QUEBEC, CANADA -- The most striking thing about USS Freedom, the Navy's first Littoral Combat Ship, is just how lifeless she seems. Walking the 3,000-ton vessel's white-painted passageways, it's rare to cross paths with another person. The 380-foot vessel has a "core" crew of just 40 people, compared to 200 for the slightly larger Perry-class frigates the LCS is replacing. "Forty-percent empty space," is how Commander Don Gabrielson, Freedom's skipper, described his vessel during my visit last week.
Emptiness is everywhere on this ship, especially now, just a couple weeks into her first cruise, through the Great Lakes, bound for a year of testing off of Virginia. The hangar bay, big enough for several mission modules (packed in shipping containers) plus up to three helicopters, houses just a single Fire Scout robot chopper, minus its rotor blades.
The Mission Control Center, where Commander Kris Doyle, the executive officer, manages Freedom's weapons and robots, is bigger than similar centers in other warships, with lots of rooms for future sensor and drone controls. Even the bridge is spacious, by virtue of having only a handful of people on watch at any given time. Gabrielson told me that older warships might have as many people on the bridge as he has on his entire crew.
Above deck, there's space reserved for several new weapons slated for installation in the future: a couple 30-millimeter gun turrets derived from the Marines' Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and a second anti-air missile launcher.
But the biggest "nothing" on the ship is the "reconfigurable space"
beneath the hangar, accessible by cargo elevator, and with a gate opening onto the water at Freedom's stern. This is where Freedom
keeps her small boats -- and where she might add any odds and ends like extra supplies for long voyages, or even additional berthing to boost the size of the crew. Right now, she's got a giant refrigerator down there, storing food.
With all this growth room, the Littoral Combat Ship is designed to "be whatever you want it to be," Gabrielson said. In a long conversation over spaghetti and meat sauce in Freedom's tiny wardroom, he sketched out a dozen ways Freedom and her planned 54 sister ships will fight in future conflicts.
Group together three LCSs -- one each configured for anti-submarine warfare, swarming-boat defense and Marine transport -- and you've got a nimble flotilla for Marine Force Recon raids in low-threat zones. Add a destroyer to the mix and you can put those LCSs up against China in the
Taiwan Strait. Strip away most of the weapons, add a "humanitarian module" (like a medical clinic in a big metal box) and a gaggle of LCS
could fill one of the Navy's soft-power "global fleet stations" off
Africa or South America. The sky's the limit.
"It's the Field of Dreams of warships,"
Doyle said. In other words, if you build the ship, potential
"customers" ranging from the Marine Corps to humanitarian workers to battle groups sailing into a shooting war, will come.
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