U.S. Navy's Small Ship Troubles

[mso489]

The U.S. Navy has run into trouble with some of its most recently launched small ships. Built by two different major contractors, these are classified as littoral combat ships designed for coastal shallow-water duty. The Navy wants to decommission eight of ten of the current class for serious problems with propulsion systems and the lack of suitability for current needs, facing the Chinese deep water fleet rather than the small boat conflicts in the Middle East. These U.S. ships average only four years old.

Being a former enlisted minesweeper sailor aboard an Aggressive-class minesweeper in the South China Sea, a predecessor to the littoral combat ships -- and the son of a WWII YMS-class minesweeper skipper in World War II -- I've followed this new ship design closely and with great interest. I'll spare the pipe group all of the details. But it has been an interesting misstep in design and seagoing operations. The Congress doesn't want the Navy to abandon the ships, partly because of the investment already made, an partly because of the interest groups in the various states where these ships and their equipment are designed and built.

As a historical reference, the ship designing and building competition between navies goes back to the Greeks and Trojans and before. The European sea powers in the 18th and 19th Century were always jockeying between huge flagships with mighty arrays of guns to smaller, swifter and more maneuverable ships that could take shots at sinking the big ones. So this drama is not new. But it is riveting to people who've been aboard warships as crew and can sense the at-sea challenges that are, or are not met.

 

[RustiePyles CPG]

The whole LCS program has been a soup sandwich. I say good riddance, they need to decom all 10. If we want to be competitive with China we need to reinvest in carrier and sub tech.

 

[mso489]

A little more context: Some of the minesweepers my dad trained on during WWII were converted fishing boats and yachts, still classified in the YMS (yard minesweeper) class, though by the time he was in the Philippines, most of these YMS were built to purpose.

My Aggressive-class minesweeper, the U.S.S. Gallant (MSO 489) -- MSO means minesweeper oceangoing -- was 172' long and 36' in beam (width), and the hull was built of layers of Washington State spruce to be antimagnetic, so as to not attract magnetically activated mines. We also had de-magnetizing "degaussing" gear to neutralize all of the metal object aboard the ship. We never did minesweeping in Vietnam's waters, but ran patrols on junks suspected of smuggling weapons to the south and acted as a communications relay and weather and reconnaissance station. We were ghosted by Soviet "fishing" trawlers, actually intelligence gathering boats, from time to time. We spent some time doing sonar searches for U.S. cargo aircraft that had gone down.

I believe I served on one of the last wooden-hulled warships in the U.S. fleet.

 

[tbradsim1]

Bureaucrats have always stuck their nose where they don’t know a damn thing , Swift boats built in Bayou Vista had a problem, sent me there, wasn’t Genuis, 50 caliber was too far on the prow, cut engines and it would submarine, had them cut the pilot house and put gun alongside pilot, was more trim, got on plane faster. We have lost the battle, our Generals now are suck up climb the ladder fucks. Oh my don’t shoot that pretty ballon down.

 

[verporchting]

Send the contractor the poorly designed boats with a refund invoice for shoddy workmanship. If they don’t promptly pay the refund amount then send some properly functioning ship to surface materiel from Raytheon to emphasize the navy’s dissatisfaction with their lack of support.

 

[mso489]

I think the Navy wants to build a small deep water ship, a so-called frigate, that would provide a smaller ship with speed, maneuverability, and carry missiles. Big ships are the backbones, but you need some kind of smaller ships for flexibility and to not have all prime targets, as the Japanese learned at the Battle of Midway.

Funny, the littoral combat ships were designed with multi-use in mind, with different outfit packages for minesweeping, patrol, and other functions. The crew was meant to be cross-trained to adapt.

All this happened on my old wooden minesweeper, which did patrol and other functions and never did minesweeping except as an exercise, despite a huge tow-cable reel on the back of the superstructure. Unbelievable, the "main battery," biggest firepower, was a mortar on the foredeck, which of course lobs a trajectory in a high arch, in this case from a rolling deck! As I was transferring off the ship, they were removing that and replacing it with twin machine guns. Before that, on patrol, we relied on 50 calibers mounted on an upper deck. The mortar was useless.

We all cross-trained to whatever needed doing.

 

[Streeper541]

I'm surprised they haven't transferred them to the Coast Guard yet... That's what they seem to do with all the other junk the Navy didn't want when I was in.

Seriously though, shipbuilding has been an issue as of late in both the Navy & the Coast Guard.

Several years ago I remember the Coast Guard trying to save money by lengthening the 110' coastal patrol cutters by adding 13' feet to them. When I saw the prints, I pointed out what I believed were some design flaws. I wasn't listened to because I wasn't an engineer. The program was a disaster and a couple of the cutters broke in two... exactly as I stated, but what the hell did I know?

 

[kcghost]

I suspect most of the contractors were following Navy specification. You have a to be a little leery of generals and admirals who are fighting the last war. As far as the makeup of a fleet it takes a lot of ships and are mainly small vessels who protect the big ships.

 

[jaytex1969]

I think the Navy wants to build a small deep water ship, a so-called frigate.....

Yar!

 

[mso489]

One cool thing about the littoral combat ships is that they can reach 50 mph. My minesweeper could hit 14 with a following wind. But the new propulsion system, in one case, ground up the machinery and lit up the motor oil with the glitter of ground steel. Our ship in the late 1960's had (wait for it) Packard diesel engines; I'm talking about the old Parkard automobile company which went out of business when I was in grade school. They were dependable. The "pitch" system that changed the angles of the ship's propeller blades, on the other, never worked. We spent months in Guam trying to get them to work, and doing sea trails to see how they worked, and they never worked. So pitch the pitch system you might say.

Our Captain, who was an Annapolis grad and a fighter pilot getting his ticket punched as a "line officer" aboard ship, nearly got to blows with his boss, a bootstrap warrant officer become a commissioned officer who actually had the combat zone title of Commodore, head of the minesweeper group. All about the pitch system.

 

[Andre_T]

The whole LCS program has been a soup sandwich. I say good riddance, they need to decom all 10. If we want to be competitive with China we need to reinvest in carrier and sub tech.

I am still mad that they gave the name Independence to one of those POS. I still miss my Independence (CV-62).

 

[RustiePyles CPG]

I am still mad that they gave the name Independence to one of those POS. I still miss my Independence (CV-62).

Maybe they'll decom the Independence and strike it, then they can give the name to more worthy Vessel.

 

[georged]

If we want to be competitive with China...

Which we?

The problem is there are two "we's"...

Those who want the USA to remain a separate country, and those who want it to be assimilated into the coming global morass of submissive, dependant consumers.

 

[brian64]

Which we?

The problem is there are two "we's"...

Those who want the USA to remain a separate country, and those who want it to be assimilated into the coming global morass of submissive, dependant consumers.


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[Swiss Army Knife]

This thread took a weird turn. I thought we were talking about boats. To keep it on rails: What was a bigger blunder the LCS program or the Zumwalt program?

 

[Zack Miller]

The original plan was for fifty of these vessels, but apparently there will only be twenty-one. Congress is complaining that they bought a pig in a poke, but are also reluctant to have the ones they bought decommissioned.

in addition to having limited strategic usefulness, they also really have no defensive capability.

I have read there may be some interest in reviving a frigate type of craft which might have some utility.

 

[dunnyboy]

This is a fascinating thread. I had read about this in various papers. It just seemed like another Pentagon procurement fiasco although, obviously, with increasingly serious consequences as China builds up its naval capabilities. Thanks to @mso489 and the other former navy men for adding detail to the story.

 

[mso489]

I think the Navy went overboard, so to speak, looking for a forward design. My ship was a throwback, with its wooden hull, but these new ships went with multiple innovations, apparently including untested propulsion systems that weren't tested by time. It's a balancing act to get what is up-to-date but still utilitarian and god-awful durable, because warships get the hell beat out of them just getting from place to place, running typhoon evasions, and surviving the errors of sailors, and breathing saltwater, and running for months at a time. Literally. I'm sure our diesels ran for three and four months non-stop, so when we got into port and they shut them down, the silence was actually deafening. It took three days to get used to sleeping without the drumming engines and the roll of the hull. It's a pretty hard life for the crew, too.

 

[Briar Lee]

Here’s why the US Navy is building small surface combatant ships:

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On 20 May 2021, the U.S. Navy issued Fincantieri Marinette Marine a $554 million contract to start building the future USS Congress (FFG-63).[18]

USS Congress (FFG-63) - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

—-

Jeff Bezos’ new yacht cost about the same.

——

In 2022, Oceanco built a yacht known as Y721 for billionaire Jeff Bezos. The vessel is 127 meters in length with triple masts that reach 70 meters, making the sailing yacht nearly half the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. It's rumored that the cost was over $500 million with a $25 million annual upkeep cost.

—-

A modern blue water navy requires lots of smaller vessels for escort duty, minesweeping, patrol duties, anti-submarine warfare, and general maritime use. They can’t all be multibillion dollar carriers, cruisers and destroyers.

If the USA is ever involved in a war with China or Russia we’ll not have enough ships, once the shooting starts.

But there’s only so much money to build, train, and crew a fleet.

It’s the same problem every maritime power has had for millennia, except today whatever ships we have on the first day of the war, is all we will have.

Every ship in modern times is in practice a capital ship.

 

[Swiss Army Knife]

I think the Navy went overboard, so to speak, looking for a forward design.

Their biggest problem is in the name, they're littoral craft designed during the age of counter insurgency. For the military the age of COIN is over and it's moved towards peer-to-peer conflict and the LCS just weren't really designed with fighting the Russians or Chinese in mind.

They're pretty cool naval oddities but I'm looking forward to the Navy moving towards more traditional designs again.