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Will LCS go gator?

Future littoral combat ships could moonlight as part of the “Gator Navy” under a Marine Corps proposal, which wants a new set of LCS mission modules that will help the ship take on Marine jobs as well as traditional Navy missions.

The Marines could get a surface fire-support module, a special operations module and humanitarian assistance package, according to an Oct. 28 presentation by Victor Gavin, executive director for the Navy’s program executive office for littoral and mine warfare.

The LCS has relatively few abilities of its own, but it was designed to carry different sets of equipment to accomplish traditional naval missions, including surface combat, hunting submarines and finding mines. Commanders seem enthusiastic about designing even more accessories for the LCS to give it the ability to perform Marine Corps missions.

A fire-support LCS could take the place of the now-truncated Zumwalt destroyer class, which was to carry two 155mm Advanced Gun Systems to provide fire support for Marines ashore. An LCS would need some kind of new weapon, however, because neither its integral 57mm gun nor its Non-Line-of-Sight missile, now in development with the Army, has the range or the punch the Marines want.

A humanitarian or hospital-ship module would take advantage of the ship’s shallow draft. Unlike big-deck amphibious ships or the Military Sealift Command’s hospital ships — both converted oil tankers — an LCS only draws about 12 feet of water, meaning it could enter austere ports in Africa or South America to deliver medical aid.

The new mission packages aren’t in development yet, nor have the Navy and Marines done the requisite studies to determine which new modules to build, Gavin said. But Marine leaders are interested in adding LCS to expeditionary strike groups with Marine-centric missions in addition to their traditional Navy roles.

Good results in initial tests

Gavin’s LCS update came at a daylong conference in Washington, D.C., of the Surface Navy Association, where Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard officials spoke about the latest details in surface warfare.

Another LCS program official, ship program manager Capt. Jim Murdoch, said the first LCS, the Freedom, performed well in its initial tests on the Great Lakes. He described how the ship had passed north from Lake Michigan through Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., into Lake Superior, and was scheduled to arrive in Duluth, Minn., on Oct. 27.

But the ship’s skipper, Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, wanted to get in port before a storm front came across the lake, so he took the Freedom up to 40 knots and sped west to Duluth ahead of schedule, arriving a day early. The Freedom was scheduled to sail from Duluth to be in Milwaukee by Nov. 8, when it is to be commissioned.

Murdoch acknowledged some growing pains aboard the ship since it first sailed this summer, particularly getting sailors familiar with its combined diesel and gas turbine power plant.

“You can’t overstate the challenge these guys have, learning a new ship,” he said.

Murdoch also acknowledged that the Navy’s plan to continue buying multiple copies of each LCS — the steel, monohull built by Lockheed Martin and the aluminum trimaran designed by General Dynamics — will create separate training loops for sailors. The ships are too different for crews to become facile with both, he said, meaning the multiple crews for each Lockheed ship won’t be able to serve aboard a GD ship without new training.

But the closed loop is worth it because of the savings the Navy realizes by keeping the two defense giants competing with one another, Murdoch said. The Navy will need multiple ships to choose which one is better, and if Navy Secretary Donald Winter decided on which copy he preferred before testing was finished, the winning sole contractor would take away Murdoch’s ability to save money, he warned.

Another update came from Marine Maj. Gen. Tom Benes, the Navy’s director of expeditionary warfare, who described the Navy and Marine Corps’ bid to increase the fleet of amphibious ships.

One proposal, he said, has been to decommission two Tarawa-class big-deck amphibs and turn them over to Military Sealift Command as an early basis for the planned Maritime Pre-positioning Force (Future). This would enable the fleet to jump-start the core of the MPF(F) — which is planned to carry the secondary elements of a Marine Corps invasion force — without newly built ships.