Saturday, September 3, 2016

The U.S. Navy Is Struggling To Make Its Littoral Combat Ships Work

When the littoral combat ship USS Coronado set sail from Pearl Harbor for a planned deployment across the Pacific, it suffered engine problems and had to turn back. The Navy is struggling to get its new class of warships to work as planned. MC2 Ryan J. Batchelder/U.S. Navy

NPR: Amid Breakdowns, Navy Struggles To Make New Ships Work

The Navy continues struggling to get its new class of warships to work right.

When the USS Coronado set sail last week from Pearl Harbor for a planned deployment across the Pacific Ocean, it suffered engine problems and had to turn back. Before that, the Navy acknowledged that a diesel engine on another ship, the USS Freedom, was in such bad shape, it needs to be rebuilt or replaced.

Both of these are littoral combat ships, known as LCS, which are intended for operations taking place close to shore.

Other littoral combat ships have suffered problems as well. The USS Milwaukee lost power in the middle of a trip to Norfolk in December and had to be towed ashore. And before that, the USS Fort Worth sat idle for months in Singapore, crippled by its own machinery problems. Now it's limping home across the Pacific for more repairs.

The Navy acknowledged all the failures this week in a statement after the Coronado turned back to port.

Read more ....

WNU Editor: Similar concerns are now being raised on the U.S. Navy's newest aircraft carrier class .... Pentagon Orders An Independent Review Of The $12.9 Billion Gerald R. Ford Aircraft Carrier (August 30, 2016)

2 comments:

Jac said...

New program, new problem, as usual.

Jay Farquharson said...

Nope, concurrence at work.

The US went for "revolutionary" rather than "evolutionary".

Weapons platforms were designed around weapons and technology that didn't exist,and still doesn't, "modular" concepts to try to shoehorn everything done by a suite of platforms, into one "concept" platform,

And as the years of missing deadlines drag on, the old platforms are falling out of service from wear and tear and the "new" platforms are still a decade or decades away from service.

"Concurrence" was a Fortune500 tech fad/Corporate speak trend in the late '80's and early "90's, and all the Companies that engaged in it either lost fortunes, or went bankrupt. That's why your "grey box" isn't an IBM, but a Chinese Lenova.