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InSurv recommends accepting LCS 1

Navy inspectors have recommended that service officials accept the first littoral combat ship, the Freedom, after the ship finished its acceptance trails Aug. 21 on Lake Michigan, top acquisition officials announced Wednesday.

The Board of Inspection and Survey concluded that the Freedom was a “capable, well-built and inspection-ready ship,” according to information provided by Allison Stiller, the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisitions. She and other top acquisitions officials spoke at a rare roundtable with reporters at the Pentagon.

Vice Adm. Kevin McCoy, commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, said he rode the ship for part of its trails and made a point to compliment the crew on the Freedom’s fit and finish.

The InSurv turned up 21 “starred” systems, said Wilmot Summerall, executive director of combatants for the Navy’s Program Executive Officer for Ships, and the ship had about 2,600 trial cards overall. That’s far fewer than the class-leading destroyer Arleigh Burke when it entered the fleet, which generated more than 15,000 trial cards, Sumerall said, but acquisition officials conceded the 9,000-ton destroyer is much larger and more complex than the roughly 3,000-ton Freedom.

Still, McCoy said, nothing in the InSurv was surprising. “We didn’t get any real, ‘I gotchas,’ out of the report,” he said.

But the ship also didn’t test out all its systems, the acquisitions officials said; it couldn’t fire its weapons in the lake, power up all its combat systems, or test parts of the ship it can’t use in fresh water, such as its bilges. Some of the weapons the ship will eventually carry, such as its Non-Line of Sight missile, are still in development.

The Freedom has been cleared for the first of its two 40-person crews to move aboard Sept. 18, said Lt. Cmdr. Victor Chen, a spokesman for Stiller. After the ship is commissioned this November in Milwaukee, it will travel down the East Coast and eventually end up at Naval Station Norfolk, Va., although the exact details of its travels are still in the works, said Adm. Michael Mahon, deputy director of surface warfare for the office of the chief of naval operations.

Also unclear Wednesday were the latest figures for the cost of the Freedom, which have ballooned after yard delays, design changes and even a shipyard fire. Reports from earlier this year have put the ship’s price tag at over $600 million. Congress has imposed a cap of $460 million per copy for subsequent ships, which lawmakers said was necessary if the Navy is to reach desired fleet of 55.

The Freedom will enter an extensive test phase, along with the second littoral combat ship, the Independence, which is finishing construction in Mobile, Ala. The ships must test their seaworthiness and their integral systems, then experiment with how they use the three interchangeable mission modules they’ll carry for specific assignments: anti-surface, anti-submarine and mine sweeping operations.

Once that’s complete, the Freedom is projected to be ready for its first operational deployment in 2011, Mahon said, whether or not there’s a growing fleet of follow-on ships. Some of the original concepts of operations for the LCS called for the ships to operate in LCS-only squadrons, but the Freedom could also sail as part of a carrier or expeditionary strike group, Mahon said. “It depends on what the fleet wants to do.”