Reporter's Notebook

Getting ready to sail

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It promises to be quite a show Saturday at the lakefront in Milwaukee, where the Navy’s top brass is scheduled to gather to commission the littoral combat ship Freedom. My colleague Andrew Scutro will be on hand and have a story for our Web site. For all the thousands of warships that have served in the U.S. fleet down the decades, there has never been one quite like the Freedom, and as photographer Rob Curtis and I gear up to walk aboard for its maiden cruise on Monday, it’s worth going over what makes the Freedom so different.

First, unlike the cruisers, destroyers and frigates that make up the bulk of today’s surface force, the Freedom has almost no capability built in. Instead, the ship is designed with an open working space below its flight deck, where it will take aboard one of three different sets of equipment in order to perform a specific mission. The ship will carry robot boats and submarines to hunt for enemy subs and mines, as well as a pair of small chainguns for use against small boats on the surface.  The Navy and the Army are also developing a new missile system, called NLOS, that will give the Freedom a slightly longer reach for hitting small, fast surface targets. The ship has two main weapons of its own: A 57mm gun and a Rolling Air Frame missile that it will carry no matter which mission package is aboard.

Second, the Freedom and its follow-on siblings will have radically different crewing arrangements than the Navy’s surface warships today. The Freedom has two “core crews” of 40 sailors that will take turns driving the ship; right now its Blue Crew is aboard. It will also take aboard a crew of 15 specifically for each of its mission modules, and 20 more sailors to fly and maintain its MH-60R Seahawk helicopter. That makes for a total of 75 people aboard a 3,000 ton, 377-foot warship. The Navy says this arrangement will work because many of the Freedom’s systems are so advanced. The engine room, for example, is designed to be completely automatic. This is common among many merchant vessels on the oceans today, but it’s new and different for the Navy.

And there are many other new features aboard the Freedom. Instead of propellers, the ship has four water jets to help it reach a top speed of more than 40 knots, or about 46 miles per hour. It has two doors at the stern for launching and recovering its unmanned boats and submarines. And, according to early word from the Navy, its  accommodations for the typical sailor are much nicer than most other surface ships in the fleet.

Navy Times has been writing about the Freedom, and the LCS concept, for years. Now we’re finally going to see it up close.  Plus, I’m looking forward to visiting Milwaukee, which, I’ve heard, is home to a popular microbrew the locals call “Miller Lite.” Worth checking out, from what they say…