“LCS provides a series of capabilities – I like to call them payloads – that you can put on board the ship in a more modular fashion. LCS offers speed and that volume and the agility to take in systems – with a large flight deck, large hangar, and large mission bay. You can now tailor your capabilities to that,” Greenert says. “So you have one ship that can change its mission for a small – relatively small – footprint. We can move from place to place to be where we need to be and be there when we need to be.”
Cmdr. Timothy Wilke, left, commanding officer of the littoral combat ship USS Freedom (LCS 1) and Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. Jonathan Greenert, center, give the Chief of Staff of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force Adm. Kawano a tour of Freedom’s bridge. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Cassandra Thompson
“When you have a new concept, you don’t get all the exact planning right,” Greenert says. “The crew has made up the difference. I got some very interesting questions and feedback from them about whether the electronic warfare system is the right package; how do we integrate the aviation package; what’s the right makeup of the crew, because right now it’s a pretty senior crew, and there might need to be a broader spectrum of crew skill sets out here. These are some thoughtful, sophisticated thinking people. We wrote their comments down and will go back and look into them. Some of them were on board during the last deployment to the Caribbean. This is a group that’s very proud of their ship, and they want to get its concept on its way in a good way.”
“What we do down here is build partnership capacity through theater security cooperation, and preparing for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. We’ve had typhoons in Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand, and the tsunami of 2004 in Indonesia and around the region. This ship will work to find out what missions resonate with the needs of the nations down here, and we’ll work to bring our skills together in that area,” Greenert says. “It is a littoral combat ship, and this is one of the biggest littoral areas of the world. So, from that perspective, I’m very excited about the possibilities.”
“There are missions we don’t know about yet that I think that we will work and integrate into this ship,” Greenert says.
Transit On-time, but Not Trouble-free
Boatswain’s Mate 1st Class James Small, assigned to the littoral combat ship USS Freedom (LCS 1), directs a Royal Malaysian Navy Super Lynx helicopter as it does touch and go training on the flight deck during Exercise CARAT 2013. The Super Lynx, call sign RENTAP, is the first foreign helicopter to ever land on Freedom. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Cassandra Thompson
Travelling independently, Freedom made the 8,300 nautical mile transit from her homeport of San Diego to Singapore in 49 days, with several stops along the way. She had several power outages along the way as well, but Navy officials say they were not alarmed.
“In 32 years in the Navy I’ve never made a deployment – and I’ve made a lot of them – where we haven’t had some kind of engineering issue we had to deal with during the deployment. So, that’s not unexpected,” says Carney. “With Freedom, the ship and the crew have met every milestone since leaving San Diego. They deployed on time, they made their port visits on time, and they made it to Singapore on time. It’s one thing to sustain a ship when it’s off the coast of San Diego or off the coast of Singapore, but when you’re thousands of miles between Guam and Singapore, or Guam and Hawaii, that’s when the test of endurance and reliability really comes. This ship is out there deploying, by itself, without the benefit of a strike group or other ships to send over technicians or parts or test equipment, and they made every milestone and every wicket required of them. We’re looking forward to putting the ship through the paces in the next few months and learning a lot about the capabilities of the ship.”
“The Navy has put a lot of brain power and thought into how to operate this ship,” Wilke says. “Now we’re enacting that brain power.”
“I’ve had power outages out at sea before,” says Cmdr. Tim Wilke, commanding officer of the USS Freedom Gold crew. “It’s not my first time. What was unique about the power outages during this transit is the fact that by the time we were able to respond, the system had almost kicked back on, using what we call ‘dead bus logic.’ If it senses that it’s losing power on the bus, it will start up a standby generator. It worked as designed to restore the system on the ship. And the crew is well-trained and they responded accordingly, because it’s not only getting the electrical client up, it’s also getting the other systems up. So, we were able to get propulsion power back pretty quickly.”
“But of course we are looking closely at anything that takes place on this ship, especially since it’s the first one. We understand more every day about how we operate the ship or the equipment we have on board, and how we maintain it. We’re making improvements. We’ve gotten better from this ship to Fort Worth, and we’re getting better with Milwaukee,” Wilke says.