Some interesting documentation on the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program suggest the CG may have a better handle on the required accommodations for the Offshore Patrol Cutter, than the Navy had for the LCS. Congress required a report on the manning of the LCS ships and it is out. You can read it here. It is surprisingly short. Once you get passed the forwarding letters, there are actually only four pages of actual content.

To put things in context, the LCS program has tried hard to reduce manpower costs. The Coast Guard agrees that manning is the largest single cost over the life cycle of a ship and estimates that it represents 60 to 70% of the operating costs. The LCS program is also attempting to deploy three new sets of equipment (mission modules) that are still not fully developed, and for which, support requirements are not fully understood. With as much uncertainty as accompanied these programs, you might have thought they would have left themselves some wiggle room in terms of adding extra people.

The LCSs were originally to have a core crew of 40, plus 20 for an aviation detachment, and 15 for mission module personnel. Total 75, so they provided how many racks? You guessed it, 75. In 2012 the Aviation detachment was increased from 20 to 23–Change the design, add three more racks. Now they have decided a core crew of 40 cannot cut it, so they are adding 10 more as a pilot program, and they are still not sure 15 is the right number for the mine-countermeasures detachment. Change the design again. They are now going from two high to three high to make room for the additional crew.

“Conclusion: Based on current analysis and lessons learned from FREEDOM’s deployment, LCS will be configured to support up to 98 total personnel, to include core crew, Mission Package detachment, and aviation detachment. Projected costs to modify ships to accommodate this manning level are $600,000 for LCS 3 and $700,000 for LCS 4.”

But the problem is not just number of racks,

“This habitability modification does not include modifying the ship for other necessities that come with increased crew size, such as the capability for increased food storage, potable water generation, and sewage collection. The habitability modifications for LCS 5 and follow-on ships in the initial block buy will require a design and engineering study which will cost approximately $6 million to complete both ship classes –$3 million for the INDEPENDENCE class and $3 million for the FREEDOM class. This cost is associated with the non-recurring engineering elements required to modify each ship for increased food storage, potable water consumption, solid waste storage, and changes to the HVAC equipment. A design and engineering study will determine the change order cost of each following ship in the block buy. Future programming submissions will fund these habitability modifications.”

“The costs to modified follow on ships will be addressed in future budgets.”

The Coast Guard’s latest Manpower Estimate for the Offshore Patrol Cutters (OPCs), completed 18 March 2011, was 104 (15 officers, 9 CPOs, 80 E-6 and below) plus  an aviation detachment (five personnel) and Ship’s Signals Exploitation Space (SSES) detachment (seven personnel) for a total of 116. Accommodations are planned for at least 120 (threshold requirement) and hopefully as many as 126 (“objective”).

I’m not sure that will be enough, even though the Coast Guard has apparently been more realistic in its manning assumptions, the manpower estimate does make some optimistic assumptions and it recognizes these. They conclude:

“The risk of crew size and total system personnel requirements changes remain significant as the program remains dynamic. Any labor drivers that we cannot eliminate through engineering and design, but are required to achieve mission capability and capacity will be mortgaged with increased manpower requirements.”

If history is any guide, we can expect crew requirements to increase over the life of these ships. They say the Navy expectation is 10%, but their ships don’t live as long. Additional systems and the manpower to operate and support them are added. 327s, which began life with a complement of 62 in 1934, had a complement of 144 in the 1980s. If they should go to war, manpower-intensive systems that did not seem to make sense when looking at a 30+ year service life, start to make sense when you are just trying to keep the ship from being sunk for the duration of the conflict. It was not uncommon for the crews of ships to double from their peacetime complement before the start of WWII until the end of the war in 1945. Destroyers, which were similar in size to these ships, had crews approaching 300 even though 50% of their hulls was stuffed with propulsion machinery and they had virtually no accommodations above the main deck. 

Providing excess capacity and relatively roomy accommodations upon commissioning, buys much greater flexibility over the life of the ship.

Greenpeace attempts to disrupt drilling operations in the Arctic:

http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/Shots-Fired-in-Ongoing-Russian-Arctic-Oil-Protest-Activists-Arrested-2013-09-18/

Russian Coast Guard seizes Greenpeace’s vessel:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24170129

We can expect this sort of activity in our waters too. Will the USCG use similar tactics?

Looks like I will be otherwise occupied for about a week, so content through next weekend will be light to none existent. I will try to drop in occasionally. Hope to be back to full strength week of 22 Sept.

I found this video over at CIMSEC where they posted a short review of the progress in the use of UAVs,

I had not been thinking of using UAVs from icebreakers, but it makes a lot of sense. As we have seen, flying helicopters in the Arctic is still a dangerous business. In addition to removing people from a relatively dangerous environment, UAVs have the potential advantage of much longer endurance. The UAV in the video is the Austrian built Schiebel S-100 that is used by the Chinese Navy as well as the French and German Navies and many other agencies.

gCaptain is reporting a helicopter operating from the Canadian Icebreaker Amundsen crashed in the Arctic killing the pilot, the Amundsen’s CO and a scientist.

More here.

Note: I wrote this for CIMSEC which has a broader, largely non-Coast Guard readership. It is post there as well. What goes unsaid is that cutters are well equipped to assume those few cruiser functions that can still only be handled by surface vessels. 

Looking back at Corbett’s writings, he talks a great deal about the need for cruisers, but technology and terminology have moved on and the cruisers of Corbett’s days are not what we think of as cruisers today. Corbett’s “Some Principles of Maritime Strategy” was published in 1911. There were some truly large cruisers built in the years leading up to World War I, but Corbett decried these in that their cost was in conflict with the cruiser’s “essential attribute of numbers.”

A typical cruiser that came out of the thinking of the day was the Active Class (1912). 3,440 tons, 26 knots, and ten 4″ guns. Many of the cruisers of the day were even smaller, many under 3,000 tons.

HMS Fearless, an Active class cruiser

Corbett often referred back to the Nelsonian period. His idea of a cruiser was the smallest warship that could undertake prolonged independent operations, frigates, sloops of war, and brigs, even schooners. Their missions were:

• Protection of our own maritime commerce
• Denial of the enemy’s commerce, including blockade and commerce raiding
• Scouting (ISR in the current vocabulary)
• Screening the battlefleet (both anti-scouting to deny the enemy knowledge of own battlefleet and protection for the swarm of flotilla craft with torpedoes.)
• Communications

Of these he seemed to consider scouting for and screening the battlefleet, unfortunate, if necessary distractions from their primary duty of exercising control over maritime communications and commerce.

In the hundred plus years since Corbett’s writing, the number and types of naval platforms have proliferated and the roles once the exclusive domain of these relatively small surface ships have been assumed by other systems.

Radio replaced the dispatch carrying function of Nelson’s cruisers and improvements continually reduced the importance of the role for 20th century cruisers.

The torpedo boat destroyers first grew from what we would now call FACs into cruiser roles and cruiser size and now emerged as major strategic assets in their own right.

Submarines, which were little understood in Corbett’s time, quickly emerged as the premier commerce raider. Later they took on the role of countering their own kind, just as cruisers once did. They have scouted for and screened surface ships. They also grew into additional roles that make them in some respects inheritor of the battleship mantle as well as that of the cruiser.

Airplanes, also a recent innovation when Corbett wrote his classic, quickly became effective and essential scouts. They began to screen the fleet against the opposing “flotillas” including the enemies own planes. Flying from escort carriers or in the form of long range maritime patrol aircraft that took on the cruisers role of protecting commerce. During WWII they replaced the battleships’ guns.

More recently satellites also assume roles in scouting and communications.

Small surface ships can still do the missions Corbett identified, but it seems other systems may be able to do them as well or better. Are their still roles for the smallest warships that can undertake prolonged independent operations?

There are still some things only surface ships can do. What is enemy commerce is not always obvious. In many cases only a visit and search can determine if a vessel is innocent.

While aircraft and even submarines may protect our own commerce, when ships are attacked far from shore, only surface ships (and their embarked aircraft), can save the crews or bring damage control assistance.

These are certainly not jobs for Burke class destroyers, which are now, with BMD and land attack roles, essentially Capital Ships. We need some minimum number of ships to do these tasks which are essential to the exercise of sea control. Once we establish how many wee need, we can consider if the marginal cost of adding MCM, ASW, ASuW, and/or AAW capability is worthwhile. Frigates once filled this role, in addition to others, LCS are the only ships the Navy is currently building that might do these jobs. Some Coast Guard Cutters may also be appropriate. Somehow, I doubt we have enough, and I have doubts that they are adequately armed to deal with even medium sized merchant vessels without assistance.

Essentially we have a fleet of battleships of several types, CVNs, SSBNs, SSNS, DDGs, Amphibs. Simple and numerous “cruisers,” the smallest ships that can undertake prolonged independent operations, are almost non-existent.

“In no case can we exercise control by battleships alone. Their specialization has rendered them unfit for the work, and has made them too costly ever to be numerous enough. Even, therefore, if our enemy had no battle-fleet we could not make control effective with battleships alone. We should still require cruisers specialized for the work and in sufficient numbers to cover the necessary ground.”

Ref: “Some Principles of Maritime Strategy,” by Julian Stafford Corbett: http://eremita.di.uminho.pt/gutenberg/1/5/0/7/15076/15076-h/15076-h.htm