US NAVY - Littoral Combat Ship Cut Plan Reopens Navy Rift

The two Littoral Combat Ship variants, LCS-1 Freedom (far) and LCS-2 Independence (near).

By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.             on January 17, 2014 at 4:30 AM

CRYSTAL CITY: The Littoral Combat Ship was supposed to be one of the fastest things in the fleet, but it seems like the skeptics – and the sequester – have caught up with it. The question is, what’s next?After a Pentagon memo  recommended slashing the program by more than a third — from 52 ships to 32 — its backers came out swinging. “We have heard for the past 12 years about the importance of the LCS to our future Navy,” House seapower subcommittee chairman Rep. Randy Forbes said in a press release Thursday afternoon. “Although this platform has had its share of development difficulties, I believe it has a necessary role to play in the future fleet.”What’s more, LCS proponents have at least a year to reverse the decision. The Navy is locked into a long-term contract for Littoral Combat Ships that ends in fiscal year 2015 with the purchase of the 24th LCS. Short of breaking that contract and paying penalties, the Pentagon can do nothing to LCS in the budget it is currently preparing to send to Congress. “This year is another oversight year and next year is a decision year,” one Hill source told me. What will really decide the LCS’s fate is the next contract, which will be in the 2016 budget.It’s also possible that there could be no new contract and no 2016 money at all, which would end the program at 24 ships. The 32-ship number leaked this week certainly has the smell of an internal Pentagon compromise between going the full 52 and stopping dead at 24. Noted naval analyst, author, and LCS critic Norman Polmar still hopes the slam-on-the-breaks school will prevail: “24 might be a better total number for the current LCS program,” he told me in an email.Then there’s the bigger picture. However many Littoral Combat Ships are cut – and at least some will be in this brutal budget environment – the Navy needs to start thinking hard about what to buy instead. The deeper the cut, the faster they need to figure something out. Stopping LCS at 24 ships would have given the Navy only a year to figure out its next move. Even the 32-ship compromise means the last pair of ships would be bought no later than fiscal 2019, an eyeblink for developing a new warship design.“With 20 fewer LCSs in the plan, I presume the Navy must be looking at another small or medium-sized combatant,” Eric Labs, a naval expert at the Congressional Budget Office, said Thursday at the Surface Navy Association’s annual conference. But what is the other ship? And for what purpose?LCS is meant to enter shallow waters — the littorals — in order to either clear minefields, hunt enemy submarines, or fend off fast attack boats, depending on which of three plug-and-play “mission modules” is fitted to the basic hull. (Just to complicate things further, there are two radically different hull designs: a kind of giant speedboat built by Lockheed Martin and Marinette Marine; and a spaceship-like trimaran built by General Dynamics and Austal).Are those three missions the right priorities?, asked Congressional Research Service analyst Ronald O’Rourke. If so, are they best done by the same ship? If so, should that ship be small and fast, like the LCS?“What’s amazing to me is just how often and how far way the discussion of LCS drifted from these central questions,” O’Rourke said. Much of the fault was the Navy’s. For a decade, he said, “the Navy continued to throw more missions into the discussion and to further confuse the issue of what it is we were really supposed to be trying to accomplish with this program.”But the mistakes began at the very beginning, O’Rourke went on: “The Navy, prior to announcing the LCS as its preferred solution for performing those missions, never performed a rigorous analysis of multiple concepts to show that a small, fast, modular ship was in fact the best and most promising way to do it.”So controversial was the small-and-fast approach, in fact, that some in the Navy dubbed the LCS the “little f*cking ship.” The Pentagon’s notoriously independent Director of Operational Test & Evaluation said the design was too small and too lightly built to keep fighting after it took a hit in combat — not a fatal flaw for the supporting roles it was meant to fill, but definitely a flaw.The LCS did get built — after massive initial cost overruns now under control — although maintenance problems have marred its performance, including electrical plant failures that left it adrift on its first overseas deployment. Now, after surviving all these problems and criticism, the program’s fate is again in question.Cutting the Littoral Combat Ship reopens a debate at the heart of the Navy: Should the fleet continue its traditional approach of buying a relatively small number of relatively large ships, like its current workhorse the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke destroyer, or buy more, smaller vessels, like LCS? In fact, LCS was itself a scaled-up version of the late Adm. Arthur Cebrowski’s “Streetfighter” concept, a vessel intended to be so small and cheap it was effectively expendable. In the information age, Cebrowski argued, you didn’t have to put all your weapons and sensors on a single big ship: You could have multiple small vessels linked by a network and working in concert. If any one of them got sunk, you had plenty more.Most Navy officers were aghast, unsurprisingly. Ever since the USS Constitution – “Old Ironsides” – with her famously cannonball-resistant hull, the US Navy has wanted ships that could take a hit and keep on fighting. The counterargument: In an era when a single suicide boat can cripple a destroyer (the USS Cole) or a single missile a frigate (the USS Stark), the Old Ironsides model just doesn’t apply anymore.“These two sides in the debate almost seem to be talking past each other,” O’Rourke said. “A key point of departure, a fork in the road that sends the groups down different paths, has to do with a fundamental difference they appear to have on future surface ship survivability.”The small-ship insurrectionists believe that bigger doesn’t mean much more robust, not in the face of modern weapons, and that incoming threats move too fast to stop. The Navy mainstream believes that size does matter and self-defense is possible. The Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, in particular argues that ships can protect themselves in the 21st century if they limit their own tell-tale electromagnetic emissions, deceive enemy targeting systems with electronic jamming or cyber warfare, and as a last resort shoot down incoming missiles with anti-missile missiles of their own — or, in the future, lasers.That’s a debate that goes well beyond the Littoral Combat Ship and whatever comes after it. It also goes to how the Navy replaces its aging Arleigh Burke destroyers after it cancelled one replacement program and truncated the other, the DDG-1000, at just three ships. Upgraded Arleigh Burkes are now supposed to stay in service until 2072.The Navy is already contemplating a “Future Surface Combatant,” said Rear Adm. Thomas Rowden, the Navy’s director of surface warfare (aka staff section N96). It will be “the later part of the ’20s when we’re going to start contracting for these… to replace our cruisers,” the aging Ticonderoga class, Rowden told the Surface Navy Association conference.The admiral had a slide of what the new vessel might look like, but he made clear fundamental choices were on the table. That includes questioning the Navy’s longstanding preference for large, versatile “multi-mission ships” like the current DDG-51s, he said. What he did not say was that the alternative would be something like the LCS, which can do only one mission at a time, depending on which mission module is currently aboard.One thing the Navy definitely does want is more electrical power to run everything from radars to jammers to future laser weapons and rail guns, as well as the ship’s propellers, off a single integrated system. “I think it is about integrated power on the right size ship. I think it is about the right weapons,” Rowden said. “I think it is about affordability, affordability, affordability.” For the foreseeable future, affordability 

Warga kapal KD Jebat selamat

KUALA LUMPUR: Kapal Frigat Tentera Laut Diraja Malaysia (TLDM) yang berpengkalan di Lumut, Perak, KD Jebat mengalami insiden pergeseran dengan kapal dagang tidak dikenali di 24 batu nautika Barat Laut Permatang Sedepa, Selangor, kira-kira 3 pagi tadi.

Jurucakap Jabatan Perhubungan Awam Markas Tentera Laut berkata, ketika kejadian anggota sedang membuat rondaan di Selat Melaka dalam keadaan hujan dan laut agak bergelora.

Katanya, akibat pergeseran itu, KD Jebat mengalami kerosakan kecil namun tidak menjejaskan pelaksanaan operasi.

"Semua warga kapal selamat dan tindakan pantas pegawai pemerintah serta kecekapan warga kapal berjaya menyelamatkan kapal daripada kerosakan teruk.

"Kami sudah menubuhkan Lembaga Siasatan bagi menyiasat punca sebenar kejadian dan kenal pasti kapal dagang berkenaan," katanya dalam kenyataan.

Pentagon Cuts LCS Buy to 32 Ships

Jan. 15, 2014 - 07:37PM   |  

By CHRISTOPHER P. CAVAS  

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The littoral combat ship Freedom, left, and the future USS Coronado. (Navy)

WASHINGTON — The office of the secretary of defense (OSD) has directed the US Navy to limit its overall buy of littoral combat ships to a total of 32 ships, foregoing 20 more of the small, fast and controversial warships, Pentagon sources have confirmed.

The decision, in a Jan. 6 memo from Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Christine Fox, came after the Pentagon received its final 2015 budget guidance from the White House. Several major acquisition decisions, including direction on what to do with the LCS program, were awaiting the numbers from the Office of Management and Budget.

The program of record calls for the service to build 52 littoral combat ships, built to two designs, one from Lockheed Martin and the other from Austal USA. Three of the ships are in service, and a fourth ship will be commissioned in April. Another 20 are under construction or on order, split evenly between the two prime contractors.

Asked for comment, Navy spokesman Cmdr. Ryan Perry said “we’ll continue to work with OSD on LCS acquisition plans.” No date has been announced for the submission of the 2015 budget to Congress, but it’s expected to take place no earlier than mid-February.

Over the past year, the Navy and OSD have debated cutting the LCS program — along with discussions about the future of virtually every significant defense acquisition program. Various alternatives have been put forth, including ending the buy at 24 ships. It’s believed that OSD’s initial guidance in January was to cut the program even further. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, a strident defender of the LCS program, personally argued to restore at least a portion of the future ship buy, Pentagon sources said. One Navy source familiar with the situation declared that the decision to end LCS at 32 ships isn’t yet a done deal. “This isn’t over yet,” the source said.

The reduction is not surprising to the Navy, but it is a disappointment to many senior officials and officers who have defended the ships. Unlike most warships, LCS doesn’t carry a major load of weapons and sensors, but rather features a large mission bay and adaptable systems to accommodate a range of mission modules — equipment fashioned to perform specific warfare tasks such as anti-submarine or counter-mine missions. OSD has long harbored a variety of LCS critics, who each year have sought to limit the program’s scope. The concept, under development for over a decade, remains hotly contested within the Navy’s surface warfare community.

A major political feature of the LCS program was that the 52 ships represented a major portion — nearly one-sixth — of the 306-ship fleet. Among other issues, the Navy is in the earliest stages of thinking about what sort of ship might be useful and affordable instead of an LCS.

It’s also not clear that any decision has been made as to how the eight ships remaining to be ordered would be structured. Current plans call for two ships per year, one from each builder, starting in 2016. Options would include four ships per year, or a down-select to only one of the LCS designs. ■

M80 Stiletto next generation littoral combat vessel

The M80 Stiletto was developed for high-speed military missions in shallow, littoral and near-shore waters

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The future of offshore patrol could, however, lie in the design of the US next generation vessel - the M80 Stiletto.

Constructed with carbon-fibre materials, the M80 posses a unique hull design allowing the vessel to achieve speed, ride quality, payload capability and provision for unmanned vehicle support that is currently unmatched in the naval field.

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Related project

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M80 Stiletto Next-Generation Littoral VesselThe M80 Stiletto is a prototype naval ship manufactured by the M Ship Company, to meet specific requirements of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation.

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The vessel, currently in field trials conducted by the US Department of Defence, is designed for high-speed military missions in shallow, littoral and near-shore waters. The twin-M-hull vessel is capable of reaching speeds of up to 60kt, creating an air cushion by recapturing the bow wave and using its energy in order to produce less drag.

While also posing greater energy efficiency, fleet costs are reduced due to higher reliability of construction and maintenance, both sure to be increasingly attractive for a navy forced to contend with budget restraints.

The M80 has previously participated in Trident Warrior joint-force exercises and has seen action in Colombia, participating in shallow-water drug interdiction operations that resulted in the capture of 1,800lb of cocaine

see video M80

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Holland Class Offshore Patrol Vessels, Netherlands

Holland Class offshore patrol vessels (OPVs) were built by Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding for the Royal Netherlands Navy. A series of four OPVs are named after Dutch coastal provinces.

The Royal Netherlands Navy deploys the OPVs in the Caribbean and the North Sea. The vessels can support international task forces in anti-piracy missions, counter-drug operations and block ships in coastal areas during crises.

With the ability to carry supplies and more than 100 people, the vessels can also carry out emergency missions.

Holland Class OPV design and features

"With the ability to carry supplies and more than 100 people, the vessels can also carry out emergency missions."

The vessel has a broad platform to provide stability in marine seas. Its stealthy design incorporates innovative techniques to reduce radar reflectivity. The body is built with thick steel, which has a lower tensile strength. It is heavier than the steel used for frigates and can resist the impact of small-calibre weapons.

The hull is stretched and the bridge and superstructure are placed aftwards, to help optimise the seakeeping capabilities of the vessel. The speed is cut down to reduce fuel consumption and increase the range of the vessel. Two rigid-hulled inflatable boats (RHIBs) and one NH-90 helicopter are also carried to support interception operations.

The Holland Class is also equipped with a CAMS-Force Vision integrated fire control system and two monitors for non-lethal protection and fire fighting. The OPV also features a gas citadel, explosion-resistant structures, redundant and decentralised systems.

The vessel is fitted with highly automated systems, including a shore support and management system, calamity system, warning system and monitoring system. The patrol vessel has an overall length of 108.4m, a width of 16m and a draught of 4.55m. Displacement of the vessel is 3,750t.

The OPV can accommodate 50 ship crew members and up to 40 non-listed persons, including a helicopter detachment, law enforcement detachment (LED), a platoon of marines or a medical team. Approximately 100 evacuees can also be boarded. The ship can sail at a speed 21.5kt. Its maximum range is 5,000nm.

Holland Class offshore patrol vessel construction details

In December 2007, the Royal Netherlands Navy signed a contract with Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding in Vlissingen, the Netherlands, for the construction of four patrol vessels.

Construction was carried out in parallel, with the first two at Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding in Vlissingen, the Netherlands, and the remaining at Damen's sister shipyard in Galatz, Romania. The project cost was estimated at €467.8m ($687.9m). These ships were built between 2008 and 2012, and the fourth ship was built in 2013.

OPV guns and weapons

The main gun is a 76mm Oto Melara Super Rapid gun. It has a firing rate of 120 rounds a minute and a range of 16km. The vessel is also fitted with a 30mm Oto Melara Marlin WS gun, two 12.7mm Oto Melara Hitrole NT guns and two 12.7mm M2HB machine guns. The guns onboard can be remotely operated.

NH-90 helicopter facilities

The patrol vessel has a fully-equipped hangar to support the operations of a NH-90 helicopter. The helicopter is equipped with homing torpedoes and a sensor system. The sonar and radar on the helicopter allows it to make observations beyond the radar horizon of the OPV. Space is available under the helicopter to accommodate containers of relief supplies.

Holland Class OPV sensor technology

The OPV is the first vessel in the Royal Netherlands Navy to be fitted with Thales Integrated Sensor & Communication Systems (ISCS).

"The Royal Netherlands Navy deploys the OPVs in the Caribbean and the North Sea."

The system integrates communication and optical sensors, RF systems and radars.

The sensor suite includes a Sea Master 400 air warning radar, a Watcher 100 active phased-array surface detection and tracking radar, identification friend or foe (IFF) system, electro-optic or infra-red panoramic surveillance system, a combat management system, a command and information centre, a mine detection sonar, RADIAC sensors and an infra-red Gatekeeper / electro-optical warning system. The OPV can make observations within a range of 140nm.

Equipped with a combined electric or diesel (CODELOD) propulsion system, the patrol vessel is powered with two MAN 12V28/33 diesel engines rated at 5,400kW, fitted to a Renk gearbox.

Each propulsion system drives a Rolls-Royce controllable pitch propeller. The electric propulsion is principally deployed for low-speed missions and minimises fuel consumption, while maximising the vessel's endurance.

The keel for the first vessel, Hr Ms Holland (P840), was laid in December 2008. It was launched in February 2010 and commissioned in May 2011.

The keel for Hr. Ms. Zealand (P841) was laid in October 2009 and the vessel was launched in November 2010. Zealand commenced its sea acceptance trials (SAT) in August 2011. It was commissioned in October 2011.

The third vessel, Hr. Ms. Friesland (P842), was laid in November 2009 and launched in November 2010. The SAT for the Friesland began in September 2011 and was completed in November 2011. The vessel was commissioned in April 2012.

The keel for the last in the class, Hr. Ms. Groningen (P843), was laid in April 2010. It was launched in April 2011 and commissioned in November 2013.

The US Navy’s 2014: How they going to face challenges in 2014 and coming years? Subs, Cyber, & Cheap Support Ships

By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on January 06, 2014 at 5:01 AM

The US Navy, is, hands down, the service in the best shape for 2014. Every act of belligerent idiocy from Beijing – and there’ve been a lot of them lately – makes the Navy budget an easier sell. In stark contrast to the Army, the Navy has the central role in the new Pacific-focused strategy, a high-tech threat justifying high-cost programs, a highly visible role in peacetime engagement around the world, and, perhaps most crucial, a clear set of missions.
Submarines are the spearhead of the Navy’s Pacific vision, but that’s not surprising given that the Chief of Naval Operations is a submariner. What’s less expected is how intensely Adm. Jonathan Greenert has gotten religion on electronic warfare and cyber, two things submariners historically don’t have to deal with. (Of course, the Navy boasts a redoubtable history as a service on the cutting edge of intelligence, which puts them squarely in the park for cyber operations.) Greenert sees those  as two sides of the same shield, a way for aircraft and surface ships to hide using the electromagnetic spectrum just as submarines have long hidden beneath the waves and under thermoclines.
The third point of Greenert’s trident is something unexpected not just for a submariner but for the Navy, which is traditionally obsessed with big, costly and highly capable combatants – battleships before 1941, aircraft carriers thereafter – at the expense of less exciting vessels. But Greenert is pushing for larger numbers of cheaper ships, ships he admits are less battle-worthy, to handle the low-threat regions of the world and thus free up the submarines, destroyers, and other high-end combatants to concentrate on the Chinese dragon.
In some ways, it’s actually easier to see what Greenert is doing from Beijing’s perspective than from Washington’s. Imagine yourself a People’s Liberation Army strategist standing on the shore of China looking east.
The first line of US naval forces confronting you, you can’t even see, though you know they’re out there: nuclear-powered submarines, especially the newer Virginia class that both the Navy and key Congressional backers insist the government must keep buying at a rate of two a year. China’s own sub fleet outnumbers but hardly outclasses the American ones, while China’s most dangerous weapons, its land-based missiles, can’t hit submarines. US subs can attack targets both at sea and ashore with a mix of missiles and torpedoes, and just as important they can spy, unseen, on Chinese forces – including, in the near future, by launching drones – and report back to the rest of the fleet.
The second line, at least, is on the surface – though Greenert’s emphasis on electronic warfare may well hide it behind a buzzing confusion of jamming and deceptive signals: the Arleigh Burke-class Aegis missile destroyers, which will be the workhorse of the fleet well past 2050. The surface ships are easier targets than the submarines but can carry far more missiles, not just for attack, but also for defense against incoming aircraft and ballistic missiles, making them important protectors of the fleet and bases on land.
Only in the third line do you get to aircraft carriers, shielded by the Aegis ships and by distance: While carrier advocates insist they can survive a war of long-range missiles, there’s enough doubt that few commanders would push them too far forward. That fact helps explain Greenert’s emphasis on new long-range and unmanned aircraft that can outrange conventional fighters.
Beyond these three lines containing China – or any lesser power that either replicates or purchases Chinese equipment – you’ll find the rest of the Navy doing missions around the world: amphibious warfare ships deploying Marines to disputed islands or disaster zones, Littoral Combat Ships clearing the seas of mines or small armed boats, and, increasingly, ships crewed not by Navy sailors but civilians.
“We have a need for 35 amphib[ious] ships,” Adm. Greenert told reporters at a US Naval Institute conference back in October, but the Navy just cannot afford that many. So to free up battle-worthy amphibs for missions in high-threat zones – say the South China Sea or the Persian Gulf – the Navy is increasingly building non-combatant ships to handle low-threat missions: the small Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV), derived from an Australian ferry, and the large Mobile Landing Platform (MLP), derived from a commercial oil tanker. (Some MLPs will have flight decks, upgrading them to something called an Afloat Forward Staging Base or AFSB).
Operated by Military Sealift Command and crewed by civilians, the JHSVs and MLPs are cheaper substitutes for the amphibs and can perform just as well in peacetime missions like disaster relief or even wartime missions against poorly armed opponents. Said Greenert, “they resonate better with the type of operation that we are currently using very expensive high tech big capacity ships to do, when we could use a less expensive, very functional ship.”
Greenert thinks much the same way about the Littoral Combat Ship. Originally conceived as a close quarters “street fighter” for shallow water warfare, the LCS is instead becoming a kind of Swiss Navy Knife, equipped with plug-and-play equipment modules – still in development – that let it clear mines, hunt submarines, shoot down small fast attack boats, or, if you take the modules out, just carry stuff around at the same speed as the JHSV but with better protection. The LCS is significantly more fragile than an Aegis destroyer, an amphib, or even some of the older frigates it is replacing, but Greenert sees it as sufficiently survivable – and much cheaper – for most Navy missions around the world. That, in turn, lets him focus his limited number of high-end ships against the high-end threat.

Welcome 2014, Happy New year Mate

Previously i never failed to attend the new year celebration, at RMN Lumut  Officers Mess,  fully dress with Mess Kit and partner, invited artist and raffle draw  and saying goodbye to the current year with  most commonly sung song for English-speakers on New Year's eve, "Auld Lang Syne"  an old Scottish song.

This is a Navy event, so there is a bar to offer the beverages of choice.

Nowadays, fireworks show is most exciting especially with kids around.

But for one thing for sure, my perspective of coming years always positive and goodbye 2013..i never look back whatever passed by

I hope i can post better articles, more news and get more cooperation from other writer. 

Welcome 2014...