The U.S. Navy’s Troubled Ship

Late last year, one of the U.S. Navy’s newest and most-modern ships, the Freedom-Class Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), USS Milwaukee, suffered a major engineering casualty. One of the most-controversial ships the Navy has ever built, the LCS has had bright – and not so bright – spots in its brief history.

Here is what the U.S. Naval Institute, the premier professional journal of the United States Sea Services, said about this incident:

The Navy’s newest Littoral Combat Ship – USS Milwaukee (LCS-5) – could be sidelined for weeks to repair an engine casualty that occurred last week during an Atlantic Ocean transit. Lockheed Martin and the service are currently working through the total scope of the repair package for the gearings that connect the ship’s main engines to its water jets.

More here from the U.S. Naval Institute website:

http://news.usni.org/2015/12/14/littoral-combat-ship-uss-milwaukee-repairs-could-last-weeks?utm_source=USNI+News&utm_campaign=03ac790d51-USNI_NEWS_DAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0dd4a1450b-03ac790d51-231544033&mc_cid=03ac790d51&mc_eid=93a1fd6ad6

When Dick Couch and I rebooted the best-selling Tom Clancy Op-Center series, our first geographical focus was the Mideast, and the second was Northeast Asia, with the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) featured prominently. We wrote that second book, Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Into the Fire in 2013 and had the LCS in our sights. Here is how we introduced USS Milwaukee in that book:

And there was the LCS itself, the Milwaukee. The critics of the U.S. Navy’s LCS program, both in congress and within the naval establishment, were right in their assessment of the ship’s shortcomings. The LCS was basically defenseless. She was a sitting duck for any ship or small craft with a surface-to-surface missile capability. Her single gun, the Mark 110, Mod 0 57mm BAE Systems cannon was capable of 200 rounds per minute with 240 rounds in ready-service availability. It could be deadly to small craft that came within five miles, but most of the world’s navies, including that of North Korea, had small craft with accurate surface-to-surface missiles that could be fired well outside that range. And they would be operating well within the arc of North Korean land-based air. Milwaukee’s RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile system was compact and effective against both flow-flying aircraft and surface-to-surface cruise missiles. But there was an interface flaw. The RIM-116 had no built-in acquisition capability; it had to be carefully aimed along the axis of the incoming threat. The system that aimed the missiles was the AN/SWY-2 Ship Defense Surface Missile System. When the two systems worked, they worked well. But they didn’t always work well. In Bigelow’s experience, they produced a missile launch and a missile kill only about half the time.

into-the-fireNow life imitates art. Read more about the Littoral Combat Ship, USS Milwaukee and about Commander Kate Bigelow’s efforts to save her ship and her crew in a snippet from Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Into the Fire here:

http://georgegaldorisi.com/into-the-fire