Posted on 08/16/2023 6:22:39 AM PDT by artichokegrower
This is nothing new. It’s always been like this, whether Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines.
Oh, I know, first hand. I served in the NAVY in the early 90’s. Got a front row seat to how the federal govt wastes our money.
My favorite was at the end of the fiscal year my ship would go 55 miles off the coast of San Diego to pump all of our perfectly good Oil and Jet fuel overboard so we could keep our allotment for the next fiscal year. Brand new furniture and engine parts would also go over the side. Was too much of a pain to send it back to where it came from.
What a waste of money.
This old Army guy knows basically nothing about the Navy but 5 years seems to be a fairly brief period of service.
Shouldn’t have named it after an Indian. That really pisses off the college loan deadbeat kids.
The USS Fort Worth was the test platform.
The ships have propulsion issue problems & the anti-submarine system being developed for the ship never worked out.
More money for Ukraine.
“They should donate it to Ukraine in lieu of an equivalent amount of actual money”
Thats what most US aid to Ukraine IS.
That said, the problems with these things are such that they amount to negative military value.
Give it to someone.
It had gender-specific bathrooms
It nearly caused a mutiny among the tranny officers
Giving it to Ukraine will be a great idea.
There will be no maintenance costs on it, because it will be sunk within a week of arriving in the Black Sea
It is built of thin aluminum and cannot handle live fire. I have actually been on board them while they were being built. Definitely not comparable to the Coral Sea when I served aboard it.
The U.S. Navy has an interest in offloading its Freedom-class LCS vessels, which have high maintenance and operating costs but limited lethality and survivability in a high-end fight. The ultimate cancelation of a planned anti-submarine warfare package also removed the ships’ utility as a platform for sub-hunting. The third-party ASW package for the Freedom-class was canceled in 2022 after repeated developmental delays, and according to then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday, the small warships are “as noisy as an aircraft carrier” - an inbuilt challenge for sensitive ASW sonar systems.
In 2022, the service proposed early retirement for every commissioned vessel of the type then in service, a total of nine hulls. The House Appropriations Committee limited this divestment plan to four ships in the FY2023 spending bill.
The Freedom-class was designed by an aircraft manufacturer, and the Navy specified an unusually high top speed and low cost as its key design requirements. Achieving 40-plus knots in an affordable, conventionally-powered monohull meant accepting tradeoffs for armament and armor, resulting in a lightly-armed patrol vessel with limited utility in a near-peer conflict. This concern was identified by the program’s critics as early as 2016.
Taiwan S. Korea & Japan could probably use them.
All the more reason to shovel it off on someone else.
See my post #52. The bottom line is that this was a major screwup by the USN.
I see. Thank you.
Perhaps enemies will just point sticks at it and go pew-pew.
In other words, their vision was too ambitious beyond their capability to deliver.
All of the LCS have unfixable problems with the propulsion systems, both the turbines and the pumps that produce the thrust. Initial design failures. It will cost more to fix them than to scrap them. Incompetence at the Naval Sea Systems Command the constructors, it seems.
Ships have a service life. Some of the ships up for decommissioning now are here -
The cruisers Antietam and Leyte Gulf, for instance, were commissioned in 1987. That makes them 36 years old. Its probably not worthwhile to keep upgrading and overhauling them. The submarine USS San Juan is 35 years old, so ditto.
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