LANTFLT racking up the hours

Neptune's helpers have sent us here at ID some interesting information which is relevant to our discussion of strategy, current operating conditions, and ship type allocation. It consists of a detailed list of ship operations of LANTFLT's non-nuclear vessels for FY2008, and offers one metric we're most concerned with: Underway Hours (UH) for each ship.

None of this information is marked for classification in any way. Still, since we're not positive of the position of LANTFLT on its distribution, ID won't post the information in full. We're going to ask you to trust us, just as we trust the information, for the purposes of argument. In any case, here are some highlights. More nuggets as we dig through them.

Of the top five ships listed by underway hours, there are two LSD, two DDG and one PC. The ship with the most underway hours is an LSD, by a margin of over 200 hours, with a total underway time of 5,097 hours (out of a total of 8,766 hours/year!) Note that this specifically does not include non-underway time on the boilers; that is accounted for separately. The PC has an underway time of 4,711 hours. As for averages by ship type, we get the following (UH = underway hours):


As Galrahn and others have been maintaining, it's the amphibs and the coastal workers which are going to get whipped from pillar to post in a soft power, littorals-focused operating environment, and that's what we see. The LHA number is slightly disingenuous as an average, as it consists of a single-ship class (USS Nassau, LHA-4) but that datapoint is still valid. It should also be pointed out that two of the nine PCs had underway times under a thousand hours, and one had a time of only 40 hours, which has a definite impact on the average time; the other seven are notably higher. The underway time for the PC and FFG are quite high - but their projected replacement the LCS is being sold as an MCM replacement with a steel hull, an FFG replacement without organic blue-water weapon systems, and a 3,000 ton instead of 330-ton PC with the same speed.

One piece of information I don't presently have is the expected duty cycle of these warships at design time, as distinct from expected life; I'll see if I can dig that up.

(Picture of the USS Whidbey Island LSD-41 - the vessel with the most hours in FY2008. Image from Wikipedia.)