Reporter's Notebook

“How do you like me now, pirate?”

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PORT HURON, MICH. – We walked up to the 02 level after lunch to see the Rolling Airframe Missile launcher, one of the Freedom’s two permanent onboard weapons, along with its 57mm gun on the forecastle. The wind had checked back from its earlier clip this morning, but it still bore the perfume rising off the Esso refinery across the river in Canada.

Chief Firecontrolman Jason Dempsey took us through the empty spaces atop the Freedom’s aluminum superstructure, where it will carry the 30 mm guns and the Non-Line of Sight missiles of its surface warfare mission package. Along with the RAM launcher, these weapons will be what give the Freedom its ability to deal with targets on the surface, although as one blogger has suggested, the ship’s diluvial wake is just as devastating against small boats.

The skipper, Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, agreed that the ship’s high speed and maneuverability are two potent weapons. He said he could easily picture a situation where he repelled a swarm of small-boat attackers by slicing the Freedom in circles or S-turns, then forcing his attackers to chase him through the wake.

“How do you like me now, pirate?’” he said.

“I know people go, y’know, ‘well somebody in a Boghammar can go 50 knots and outrun you,’ and I say, he can’t go 50 knots in the same kind of seas I can. I’ll destroy him! I’ll tip him over! Plus I’ve got a 30mm gun as part of the equation?”

He praised the laser rangefinder and electro-optical sights on the ship’s 57mm gun. “What people don’t realize is that, if I can see somebody out there, I can touch him.”

Gabrielson has heard the critics who say LCS is under-armed. I mentioned to him that it’d be cool to see a future copy of the Freedom equipped with a SPY-1F Aegis radar and vertical launch tubes, which has reportedly interested the Israeli Navy. He agreed, but he said a traditional-SWO preoccupation with VLS and strike misses the point of LCS. There are hundreds of VLS tubes for Tomahawk or SM-2 missiles aboard destroyers and cruisers in the surface force, Gabrielson said, but the Freedom wasn’t designed to take over their missions.

“I need a ship to keep the mosquitoes away from those other ships,” he said, pointing to the deck.

Instead of being an ominous gray presence on the horizon, the Freedom can get in close in foreign ports to provide a different kind of deterrence, Gabrielson said. It can engage foreign navies or mariners or just dissuade them from going against American wishes. If there’s a major problem that the Freedom can’t handle, it can call the fleet, he said.

“We can say, ‘hey, you guys wanna play? We’ll play.’ And half a day later the other guys show up,” Gabrielson said.