In defense of LCS: The skipper’s own words

November 30th, 2009 | leadership Life at Sea Maritime operations Science and technology Ships Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing

There are defense programs more controversial than the Navy’s littoral combat ship, but not many. The smaller, faster, modular ships represent a break from U.S. Navy convention in almost every way, and they have had skeptics and critics from the beginning. LCS has its champions too, and few are as outspoken or as passionate as the first captain of the first LCS, Cmdr. Don Gabrielson.

Gabrielson, who commanded the littoral combat ship Freedom’s Blue Crew after the ship was commissioned last November, gave a spirited defense of LCS in mid-November at the Surface Navy Association’s annual communications forum at the Army-Navy Country Club. But he spoke only to a small audience of SNA members and reporters, so Scoop Deck asked for a copy of his remarks that everyone online could read and discuss. We recommend getting another cup of coffee, clicking on through to the jump, and taking a close look at Gabrielson’s take on LCS. Then let’s hear what you think in the comments.

Cmdr. Don Gabrielson’s remarks on LCS, delivered Nov. 12:

A year ago this week, LCS 1 was commissioned in Milwaukee.  And in a handful of weeks, she will deploy.  What a year this has been.

Many observing the pace of operations in LCS have noted that it is moving fast.  But it has always been that way with this program — and that has been the point.  The world has changed, and we need new capabilities to help deal with the challenges of the future.  It’s easy to continue building what you know, and it’s easy to advocate the tools we are comfortable with because they worked in the past.  But our combat experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have driven home the point that our enemies have studied us, they’ve studied our equipment and tactics, and they know how to maximize their opportunities.  Look at how our tactics, training and equipment on the ground have changed in eight years.  LCS is the Navy’s opportunity to get ahead of that learning curve at sea.

The whole point of LCS has been to turn the tables on those who seek sanctuary in very shallow waters, those who rely on speed and maneuver with small craft in large numbers, with rapidly changing tactics and capabilities that directly counter the systems they watched us consume years developing.  These are not things we think someone might do — these are things they’ve already been doing for years, essentially unchallenged until now.

It’s almost impossible to put into words what my sailors and I lived through, how much LCS changed our view of ourselves and what ships can do.  But LCS is like that — if you allow it to fulfill its potential, you have to fundamentally alter the way you think about ships.  And that is the real challenge — to let go of what we’ve come to believe and instead focus on the opportunities presented by modern technologies.  The things that so many focused on as Achilles’ heels were, by and large, complete non-issues to us on the ship — because we weren’t constrained in our way of doing business.  And that set us free.

I’d like to offer a few observations about my experience at sea with LCS:

• Size.  People talk about LCS as a ‘small ship.’  Last December, we tied up in Norfolk across the pier from an FFG.  My first reaction was, “Who shrank the frigates?”  From our bridge wing, we looked across the top of the superstructure of the FFG — and we had two more decks above our heads.  Small is a relative term — LCS isn’t small to anyone but us.

• Modularity.  This means we’re never stuck with an outdated capability longer than it takes to develop a new one — as soon as it’s ready, we can bring systems to the ships, wherever they are, and install them overnight.  No other ship can do this.  Period.  We are barely coming to grips with what this will do for us.

• Warfighting capability.  When you compare what LCS brings with its mission packages along with core systems that are always onboard, it’s hard to see these ships as anything but incredible war machines.  These are three thousand ton ships that are packed with warfighting teeth.  They aren’t DDGs because they don’t need to be DDGs.

• Maneuverability and access.  Shallow draft opens more than five thousand ports to LCS that other US Navy ships can’t enter.    We commissioned FREEDOM in Milwaukee — in 17 feet of water.  We tied up in a river that was 150 feet wide in Buffalo.  We backed into a 75-foot wide dock in a river in Norfolk — without help.  The hullforms allow maximum speed in shallow water — FREEDOM exceeded 45 knots in 26 feet of water;  waterjet propulsion brings incredible maneuverability — FREEDOM can do a zero-radius turn and reverse course from 15 knots in about 90 seconds, and is incredibly smooth riding at full speed.  This will bring huge advantages in warfighting and humanitarian missions, as many small ports lack tugs and other infrastructure associated with larger ports, which means that LCS’ inherent maneuverability will be a distinct advantage.  We were able to undock in a river, in 7 knots of current, at night, rather than waiting 24 hours for a tug.  In forty sea details, we used tugs far less than half the time, and mostly because they were there.  That is unique in my experience on five ships.

• Speed.  When was the last time you saw a football field go 60 miles per hour and turn on a dime?  Every single time we demonstrated what speed combined with phenomenal agility bring, the conversation changed.  Skeptics became believers.  No other vessel on the water can overtake or outrun LCS in waves above 5 feet.  There is no equation that says how much speed is enough – that’s like asking a fighter pilot how fast is too fast, or an army tanker, or an amphibious ops boat driver.  If speed didn’t matter, we’d still be flying biplanes and driving tractors with guns, bringing Marines ashore in landing craft instead of LCACs and V-22s.  Speed alters the tactical situation and the strategic impact is huge.  No one can outrun a bullet.  But speed, with agility, can surprise and outrun its aim.  Speed will save lives and improve our ability to outmaneuver adversaries.

• Crew Size. We could have cut a few bodies here and there from a legacy manning model, or we could force ourselves to rethink how we operate by manning the ship around new technological capabilities.  Crew size, more than any physical feature, is a capability driver.  I’ve taken to describing the crew size as 40+35, the core crew plus mission package, plus the shore support.  It will work, because everyone has the freedom (pardon the pun) to approach their work from an entirely new perspective, and the ship was designed to be operated by a small crew – an important point.  We will continue to learn how to do this better – nothing we could conceive of will teach more than the upcoming deployment.  But it is working very well.  And the crews love it.

A noted MIT futurist named Ray Kurzweil wrote a book called “The Singularity is Near” that discusses the rate of change of knowledge over time.  He theorizes that the sum total of knowledge created in the last hundred years exceeded the thousand years before it — which means that in order to stay ahead, you have to work faster.

We consumed over twenty years developing the AEGIS Weapons System, a truly incredible and still important capability — but we took that long in part because we had that long.  Our only real adversary was the now-former Soviet Union, and AEGIS technology was part of a broader strategy, an arms race that contributed to their demise.  Even now, we have challenges keeping pace with the changes, and we don’t live in that world any more.  We don’t have twenty years to respond to new challenges — we don’t even have 20 months if you think about it.  Modularity, combined with the access and maneuver delivered in both LCS designs, gives us, for the first time, a real opportunity to stay in front without requiring massive overhauls that require decades to complete.

Yogi Berra, another noted futurist, had another favorite saying of mine — “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future…”

I’d rather have a portfolio of capabilities that puts more options on our side, and more guesswork on the other side.  That is what LCS is about.

Permalink | November 30th, 2009

Comments

1. Bruce Says:
   December 1st, 2009 at 10:21 am

   The Spruance DDs were also, supposedly, built to be “modular” — allowing new weapons systems to be switched for old ones. That happened a lot less often than it was supposed to, for whatever reasons. Some ships of the class were decommissioned with pretty much their original armament.

2. Bobby Ferguson Says:
   December 1st, 2009 at 10:06 pm

   It is the willingness of Naval Officers like Captain Gabrielson to think outside the box that offers hope for our Navy and our defense. His observations are not from a window at the Pentagon — he has been to sea with the old and the new. He knows of what he speaks.

   And to Bruce, I might point out that the modularity of LCS is entirely different from the supposed modularity of the Spruance DDs. Plug and play was not in the lexicon when Spruance hit the water. LCS was not designed with systems in place — it was designed with space in place for systems.

3. Arvid R. "Dick" Tillmar Says:
   December 2nd, 2009 at 4:50 pm

   This Commander is certianlly one of the brightest “on board”. Working with him on the Commissioning Committee of the U S S Freedom was enlightening and since his move to the Pentagon, I’ve even had the priveledge of knowing him better. Listen up folks…………he’s got it right. ! Very well written.

4. Delta Says:
   December 4th, 2009 at 8:42 am

   I attended the commissioning of USS Freedom and toured the ship several times. I agree withe CDR Gabrielson 100%. Having served on four different classes of ships the LCS is an awesome platform. Change is hard to take but this is what we need in todays Navy.

5. sid Says:
   December 10th, 2009 at 7:00 pm

   CDR Gabrielson could not be more wrong about the tactical and operational aspects of speed.

   Emphasize speed above all other design attributes, and what you get is a platform that is too limited in many ways, and historically has proven too vulnerable on the battlefield.

   The LCS is a prime example of this.

   The sad thing is, that the siren song has duped others before. Jackie Fishers batlecruisers are a prime example.

   I provided another example of of the USN’s during the Vietnam War. See CDR Salamander’s post, “A Chat Between Admirals.”

   Sadly, the transformation crowd dismiss this kind of criticism as resistance to change.

   When the bullets start to fly, they too will figure out that historical constants apply to them as well…

6. sid Says:
   December 10th, 2009 at 9:27 pm

   No other vessel on the water can overtake or outrun LCS in waves above 5 feet.

   The bodies of water up near a coast where you will be able to fully utilize it are rare indeed…

   http://ferrycabinnews.blogspot.com/2008/08/anchors-aweigh-me-boys.html

   http://ferrycabinnews.blogspot.com/2008/08/left-in-wake.html

   How much did that cost anyway?

7. MMCM (Ret) Says:
   December 14th, 2009 at 8:57 pm

   The Spruance’s were called “medium-speed habitability platforms” due to the dearth of much war-fighting hardware and the much ballyhooed improvement in crew comfort. Will these LCS’s be known as “high-speed co-habitated platforms in search of a mission”?

8. LCS Alternative Weekly « New Wars Says:
   December 16th, 2009 at 6:02 am

   [...] of Cmdr. Don Gabrielson’s spirited defense of the LCS that appeared in the Military Times Scoop Deck blog last month. Please read the both posts which are very enlightening. I’ll sum up [...]

9. Lediard Says:
   December 30th, 2009 at 7:04 am

   Pirates, drug traffikers, terrorists – they all know coastal waters like the back of their hands. These vessels with shallow draught, long range, very high speeds and manoeuverability are the answers to all maidens prayers. Get in there quick and weed them out. Flexibility, independence and surprise is the future and only answer.

10. The Scoop Deck – Incurable smallness Says:
    September 20th, 2010 at 2:23 pm

    [...] Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, the first captain of the Freedom, who remembered looking from his bridge wing over the superstructure of the frigate at the next pier. And the other two main shipbuilding projects of the next decade, DDG 1000 and the Flight III DDG [...]

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