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| USS Freedom LCS 1 (File Photo) |
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR
CAPITOL HILL: Navy Secretary Ray Mabus talked up the controversial Littoral Combat Ship days before departing for Asia to visit the first LCS, USS Freedom, which recently arrived in Singapore (sporting a sniffy camo paint job). Freedom has been bedeviled by cost overruns, delays, and manufacturing defects, with a new problem, seawater contamination in lubricant fluid, arising on its trans-Pacific trip. But the bigger picture Mabus said, is how this new class of small and nimble ship will cooperate with foreign partners to keep the peace in the volatile South China Sea and the strategic Strait of Malacca.
“Freedom is the first of its class, and it was built as an experimental ship, and every first of the class has some issues,” Mabus said of the seawater contamination, speaking to reporters after a Friday speech on energy security hosted by the Truman National Security Project. “One of the reasons we sent Freedom forward on deployment was to see what those issues were.”
After the agonies over Freedom and, to a lesser extent, its very dissimilar sister ship, USS Independence, Navy largely rebooted the program. Costs are coming down, the first ships’ defects are being remedied in follow-on vessels, and Mabus recently boasted that the Littoral Combat Ship is “one of our best programs” — although the jury is still out on LCS’s ability to survive in all-out combat.
Read the full story at Breaking Defense