Anti-Surface Warfare Makes a Comeback

Navy Times is reporting on the debut of the Littoral Combat Ship anti-surface mission module debut today. Regardless of your opinion specific to the Littoral Combat Ship, and we give plenty of opinion on the subject here, the completion and delivery of the module is a good thing for the Navy.

With its gun; non-line-of-sight missile system, or NLOS; Fire Scout unmanned aerial vehicle; armed MH-60R helicopter; and the attendant networks and sub-systems — all of which officially debuted here Friday — the LCS now has its surface warfare mission package. It’s the second of two mission packages delivered for the 3,000-ton customizable warships; the mine warfare package was unveiled in September and the antisubmarine package is scheduled to be unveiled in San Diego later this summer.

We understand the good Navy folks who design these programs get annoyed, but your brochure doesn't fly here. With a LCS in this configuration, the Navy is now in position to deploy an unrated 3,000 ton designed to kill speedboats coming in at a cost of more than half a billion dollars.

Jason Gross, a PEO spokesman for littoral and mine warfare, has some comments towards the end of the Navy Times article. We see the popular "Navy Truck" description used, a good description in our opinion because that description describes a mothership. Some of the other comments are worth discussion.

The ability to mix and match equipment gives the ship “focused mission capability,” as program workers call it...

“If you think these [guns] are little, take a look at that bullet,” he said, motioning toward a menu of ammunition.

“I wouldn’t want to be in front of it.”

Modularity is the most important technology of the Littoral Combat Ship, and the first comment is to that point, but the gun is not unique to the Littoral Combat Ship, indeed we've read in many places the gun will be mounted on Unmanned Surface Vehicles.

The limitation of the Littoral Combat Ship isn't the concept, indeed the concept is important to the future Navy. The limitation is its size, motherships need to be big, not small. The Navy has turned the entire low end of its forward deployable force structure into an unrated mothership, plowing into the future with a fleet of battleships and a flotilla of unrated motherships. This is absent all historical lessons of maritime strategy, as it has been proven throughout all maritime history that fleets cannot meet requirements expected of it with a fleet of only battleships.

It is good to see the LCS and associated modules finally built and fielded though, the only way the over 50 crowd of theorists are going to ever understand the limitations of the Littoral Combat Ship, indeed recognize the metrics for technology and manpower for war and peace in the 21st century maritime environment, is to the LCS to sea and see the data for themselves.
The Littoral Combat Ship has the potential to be the best minesweeper the US Navy has ever built, and with modularity it will at times be capable of more than that, but as a peacetime platform and in any battle scenario involving more than "AK-47 guy" in a speedboat, the Littoral Combat Ship is going to be a big and expensive disappointment.