Navy's $670M Fighting Ship 'Not Expected to Be Survivable,' Pentagon Says (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Navy's $670M Fighting Ship 'Not Expected to Be Survivable,' Pentagon Says (2013)

wired.com

17 pointsbane6 comments

Small ships have never been "survivable" in the Navy. In that regard LCS is not a change.

We quite openly referred to our FFGs (the most capable warship LCS is to replace) as "missile/torpedo sponges" to protect the "high value units" the FFG was to escort. The other types of missions LCS is supposed to take on are handled today by even less capable craft (e.g. the MCMs doing minesweeping for us today could be sunk by any random nation's coast guard).

But even ignoring 'tin can' destroyers/frigates in the guided missile age, Naval strategy since the time of Alfred Mahan has been for combat to be between major fleet vessels on either side with smaller ships simply playing a harassing or auxiliary role.

The idea is that if you can destroy their big decks, then their remaining little decks couldn't appreciably resist your remaining big decks anyways. The experience of WWII actually served to mostly bear this theory out (in the context of fleet-on-fleet engagements) except that the carrier became the most destructive ship afloat, not the battleship.

So it makes sense that LCS is not expected to be survivable. I think a lot of the confusion might come from the idea that people hear so much about LCS that they expect it's some kind of very powerful upcoming warship, which is not the case at all. It's nothing more than a modern frigate, which is about the smallest kind of surface ship that has any right to be called a "real warship" at all.

Note that this article is a year old. The USS Freedom has been operating in Singapore and the Philippines this past year. (Though it's had quite a number of mechanical problems besetting its cruises).

Startups are all about risking failure to push the envelope. The military, on the other hand, is apparently not allowed.

In most startups, failure doesn't result in death.

If you're talking about naval vessels in combat, people are going to die no matter what. If you make LCS up-armored to be more survivable then you buy less of them, and the ones you do buy go slower and have a deeper draft which means they can't go as near the coast, which in turn completely changes their military effectiveness, which can then lead to even more deaths somewhere else down the line as a result of enemy action that strong-LCS couldn't interfere with.

How is writing some website with rails/whatever even slightly comparable to deploying hundred-million-dollar hardware designed for a combat environment with lifetimes of 30+ years?

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