u.s navy sends more literal combat ships to western pacific
amid tension rise in south china sea
in the next couple of years the navy hopes to have six independence class
literal combat ships operating in the western pacific at a given time
deep services top service warfare officer said this week
in the indy class we continue to deploy them to the western pacific trying to keep that 3.0
presence out there and build it to probably around six here in a few years vice admiral roy kitchner
the commander of naval surface forces told reporters in a thursday media call noting that
all the lcs that head to the western pacific are outfitted with the naval strike missile kitchener
said the service has used the independence class ships to demonstrate presence in the region
as far as operations they've been working with our partners we've operated them in an
australian exercise where we teamed them with some expeditionary mine countermeasure capability we've
used them for presence operations in the south china sea and the east china sea he said despite
the navy's push to decommission the lcs kitchener said he's planning as if he'll operate the class
in the coming years while the navy has already decommissioned uss independence lcs 2 the lead
ship of the indie class and plans to decommission uss coronado lcs4 the service has focused its
efforts on trying to retire the troubled freedom class ships which are based on the east coast
i continue to work to man train and equip everything that we have on the books and
i'll continue to do that so as i look at dcom strategies the only issue i have with those as
i try to influence is that i just can't be pushing decommissionings year by year because of the way
the money flows it makes it very difficult for me to generate readiness i suspect we
will have lcs ships well into the future and that's how i'm preparing them kitchener said
well the independence class ships based at naval stations in san diego
have been deploying to the indo-pacific the navy in recent years has sent the
freedom class lcs to u.s southern command for counter drug operations
the service recently deployed uss sioux city lcs 11 to the middle east in a first for the class
kitchener pointed to that deployment and said the navy has taken lessons from operating the lcs
in both the us seventh fleet and us fourth fleet to determine the best maintenance
strategies for the ships again we teamed them up with some expeditionary mcm capability
because that's something we're very interested in and had some really good success
they've also trained with partners we've executed some maintenance taken the lessons
we've learned from fourth fleet and also out in seventh fleet and tied that all together
he said of sioux city despite the navy's plans to decommission many of the freedom halls
kitchener said he plans to deploy them to us 5th fleet and us 6p
again still some things to look at and to work on as far as expeditionary maintenance but so far
leveraging those lessons from seventh and fourth fleet seem to have paid off pretty well
we're looking at continuing and to formalize a deployment strategy of
freedom-class ships to fifth and sixth fleet as we sundown patrol craft out there he said
the navy has made progress on fixing the reliability issues on the independence class ships
based in san diego with the help of its task force lcs effort future said we've
had a lot of success with reliability fixes and maintaining those ships on stations
operationally longer we still have some challenges as far as some of them systems and part of that is
an effort of making sure we have the right parts at the point of need there's some scrutiny in
the good work of task force lcs he said the swo boss pointed to uss charleston lcs 18
which has been operating in the indo-pacific this year as an example of that progress
we really dove in with some analytics on understanding what parts we really needed
out there and we just had some recent success with coolers and things like that that were
available for charleston to keep them running he said i've been pretty happy with that but there's
a lot more work to do particularly if we want to build the force out there we've gotten pretty
adept at three but i wouldn't say that we've mastered it yet so there's some more work to do
the naval sea systems command lcs strike team led by program executive office for unmanned and small
combatants rear admiral casey moton helped the service make fixes to uss oakland lcs 24 ahead
of its deployment the work that the strike team did the navsea engineers on reliability fixes
we pushed oakland out who's our latest deployer recent with our 20 to 25 of those fixes
most significantly we replaced all the water jet cylinders before they left because we kind
of figured out what the data we have how long they last you know what their life cycle is
kitchener said the navy also replaced some other cables and smart packs and pressure switches
for those water jets on oakland kitchener added the service will compare oakland's deployment to
that of uss tulsa lcs 16 which just returned and so that's going to be really good as we measure
how much more operational time we get with those fixes compared to a ship like tulsa who just
returned who had maybe zero to none to maybe five of those fixes so looking forward to seeing the
data that we get back on that one he said well the navy has sent the freedom class ships to us
fourth fleet for counter drug operations over the last few years kitchener said the service
has only recently figured out how to perform maintenance on the ships during deployments
in fourth fleet we continue to have pretty good success interdicting drug traffickers
the ship's very well suited for those kinds of missions and then working with our partners down
there we've also been able to start moving our maintenance around he told reporters
at first down there we were a little bit limited and we tried some things to move them
to different places and we've now been pretty good at developing some remote sites where we bring the
ships in and fly gear in and bring people in and repair from there as we transitioned to more of
the sailor focused maintenance we spent a lot of time on getting our sailors specialized training
buying some of the getting the rights to some of the gear we continue to do that kitchener said he
pointed to the crane at the back of the lcs that's used to deploy the unmanned influence sweep system
uis-s and the rigid hull inflatable boats rhibs as an example of where the navy had to train its
sailors as part of the maintenance model shift traditionally that's been very problematic for us
there are some mechanical issues with it and there are also some training issues with it
and some depth of knowledge issues quite frankly kitchener said we called it the space shot or the
moon shot where we really focused a big effort on how do we make this thing stay up all the time
and how do we overcome this challenge and we've learned an awful lot there got our
sailors trained while the navy has made headway on lcs reliability and maintenance kitchener
said the service needs to make more progress to ensure the ships are operating at full capacity