Another Triumph of Defense Procurement

The Litoral Combat Ship may lack sufficient firepower to do its job:

The U.S. Navy’s troubled Littoral Combat Ship, a vessel intended to be small and speedy for use in shallow waters close to shore, lacks the firepower it needs, a top U.S. navy commander said in a classified memo.

Vice Admiral Tom Copeman, the commander of naval surface forces, called on the Navy to consider a ship with more offensive capability after the first 24 vessels are built, according to a Navy official who asked not to be identified discussing the confidential document.

………

Producing a ship that can accommodate larger guns or Harpoon anti-ship missiles “would be a major redesign,” Polmar said in an interview. “It will be real work to put major weapons on the ship.”

Replacing the 57mm popgun with something larger might not even possible for the Independence class trimaran, because of the extremely narrow forward central hull.

The ship is a failure.

The modular nature of the ship does not work, because you have to return the ship to a US base, or you need to fly a  team out to a foreign port in order to swap out the modules, and the modular nature of the ship results in a hull that is much larger for a set of capabilities.

The savings in crewing has proved to be illusory, the current crew levels result in an overworked and ineffective crew, so they are adding berths.

The primary offensive system, the NLOS-LS, was canceled, and replaced with a system which has about 80% less range and a smaller warhead.

And that's ignoring the (probably fixable) facts that there are issues with hull cracks, corrosion, and leaking.

It's dead, Jim.

The entire concept was flawed.