the peacetime CONOPS. I suspect the wartime CONOPS was that the overworked, sleep deprived crew was one-and-done expendable. At least they were honest in calling it a seaframe. The complement, as orginally proposed or currently modified, is likely insufficient to fight the ship and preventing a mission kill from becoming a hulk on the sea floor. Three hundred was the complement for a similar tonnage Sumner, Gearing, or Fletcher. Losing 30 crew on an EP-3 to the enemy is the cost of doing business in combat. They are airframes after all. Lose three hundred crew an people will notice - but you can call it a seaframe.
It seems easy to diagnose as I head back to my 50th at Navy tomorrow. The world has radically changed but we continue to use the same Power Point logic of the 1990s. Our senior officers are trained early not to stray too far from the herd. This leads to one disaster after another and mountains of "lessons learned" but never corrected.
Most likely, probably not. Maybe if the initial cost was right (i.e. free), and we helped as part of a foreign aid package. Based on this GAO report https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-22-105387.pdf the annual cost to run one seaframe is roughly $70 million per year. Ouch!
does anybody believe that $7b opportunity cost? If so, it's only labor, and they wrote down the hull values.
What is missing for me in the decommissioning story is the part about how we are going to make a reef out of one, and zip tie every member of the LCS PM/PEO team to the anchor chain.
Pour encourager les autres
Some years ago we good CDR Sal said something to the effect we have them we need to use them. We’re retiring PC’s in Bahrain. Despite all the issues posted here for years I think it’s a terrible decision to not at least put freedom variants in Bahrain - visibility matters. What about anti piracy patrols in the 5th Fleet Somali area of operations?
Gotta use them in low threat areas and move more DDG’s to the Pacific Fleet.
I went by Bremerton in early August and it was jarring to see LCS 2 and 4 right on the road where Kitty Hawk and Independence were when I visited my son there in 2016-2018
"...well-meaning people assumed that the Navy that won the Cold War had enough institutional knowledge and inertia of excellence to properly develop the fleet of the future."
Oops, indeed, Commander. Inertia applies to bodies at rest and those in straight line motion. In the case of the LCS it was a well-fed cash cow creating a cow patty. It was met with a resistive outside force (call it: a b_tch-slap of grounded reality) and thence became a hot steaming pile.
Good reads for all ...
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-238sp
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL32665/357
10 years too late.
So wasn’t the original sales job on this conceptual ppt project “Big ships are too valuable to push into The Littorals, and that’s the only war the Navy will ever see again because (wishes), so we need less expensive hulls, which means smaller, which means all the toys won’t fit, which means swappable toys modules, and lots of hulls means lots of bodies, which we don’t and won’t have, so minimal manning, and blue/gold...” and so on, with everything rooting back to “push the fleet into The Littorals otherwise the Navy is useless” as the underlying premise.
But now we are facing a light blue water naval adversary with aspirations to dark blue.
Doesn’t that mean the folks who are supposed to be figuring out the next war are the real root cause of this fiasco?
I have to chuckle. Why say “Good bye” when we never really said “Hello”? Evidently, we did not enunciate clearly and they mistook “Hell no!” for “Hello.”