The first Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) will deploy to Singapore next year in what will be a key opportunity to examine the ship’s operational performance and identify possible changes that need to be made to the program, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the Chief of Naval Operations, said recently.
The 10-month deployment, including eight months on station for the USS Freedom (LCS-1), will give the Navy a chance to evaluate central components of the LCS class, including the management of crew swaps and mission modules, he said. The ship is designed to operate three mission modules: mine countermeasures, anti-surface and anti-submarine warfare.
The Singapore deployment “will be to look very closely at the concept of operations on that vessel,” Greenert told reporters at a Defense Writers Group gathering.
Greenert said the program is still “relatively new” and the deployment will be an opportunity to provide feedback to the manufacturers to make changes on future copies “as soon as possible.”
The Littoral Combat Ships are expected to play a significant role in the Obama administration’s revised military strategy that focuses on the Asia-Pacific region. The Navy announced in February that it intended to base an LCS in Singapore.
The LCS comes in two versions, the Freedom variant built by Lockheed Martin [LMT], and the Independence variant produced by Austal USA. The Navy has an agreement in place with the two builders for 20 of the ships, 10 of each design, and plans to procure 55.
Both ships encountered problems in the early stages. The USS Independence (LCS-2) experienced corrosion while the Freedom had cracking that had to be repaired last year. The Freedom was returned to dry dock in San Diego last month to repair a shaft seal that failed and caused the ship to take on water.
The LCS-1 is expected to be in dry dock for about six weeks for the repairs and it will take about another week to return it to the water. It was unclear whether the repair time will