Thoughts on the military and military activities of a diverse nature. Free-ranging and eclectic.

Thursday, May 31, 2007

LCS.


This is coolbert: Here is a brand-new class of warship just now being sent to sea by the U.S. Navy.

The littoral combat ship [LCS].

Designed for warfare specifically in littoral waters. The type of naval warfare that would be seen if the U.S. and China went to war for some reason.

"the littoral region (close to shore)"

[South China Sea, Taiwan, etc.]

American Navy taking the battle to the enemy, being on the offensive, not waiting for punches to be thrown by the opponent, but throwing punches first.

“Make the enemy keep his head down, make him bleed, make him wonder where you are coming from!! - - Patton.

It appears that a lot of thought has gone into the design of the LCS class of vessels. Embodies an entire “concept”.

"The LCS will be able to supplant slower and larger specialized ships such as minesweepers and larger assault ships in anti-mine and special forces missions, plus robotic air, surface, and underwater vehicles."

A ship that from all appearances is a SELF-CONTAINED COMBAT ARMS naval ship. Can perform a lot of different missions and be task tailored for each operation as require. Can achieve very rapid burst [40 knots] of speed as needed. Employs novel hull designs as part of a “concept”.



NOT a large combat vessel, but has the capability to deploy and impressive amount of firepower, according to mission.

Can utilize during combat operations:

* Blackhawk helicopters. [with gunship firepower??!! UAV also??!!]

* Special Operations type landing craft. [Zodiac type rubber boats??]

* Torpedoes. [torpedoes fired from a surface craft. Reminiscent of the Japanese and their Long Lance torpedo of WW2 fame.]

* Missiles.

* 57 mm rapid-fire turret mounted gun.

* Roll-on/Roll-off amphibious combat vehicles.

"The Navy currently plans to build 55 of these ships."

I hope that the LCS class of naval warships turns out to be a success. The U.S. Navy CANNOT wait to scale the learning curve and find out after the fact what type of warship is needed and is effective in the type of combat to be found in littoral waters. This must work!!

coolbert.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Why not a 155mm gun? A 57mm seems a bit weak for fire support, at least to me. If you go take a look at the size of the 57mm vs. the 155mm I know what I would want to call in if I needed it. The smaller 57mm doesn't impress me as effective for dug in and motivated enemies. Why not get the biggest gun possible to rain hell on the bad guys when artillery support is needed?

I can't seem to find any reference to the armor of these ships either. I'd imagine that you'd want to be able to take punishment as well as dish it out. Many of the ships in WW2 had inches of stell armor to absorb hits and keep fighting.
History gives us examples of what is needed to get the task done. Lok at Normandy. Ships got real close to shore in order to offer fire support to the men of the beaches and inland. They went punch for punch with dug in german positions that were concrete, steel, earth, etc... In my opinion 57mm would be ineffective against that sort of thing. I can only imagine the kind of fortification our enemies would use. They studied Normandy too, you can be sure of that. Let's get a tough, aromored, heavily armed ship with big guns that can get in close of necessary to support people on the beaches as well as the LCS. We are going to need both!
I guess my main point is that you can never have a gun that is too big or be too heavily armed, especially if you are a ship and even more so if you are the guy relying on it.

9:40 AM

 

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