Reporter's Notebook

The business end

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ABOARD THE FREEDOM – This could be the only ship in the fleet for which the Pentagon chestnut, “the business end,” refers to the stern, rather than the bow or the missile decks. The ship’s purpose is to take aboard one of three custom sets of mission equipment, craned through a special hatch in the flight deck into a voluminous multi-purpose area that starts amidships and continues all the way to the stern. The ship’s combat systems officer, Lt. Jeff Hurley, took me on a tour of the spaces.

On this trip they’re being used as a catch-all storage area – for example, I saw a mountain bike down there, and the disassembled blades of a Fire Scout unmanned helicopter – but when the Freedom finally deploys, the spaces will carry a dozen or so cargo containers. The ship has a crane built into the ceiling, as well as a custom set of robots, to move the containers around. The 15 crew members that belong to each mission package will uncrate the equipment they need to operate their unmanned boat or submarine, which will launch from the aft-most multi-mission compartment. The ship will need to slow down considerably from its current speed for this to happen.

When Hurley and I entered the aft launch compartment, it was filled with a noise like four Olympic-sized swimming pools being drained every six seconds. The compartment sits right above the ship’s pumpjets, and when the Freedom is slicing through the water at 40 knots, it’s deafening. It’s not turbine noise, or the familiar machinery noise of a warship, just a bold roar. The deck shivers.

The LCS mission module sailors won’t have to control their unmanned vehicles from this space, however; for that, Hurley took me to the master control center, or MCC.  This space, located deep inside the ship and geared out with brand new computer consoles, is where the captain and his crew will spend most of their time when the Freedom has a mission. The mission-module and core crew sailors sit right behind each other so they can maintain the same picture of what’s going on, Hurley explained, although the core crew consoles have cup holders and the mission module consoles do not.

“That means they can’t have coffee,” he explained. I think he was joking.

Blog note: This post was authored around 7 p.m. eastern time Monday