Littoral Combat Ships (LCS)

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its newest independence-variant littoral combat ship, USS Jackson (LCS 6). The ship honors the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which was named for the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson. The new ship is not equipped with a traditional propeller; instead it uses water jets to for propulsion making it faster and easier to maneuver especially in shallow water.
The Department of Defense said this about the new ship, “Jackson is a fast, agile, focused-mission platform designed for operation in near-shore environments yet capable of open-ocean operation. It is designed to defeat asymmetric ‘anti-access’ threats such as mines, quiet diesel submarines, and fast surface craft.

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Jackson is the third in its class of littoral combat ships and will crew approximately 50, although will accommodate an additional 35 if necessary. Initial construction began in 2011. Her permanent assignment has not been released by the military, but immediately,

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If you see a chief swabbing the deck or are tugging in the ship's mooring lines alongside your division officer, chances are you're on a littoral combat ship.

While some of these elements can be found on board smaller ships like coastal patrol ships and minesweepers, the do-it-yourself ethos of LCS sailors stands in stark contrast to the rigid hierarchy in the surface Navy, where enlisted bus officer's dirty dishes and clean up their staterooms.

Consider the multiple roles of Electronics Technician 1st Class (SW) David Miller. His primary job is keeping communications networks, data links and electronic navigation systems running. He's a line handler during boat launches and recoveries, which can occur a few times a day. And he's the "hot suit man" on the helicopter crash and salvage team — a job that requires him to dress in a flashy suit built to withstand the inferno of a helo's wreckage.

“We're different," said Cmdr. Ken Bridgewater, the commanding officer of crew 104. "We're different in that we leverage technology. But in order to successfully do that, you have to have the proper training so when you show up on day one, you are a value added to the crew. We don't really have a lot of time for on-the-job training, you have to show up ready to go."

Just how different LCS' crew operates became apparent during a five-day journey from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Norfolk, Virginia, all part of crew 104's trip to sail the ship from shipbuilder Marinette Marine based in Wisconsin to Mayport, Florida, where they'll hand it off to crew 108. Milwaukee is the third of the Freedom-class littoral combat ships.

Across the fleet, sailors do more than just their rate — such as firefighting, seamanship and first aid. But on LCS, the ultra-lean manning creates a kind of super-sailor, where crewmembers take on jobs out of their rate and above their pay grade.

Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Renee Hotchkiss, who is aboard with Milwaukee’s oncoming crew 108, acts as her crew's "Doc" during sick calls and as a safety observer during hazardous evolutions. She also stands watch on the bridge and is working towardbecoming a qualified junior officer of the deck.

Her assistant, the "baby doc" who is typically a junior hospital corpsman, is instead a fire controlman fist class who can treat wounds and set-up intravenous drips — while still keeping the rolling airframe missile system working.

Standard evolutions frequently are all-hands affairs. Deliveries of food, mail and parts by helicopter may require half of a 330-person cruiser crew. For the Milwaukee's crew of 57, it takes every soul to hump ammo to the magazine and boxes of lettuce to the refrigeration decks.

"On LCS, every evolution is an all-hands evolution," said Lt. j.g. William Foster, the first lieutenant in charge of deck division. "For something like an [underway replenishment], it takes the entire crew. Flight quarters, same thing, it takes the whole crew."

Watch positions are also consolidated for the pint-sized crew. Senior Chief Damage Controlman(SW) Tommy Thompson is crew 104’s “top snipe" and the damage control assistant, a post held on other ships by a second-tour division officer. He stands engineering officer of the watch from a remote console on the bridge and controls the the propulsion plant, the auxiliary equipment (such as the fresh water systems), the electrical plant, and damage control systems — usually the job of three or four watches on other ships.

On most other ships, Boatswain's Mate 2nd Class (SW) James Fitzpatrick would have an entire division of seamen and boatswain's mates to handle the lines, drop the anchor and chip and paint running rust. On the Milwaukee, he has three boatswain's mates.

He relies on a motley crew of gunner's mates, electronics technicians and fire controlmen to complete the jobs.

Miller, the ET1, is typical of LCS sailors. He's served in the Navy for 14 years; the average age of crew 104 sailors is 33. And he's had experience on another LCS deployment.

"The deployment was really fast-paced," Miller said. "Wake up in the morning, first thing you are doing is flight quarters. You're at flight quarters all day, then you come down to the mess decks to try and get some food.

“Then maybe Link 16 is down. I go troubleshoot in my hot-main-suit in radar. Then I’ll probably have the night watch. Then you try and get some sleep. But then you might have UNREP so I’m up there as line handlers and because we're such a small crew, everybody is a part of it. It’s a lot.”

The break-neck pace of life on a deployed LCS is the most challenging part of serving on the newest surface combatant, said Information Systems Technician 2nd Class Stephanie Aldrete.

"We're always busy,” Aldrete said. “It's just thing after thing after thing. You get used to doing one thing and you switch to something else."

For many though, the hard days are about more than just getting the job done — it's a mission to show the fleet that the LCS model works.

"It's hard not to be excited about it," said Gas Turbine System Technician (Mechanical) 1st Class Johnathan Hovinga. "Every day it's about proving that this can work, that you can do it with fewer people. That's where the Navy is going."

The skipper said the non-stop pace has to be taken into account when setting schedules to avoid grinding down the crew.

"It's all about delegating, giving department heads and division officers the authority to [manage] sleep," Bridgewater said. "It's about looking at the plan of the day, see what's coming, see what's happening tomorrow.

“We do that a lot at the operational level. When the operations officer is putting together the plan of the week, we've got to make sure we put some space in there to give the crew time to recover.”

‘Everybody knows everybody’

When you ask LCS sailors what they like about LCS, almost all of them mention forming close bonds.

“The best part about it is the camaraderie,” Miller said. “Everybody knows everybody. It's not uncommon to see the [command master chief], the CO or XO, stopping somebody in the [passageway] and having a personal conversation with them. That's definitely the best part about it.”

Aldrete agreed, saying that the bonds she’s formed with the crew makes up, in some ways, for the frenetic pace set by minimal manning.

“It is a challenge because it’s a small crew, but you know everybody,” she said. “You’re comfortable around them, you trust everyone to teach you what they know.”

The crew’s slim numbers and maturity has yielded a somewhat amazing statistic: Since Bridgewater took over as crew 104’s executive officer in 2013, there hasn’t been a single captain’s mast case.

“You don’t have those miniature cliques where sailors can go off and start getting into things that can get them in trouble,” Bridgewater said.

Part of that bond comes from shared experiences. Many sailors pointed to seeing chiefs and officers haul lines, sweep brooms and bus their own dishes as something that brings the crew closer together. On LCS, even the commanding officer has to clear his own dishes.

"Everybody has a job to do and everybody's got to pull their own weight," Bridgewater said. "It's the least I can do as CO to spray my own tray off and throw it in the dishwasher — I have no problem with that whatsoever.

"On all ships, manpower is a very limited, finite resource that you have to take care off, it's just amplified on LCS. We don't have any extra people to do [food-service attendant] duty and take care of some of that stuff.”

For sailors, the sight of higher-ups doing the dirty work makes a big impression.

“It’s surprising to see a chief or officer, you know, you’ll see them around the ship with a foxtail and dustpan, cleaning up,” said Culinary Specialist 2nd Class (SW) Jerald Lagae. “I think it makes us feel more like a family. I wouldn’t say it makes us all equal, but it does make us more tight-knit to know that they are doing the same things we are. They aren’t too high to clean up after themselves.

“You know, it’s the little things.”

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TerraN_EmpirE said:

It's possible, That's kinda the whole point of running the shakedown cruise. To find the faults. Sounds like in this case metal fillings possibly from construction got into the oil, Which of course would lead to the logical conclusion of a catastrophic failure.

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TerraN_EmpirE said:

Well Russian papers these days are always looking to Troll The US.
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Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has ordered the Navy to trim its total buy of Littoral Combat Ships to 40 and down select to a single shipbuilder and design for the class as part of its fiscal year 2017 budget, according to a memo obtained by USNI News.

The directive to trim the service’s planned total of 52 planned LCS and Frigate hulls and direct the savings into other programs was contained in the Monday letter from Carter to Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus.

The new plan would call for a building only six LCS between fiscal year 2017-2020 – eight less than the Navy’s submitted 2017 plan – and directs the Navy to down select to a single shipyard and a single hull type in 2019.

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The U.S. Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship would be ineffective at hunting for mines because an underwater drone made by Lockheed Martin Corp. that’s supposed to find them often fails to work, the Pentagon’s weapons-testing office found.

While mine-hunting is intended to be the primary combat mission of the ship, the drones required to detect underwater explosive devices from a safe distance have failed 24 times since September 2014, according to Navy test data provided to the Defense Department’s Office of Operational Test & Evaluation.

Most recently, the drones failed 14 times over 300 hours in a five-month round of preliminary trials at sea that ended Aug. 30, according to the data. Crippled drones were towed to port seven times, and the intense combat testing required for increased purchases has been delayed. The Navy plans to spend $864 million buying 54 drones from Lockheed, the biggest U.S. contractor.

Frank Kendall, the under secretary of defense for acquisition, has scheduled a Jan. 19 review of the drone’s reliability woes, the latest setback for the troubled Littoral Combat Ship program. Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s director of combat testing, prepared a 41-page classified assessment dated Nov. 12 for the review.

An independent team named by the Navy also is reviewing the drone program because the service realizes “reliability performance has not been acceptable,” Captain Thurraya Kent, a spokeswoman for the service, said in an e-mail.

Lockheed’s Response
Lockheed spokesman Joe Dougherty said in an e-mail that the drone “exceeded or met key performance parameters during a Navy-led development test conducted in early 2015.’’ He said the Remote Minehunting System is “the only system on track for delivery that can fill” an “imminent capability gap.”

Equipped with a mobile sonar made by Raytheon Co., the drone is supposed to provide the ship with a system that can spot underwater explosive devices without sailing near them, as current Avenger-class mine-hunting ships must do.

“We remain confident the RMS is the most mature system to identify and destroy mines,” Dougherty said. A Lockheed brochure posted online and dated 2014 says the drone “meets or exceeds all key performance parameters and is available today.”

Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an e-mail Tuesday that the new report “only furthers my concerns about the testing and reliability performance of the Littoral Combat Ship’s troubled mine countermeasures capability. ”

The Arizona Republican said decisions over the next few months will set the course for U.S. maritime anti-mine capabilities for decades so“there should be no rush to failure.”

Previous Questions
The drone failures add to previous questions about how much value the U.S. will get from what’s now supposed to be a $23 billion program to build 32 Littoral Combat Ships in two versions made by Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed and Austal Ltd. based in Henderson, Australia. Both versions depend on the drones to detect mines from a safe distance.

In 2014 then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel truncated the original plan to buy 52 Littoral Combat Ships, built to operate in shallow coastal waters, citing reservations about the vessel’s effectiveness in combat and vulnerability to attack. Later, he approved a Navy proposal to buy 20 modified ships after 2019 with improved armor, sensors and weapons.

The Navy spent $109 million buying the first eight drones, spare parts and logistics services from Lockheed in 2005. The drone was supposed to complete combat testing and be declared ready for combat by September of this year. Lockheed stands to gain more than $700 million in orders for the remaining 46 drones. That includes as much as $400 million in February for the next order of 18 that Kendall will review.

Gilmore, the testing chief, found there’s “sufficient information available, based on testing to date, to conclude” the Littoral Combat Ship “would not be operationally effective” or maintainable if deployed in combat with the current mine-sweeping modules, Marine Corps Major Adrian Rankine-Galloway, Gilmore’s spokesman, said in an e-mail describing the study’s unclassified conclusions.

The system’s “reliability remains far below what is needed to support” the mine-hunting mission, Rankine-Galloway said. It’s unclear whether the drone “will ever achieve its reliability goals” of operating 75 hours between major failures, “but given the history of the program, it may require more design changes than the Navy has been considering,” Rankine-Galloway said.

The Navy’s program to date “has not substantially grown the reliability,” he said. The conclusion was based on data showing not only that critical mine-hunting systems were unreliable but also that the drone was vulnerable to mines and possessed limited communications capability.

Airborne System
Further, the Littoral Combat Ship’s separate, airborne-based

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currently can’t disable “most of the mines contained in the Navy’s own real-world threat scenarios,” Rankine-Galloway said. The system, which would be deployed on MH-60S helicopters, is intended to destroy the mines found by the drones.

Kent, the Navy spokeswoman, said the mine-hunting system “has demonstrated the ability to meet operational requirements.” Still, “reliability performance has not been acceptable during the most recent” evaluation.

Since September 2014, the drone has experienced 24 “operational mission failures” blamed on poor workmanship, design deficiencies, wear and tear or training procedures, Kendall was told Nov. 3 in a memo from David C. Brown, his deputy for development testing.

“Considering the focused effort put into improving” the drone’s reliability since 2010, the latest poor performance “puts into question whether the current” design “will ever meet the Navy’s reliability requirement,” Brown wrote.

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