Gunner’s mate 1/c Eric Jensen likes the system. “The gun is easy to use. You can take somebody who is unfamiliar with the gun to knowing the system in a week, or a week and a half. The 3-P ammunition works great.”

Jensen said the gun is directed using an EO/IR camera. “These cameras work well, but we’re getting a better camera. When I deployed to Fifth Fleet we used the camera all the time. It wasn’t built for continuous use, but that was probably the most tactically important piece of gear we had on board. Having that optical capability was priceless.”

During the Air Asia search and recovery effort, a mobile diving and salvage unit was embarked aboard Fort Worth. Using Fort Worth’s 11-meter RHIBS was a significant advantage for the divers because they were are able to bring their ROV and side scan sonar onboard the 11-meter rib, and have two of them operating simultaneously to cover more area.

Desmond said shallow draft is one of Fort Worth’s biggest advantages. “We only draw about 5 meters, or about 15 feet. That allowed us work closely with the Republic of Korea Navy during the Foal Eagle 15 exercise off the Korean Peninsula. We worked with one of their patrol [vessels] that had a similar shallow draft, and we were able to operate with them pretty close to the shore; obviously closer than what a DDG would be able to.

The 11-meter RHIBS were employed in Korea to bring Marines ashore, giving LCS an expeditionary role, too.

During the Air Asia search and recovery effort, a mobile diving and salvage unit was embarked aboard Fort Worth. Using Fort Worth’s 11-meter RHIBS was a significant advantage for the divers because they were are able to bring their ROV and side scan sonar onboard the 11-meter rib, and have two of them operating simultaneously to cover more area.

Watch team

Fort Worth has two watch-standers on the bridge and one engineer – the officer of the deck (OOD) and the junior officer of the deck (JOOD). They have control over what occurs out at sea, which is pretty similar to what you see on traditional platforms. The JOOD will handle external bridge-to-bridge communications, running the checklists on board to ensure safe operation, and manage any special evolutions. They both maintain radar contact and, of course, visual scans of the area to make sure that the ship is operating safely. The readiness control officer (RCO) is the equivalent of the EOOW (engineering officer of the watch) on a traditional ship.

“We’re unlike destroyers and a lot of other traditional ships because we have steerable jets vice propellers and rudders. We have two outboard jets, port and starboard, that are independently steerable. Speed is determined by the position of the thrust control levers. All the way ahead on both of them will be top speed for the current configuration of the power plant. We can use diesels, gas turbines, or both. We can steer either the rudder equivalent of 30 degrees to port or starboard. These buckets can close and reverse. In the open position we move forward; but we can close the buckets and direct the thrust of the jets forward to move the ship aft. In addition to the steerable jets, we have two boost jets. These are fixed, they can’t be repositioned, and they provide the ship the ability to reach its 40-knot speed,” Desmond said.

Off-hull training

“The reason why we’re able to operate the ship with just two people is we have a pretty extensive training setup ashore,” said Cmdr. Matthew Kawas, commanding officer of LCS Crew 103. “If we want to take an officer who is used to driving a traditional ship and turn them into an LCS driver, we’ll send them to Newport Rhode Island for about six weeks at Surface Warfare Officers School. They get an extensive navigation and ship handling experience in the simulators that are pretty much a mock-up of what you see here. The training is taught by master mariners who are commercial high-speed ferry pilots. When our officers know how to drive a high speed ship, we bring them back to San Diego where we have an entire LCS simulator with the bridge, engineering, and CIC all together, and they learn how to tactically drive the ship, and our tactical action officers (TAOs) learn how to fight the ship, and then they join the crew.”

“About once a year we take the entire watch team through about three to four weeks of training scenarios ranging from search and rescue to combat scenarios to ship handling,” Kawas said. “We can simulate getting underway from the pier here at Changi Naval Base and heading out to sea through the Malacca Strait to making a landing at the Sembawag Naval Base on the other side of the island. We can do all of that in the trainers, and we simulate whatever conditions we want. We can fully get certified for navigation and complete about 80 percent of our certifications we need as a crew, in the simulators, and during our off-hull training. So that there’s only a little bit of that training we need to do when we get to the local ship which right now, is the USS Freedom, the CONUS-based ship out of the two-ship pair. We’ll go to that ship and finish our final qualifications, do our fleet exercise, and then we’re fully ready to go on deployment. We fly over to meet the deployed ship. When we arrived here, we were able to get underway within a day after we took over the ship. And we headed up towards northeast Asia.”