I'll take "Saying Stupid Things" for $2000

The strange part is not that the Navy would look to buy more Littoral Combat Ships, I get why that might happen. What I don't understand is everything said that is quoted.

The service currently plans to buy 55 of the so-called Littoral Combat Ship, a small surface vessel that can move close to shore, from either Lockheed Martin Corp. or General Dynamics Corp. But John Young, the Pentagon's top weapons buyer, said Monday the Navy is likely to buy 64 or more of the vessels, which cost about $550 million each.

"If you had this ship today ... we would clearly be in the Horn of Africa dealing with the pirate situation," Young said aboard the last leg of the USS Freedom's maiden voyage from Milwaukee, Wis., to Norfolk, Va. "This vessel is just right. It has the speed and it gives you lots of tactical opportunities to deal with those boardings."

So let me get this straight, if only we had the LCS, then we could deal with pirates? I got a "if" statement for you John, how about...

If only we didn't have a guy in charge of spending the Pentagons money who didn't think .5 billion dollars was an inexpensive solution to fighting speedboats!

John Young has been busy locked in some Pentagon office listening to the echo chamber of industry tell us how an unmanned system with a precision missile can solve every problem. Uhm, on which confused battlefield would that be? Which mission module is going to board Somali fishing vessels and separate the good guys from the bad?

Can someone explain to me how a ship that lacks manpower is "just right" in dealing with a problem only solved by distributing sustainable, persistent manpower on the sea? With this logic, if we only had 2000 UAVs in Iraq we could have solved that whole counterinsurgency thing with 50K troops, right John?

Actually, more UAVs than that are used every day in Iraq, and yet, it took a major surge of troops and time to train 700,000 Iraqi's to solve that problem. John Young's vision of the LCS is in defiance of the lessons of irregular warfare challenges learned in Iraq. I just hope his opinion isn't the Navy talking point.

I like the Littoral Combat Ship, and I love some aspects of the ship like Hybrid Sailor, but I am getting really tired of reading articles where the civilians try to oversell the platform as more than it is. We need more rational and honest discussion by Navy leadership today, not people who suggest that only with "weapon system X" can we solve problems as old as piracy.