As the Navy assesses the first major overseas deployment of a Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) this year, it will pay close attention to the ship’s mission modules, a senior officer said.
The USS Freedom (LCS-1) is starting a rotation out of Changi, Singapore this month. U.S. Pacific Command head Adm. Samuel Locklear told the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Tuesday that he plans to evaluate the shore-hugging vessel’s capabilities during the rotational deployment, which he said will last roughly 10 months.
“My understanding is that we will concentrate on how do we move the mission-module packages around, how do we employ them in littorals, how do we integrate them into the operational fleet, the 7th Fleet,” Locklear said during an oversight hearing on his command.
“It’s a good thing, because it gets it into the real world,” he said about the new class of ship, which has had numerous setbacks in its development. “It gets it to having to see what it can do and how it can best perform, and how it can best be used.”
Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Marinette Marine built the LCS-1, and Austal USA is building the Independence variant. Three of the littoral ships have been delivered to the service thus far, and 21 are under contract. Both contractors’ ships suffered numerous cost and developmental setbacks in recent years, and some lawmakers continue to point to the LCS effort as a program that could be cut.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chairman of the SASC’s Seapower subcommittee, quizzed Locklear about the LCS’s deployment to Singapore at Tuesday’s SASC hearing.
“We’re going to have issues with respect to budgets and the capability of different ships,” Reed said, immediate before asking the admiral: “Do you intend to monitor the operation of the Freedom? How are you going to employ it, since it’s in your (area of responsibility)?” He further questioned if Locklear has a “conscious plan” to evaluate the Freedom’s “capabilities, to make recommendations with respect to its design, its function, and its operational capacities.”
Reed, whose hails from a shipbuilding state, is expected to become SASC chairman following the retirement of Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) next year.
Locklear told Reed the Freedom will benefit his command by giving the United States a more-visible presence in the littoral, or near-shore, areas under his purview.
“It allows us to cooperate and participate with a key strategic partner out there, our partners in Singapore,” he said. “It provides my 7th Fleet commander and my Pacific Fleet commander, Adm. (Cecil) Haney, another tool in the toolkit to be able to deal with the peacetime events as well as those in crisis. So I’m anxious to get it out to the theater and see what it can actually do.”
He added other components are looking “carefully” at “how they can use Littoral Combat Ship because of its reconfigurable capability, because of the amount of cargo and types of things it can carry, the flexibility that it has with air frames.”
“We’ll also be looking carefully at its mine-countermeasure mission, which is an integral part of I believe the Navy’s strategy for next-generation mine countermeasures,” Locklear told the SASC.