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LCS sailors chart a new course in Navy culture

ABOARD THE LITTORAL COMBAT SHIP FREEDOM — This ship’s skipper, Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, has heard from all the skeptics and critics.

The littoral combat ship can’t work, they say. It’s a surface warship with few built-in capabilities. It’s a 3,000-ton vessel shared by two crews of just 40 sailors each. It’s a 377-foot ship built to cruise at 40 knots.

“People who say ‘they can’t do it’ need to come here and a take a look at this crew,” Gabrielson said. “Because they’re doing it right now. We have completely rewritten how surface ships are operated.”

Everything about the Freedom is a major departure for the surface Navy, from the novel combined diesel-and-gas power plant below decks to the thin, light aluminum superstructure. And everything about the way its “hybrid” crew members work, live and manage their careers is a galaxy away from standard operating procedure in the surface force.

The most-junior sailors are two second class petty officers; everyone has had at least one previous sea tour; everyone has at least one warfare qualification; and each sailor has duties he could never attempt on a frigate, destroyer or cruiser.

“No one tells you, ‘No, you can’t do that job because you’re a boatswain’s mate,’Ÿ” Chief Boatswain’s Mate (SW/AW) Trevor Davis said. “On this ship, you make that your job.”

Davis, who belongs to the Freedom’s Gold Crew, oversees line handlers and general topside business as a standard boatswain’s mate. (The deck division has just two sailors, both minemen, but the line handlers can include operations specialists, fire controlmen, enginemen or almost anyone else.) But Davis also does work that normally would belong to a quartermaster, plotting courses with the navigation team and standing watch as junior officer of the deck on the Freedom’s bridge.

“I can walk onto any other ship in the Navy and point to six people and honestly say, ‘I could do all your jobs,’Ÿ” Davis said.

Everyone is qualified in damage control, firefighting and on at least three weapons, although some sailors are qualified on five. The ship treats the enlisted surface warfare pin the same way submariners treat their dolphins — you either arrive on the ship with one, get it quickly, or you’re gone. One E-4 sailor rotated off the Blue Crew because he couldn’t qualify in time.

Sailors become qualified for real, applicable knowledge, Gabrielson said, as demonstrated by how fast they can disassemble a weapon, for example, or how well they repair a particular system.

“It’s not, ‘Name all the animals on the forecastle,’Ÿ” Gabrielson said.

Operations specialists stand force-protection watches with M16s. Gas turbine system technicians haul up hawsers when the ship casts off. Engineers stand watch on the bridge.

“Some of them need sunglasses and jackets for the first time, because on other ships you never see them up there,” said the Freedom’s executive officer, Cmdr. Kris Doyle.

Everybody cleans, including Gabrielson, Doyle, all the officers and all the chiefs.

But the differences between other ships and Freedom are deeper than that. Crew members said they find themselves getting along better with their LCS shipmates than they had in earlier commands.

“Here you pretty much see everybody on the ship at least once a day,” said Operations Specialist 1st Class Rucio Fooks (SW/AW). It’s a major change compared with the small city of sailors and Marines aboard the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima, on which she served before the Freedom. “It’s fun. When we all go out, nobody gets left behind.”

For chow, officers, chiefs and sailors all stand in the same line — first come, first served.

“If you’re in line in front of the captain, so be it,” Engineman 1st Class (SW/CC) Brad Vincent said. “If he gets in line ahead of me, he beat me to the line. After we eat, the captain will be washing his plate just like we do. He doesn’t have anybody tending to him.”

Not a standard command

The Freedom was commissioned Nov. 8 in Milwaukee on a cold, gray afternoon at a park on Lake Michigan. Two days later, carrying a total of 72 Blue and Gold Crew sailors, shipyard contractors and a pair of Navy Times journalists, the Freedom pulled away from its dock on its maiden trip out of the Great Lakes.

Even routine ship-handling is different on the first LCS. The bridge crew doesn’t use the standard commands familiar to surface warfare officers, such as “right full rudder.” The Freedom has no rudder. An enlisted helmsman doesn’t respond, “right full rudder, aye” and turn a wheel. The Freedom has no wheel. Instead, the officer piloting the ship operates its controls.

“It’s awesome,” said Lt. Stephanie Smith, the ship’s electronic maintenance officer, of driving the ship. “It’s so smooth. There are so many tools we don’t have on other ships.”

The Freedom has equipment to get information from other ships’ Automatic Identification Systems, for example, which Smith didn’t have when she served aboard the frigate McInerney.

The Freedom also has a highly sophisticated autopilot, meaning its navigators can plug in a course and watch the ship sail itself. Unlike most other Navy ships, the Freedom’s autopilot can make its own turns, if it’s been so programmed, doing all the ship-driving with no human direction. Still, the ship’s bridge is manned at all times — but only just. The Freedom is designed with an unprecedented level of automation for a surface warship to enable a total complement of only 75 crew members — the ship’s core crew, plus 15 mission-package sailors and 20 from an aviation detachment. The engine room is designed to run unmanned. If everything is going smoothly, a standard watch bill can include nine sailors. On an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, 30 to 40 sailors can be standing watch at any one time.

A walk through the Freedom yields novelty at every level. The ship has no post office, soda machines or store, and there’s no place to use a Navy Cash card. It has only one or two sound-powered phones. The decks are painted, rather than surfaced with linoleum, to save weight. There is a gym, which doubles as the ship’s barber shop. Crew members sleep on roomy racks in berthing spaces with no more than eight people; each berthing area has its own sink, head and shower. There’s a Nintendo Wii in the wardroom, a PlayStation 3 in the goat locker, and an XBox 360 in the sailors’ lounge, which also features a plasma TV, Blu-Ray DVD player and surround sound.

Crew members say the video games rarely get used, though, because everyone is busy.

During the Freedom’s trip through the Great Lakes, Gabrielson made an announcement on the 1MC public address system exhorting the crew members, who were putting their ship through some of its first operational paces, to take time to rest.

A question of scale

The first leg of the Freedom’s trip from Milwaukee included a few speed bumps.

After it pulled out of Milwaukee, the ship made a fish-terrorizing run up Lake Michigan at 42 knots on both its diesels and both its turbines. The ship throws out a 25-foot rooster tail and chops up a devilish wake. The hull rises 2 feet out of the water at high speed, and its bow wave splashes above the superstructure. The ship rides very smoothly, however.

On the bridge, Gabrielson poured himself a cup of coffee, set it on a panel and swept away his hands like a magician. The cup and liquid quivered slightly.

But the crew of the Freedom is still developing the way it operates the ship. When it used an old method of burning fuel from its aft tanks first, then its forward tanks, the bow stayed too low and shipped 5 feet of lake water up its hawser pipe. It had to slow down so a team of sailors could bail out the flooded spaces. Engineers had to baby the port diesel engine when one of its valves cracked. When the ship lost the use of three of its four diesel generators, the Freedom was sidelined for a day in Port Huron, Mich., waiting for parts and technicians.

Hiccups and speed bumps are common for any new ship, Gabrielson acknowledged. He said the ship’s sailors and their “adaptive organization” could handle each problem as it cropped up.

Even as the crew creates its own methods for operating the Freedom — “with as close to a blank check as you’ll get in the Navy,” Gabrielson said — it still has many things it hasn’t tried. The ship hasn’t fired its 57mm gun or its Rolling Airframe Missile launcher. It hasn’t launched or recovered any of the unmanned vehicles it would take on a real-world deployment, nor has it even opened the stern doors through which they’ll launch. The sailors don’t know how fast the ship can sail and still safely launch and recover its vehicles, nor how many people those jobs will take. Although the Navy has finished work on all three of the ship’s mission modules, many sailors have never seen them.

Another thing not yet clear about the Freedom is whether the Navy can copy it 54 more times to build the fleet it wants. Pentagon planners hope the ships will become simpler to build. Developing a crew model that will work over and over again is a separate challenge.

The Freedom doesn’t have a hand-selected crew, but everyone on board is a volunteer. Many rearranged their careers to get a chance at serving aboard an LCS — a “band of brothers,” as Davis, the boatswain’s mate, called them.

“I made phone calls for two years to get aboard this ship,” Chief Fire Controlman (SW) Jason Dempsey said.

Gabrielson said he is confident the Navy can find many more competent sailors to form two crews apiece for each new LCS, plus the mission modules. He said he’s also confident that sailors who begin to rotate off the ship will become so valuable in their new commands that the LCS program will get a good reputation throughout the Navy, attracting more volunteers.

Dempsey said he has no doubt the Navy will figure out how to mass-produce both LCS hulls and sailors to build the fleet it wants.

“Absolutely, the concept will work,” he said. “It’s just a matter of figuring out what the formula will be.”