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20 to join LCS crew on trial deployment

The Navy’s first littoral combat ship, Freedom, will add 20 sailors to its crew when it makes its trial deployment next year, making for a total complement of about 95 people, as opposed to the crew of 75 the ship was originally designed to carry.

The extra sailors will be part of a “tailored surface warfare package” that Freedom will take on its mission to the Southern Command area of operations; they will give the ship the ability to conduct at-sea boardings and do other jobs it couldn’t tackle with only its main crew, Navy officials said.

“One of the things we’re looking at is crew workload. We’re monitoring it, and it was deemed prudent that we should bring on a separate team for that [maritime security operations] boarding team capability,” said Capt. Mike Good, the program manager for LCS’s mission modules.

Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, Freedom’s Blue Crew commissioning commander, who has since moved on to a position on the Joint Staff, anticipated criticism of the Freedom’s taking extra people. It might be seen as an early concession that the ship can’t operate in the real world with the small crew for which it was designed, but that’s not so, he said.

“People are going to say, ‘Hey, this is more people than they said they’d need. They’re lying to us!’ ” he said. But just as an LCS will take aboard custom equipment to hunt submarines or mines, so too does it need custom gear — in this case, sailors — for a visit, board, search and seizure team, he said.

“VBSS is a manpower-intensive evolution. I did one deployment to the [northern Persian Gulf] and boarded 400 ships in three months. Sometimes, when you board those ships, you keep them, lock them down for five months at a time, and you need sailors aboard all the time when they’re in that condition.” An LCS can’t spare any of its 75 sailors — 40 multitasking core crew members and 35 sailors from a mission-module and an aviation detachment — so it needs the extra hands.

Good said Freedom’s 20 extra sailors would sleep in two 12-rack berthing modules, about the size of shipping containers, which will ride in the ship’s multiuse mission spaces. While the 75 core crew members will stay in the ship’s integral berthing spaces — which include double-tall racks, rooms of no more than eight sailors, and a head and shower to each berthing area — the VBSS sailors’ lodging will be more like those of sailors on a destroyer, he said.

“The racks are exactly the same — there’s a vent fan, a night light above it, there’s the same strap to hold you in. They’re that creamy beige color with the little step,” Good said.

However, the berthing containers will not include showers or heads for the extra ship riders. For the trial deployment, sailors will use the core crew’s heads and showers, and Naval Sea Systems Command will look into developing a new stand-alone restroom container for future use with, but not part of, the extra-sailor berthing modules.

“As you might imagine, it’s a better strategy to separate them,” Good said.

Gabrielson said the VBSS team using the crew’s heads and showers “was a nonissue.”

“It’s not something where people are gonna go, ‘This is bad,’ ” he said — but it could be tricky given the geography of the ship.

Many of the ship’s heads and showers are inside the eight-person berthing spaces, meaning VBSS team members will have to enter crew members’ berthing rooms to use their facilities. Chiefs and officers also share heads and showers.

In addition to the extra sailors, Freedom’s “tailored” surface warfare package will include two 33-foot rigid-hull inflatable boats for its VBSS sailors; its two Mk 46 30mm guns mounted on the multiuse boxes atop the superstructure; an armed MH-60S Seahawk; and “quite a collection of boarding team equipment,” Good said, including flak jackets, small-arms weapons, grappling hooks, and specialized gear for at-sea boardings.

Freedom will not take a Fire Scout unmanned helicopter or any of the maritime robots it’s designed to carry, nor will it carry the Non-Line-of-Sight missiles designed to be part of its surface mission package. That weapon, being developed with the Army, is still being tested.

Good, Gabrielson and Capt. Bernard Gately, NavSea’s assistant program manager for LCS, spoke at a Surface Navy Association event Nov. 12 outside Washington, D.C. In addition to the details about Freedom’s deployment, Gately announced the Navy planned to commission its second LCS, Independence, on Jan. 16.