Freedom Deployment Requires Additional Sailors

An interesting article at Navy Times highlighting the addition of 20 sailors to the upcoming deployment of USS Freedom (LCS 1). There is much contained in the article worth discussion and consideration. Lets begin here:

"One of the things we’re looking at is crew workload. We’re monitoring it, and it was deemed prudent that we should bring on a separate team for that [maritime security operations] boarding team capability," said Capt. Mike Good, the program manager for LCS’s mission modules.

Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, Freedom’s Blue Crew commissioning commander, who has since moved on to a position on the Joint Staff, anticipated criticism of the Freedom’s taking extra people. It might be seen as an early concession that the ship can’t operate in the real world with the small crew for which it was designed, but that’s not so, he said.

"People are going to say, ‘Hey, this is more people than they said they’d need. They’re lying to us!’" he said. But just as an LCS will take aboard custom equipment to hunt submarines or mines, so too does it need custom gear — in this case, sailors — for a visit, board, search and seizure team, he said.

Additional details of the deployment also provided:

In addition to the extra sailors, Freedom’s “tailored” surface warfare package will include two 33-foot rigid-hull inflatable boats for its VBSS sailors; its two Mk 46 30mm guns mounted on the multiuse boxes atop the superstructure; an armed MH-60S Seahawk; and “quite a collection of boarding team equipment,” Good said, including flak jackets, small-arms weapons, grappling hooks, and specialized gear for at-sea boardings.

Freedom will not take a Fire Scout unmanned helicopter or any of the maritime robots it’s designed to carry, nor will it carry the Non-Line-of-Sight missiles designed to be part of its surface mission package. That weapon, being developed with the Army, is still being tested.

The article has a lot more, including a mention of the January 16, 2024 commissioning date for USS Independence (LCS 2). Lets start at the top.

First, the addition of 20 crew makes sense, in fact it is a validation of several theories of naval warfare promoted on this blog regarding the necessity to put more manpower at sea on motherships to deal with the 21st century irregular warfare challenges facing the Navy. Two fully crewed RHIBs, an MH-60S, and twenty sailors heavily armed sounds exactly like the capability the Navy needs today. Add a bit of ScanEagle scouting and I want that capability for fleet ops. I would bet the Navy is looking at it in a similar way.

I think ~100 is going to end up being the final number for the LCS, and I am comfortable with that. One of the often overlooked elements of "Hybrid Sailors" is that experience is a requirement. It means more chiefs, more experts, and more productivity per sailor. It also provides an opportunity for the Navy to test a flatter organizational model on a Navy ship. We know that flat organizations are more efficient, and I also know that smaller crews are fundamentally different environments that promote different standards for teamwork, where concepts like 'leader' and 'follower' can sometimes be interchangeable when there is mutual respect for capacity and capability of members in an organization. A lot of people are skeptical ~100 crew would be enough for the LCS, but I am not one of them. I believe in the end we will see a flat organizational model emerge among the "Hybrid Sailor" crews, because whether the SWO community (retired and active) likes it or not, all that extra school and experience when combined with the right attitude and tight knit environment will produce a higher quality sailor; and network of sailors.

But there is also a problem that comes out in this article. Cmdr. Don Gabrielson gets really defensive here, so much so it stands out as a major section of the news article (fairly or not). The original hype for the Littoral Combat Ship set such high, unrealistic expectations that the blow back from critics has itself matched the hype and intensity of the original supporters. Folks like Cmdr. Don Gabrielson now find themselves in the middle of two extremes and come off as immediately defensive.

The problem isn't the ongoing intensity and unrealistic expectations of supporters and critics, rather how everything has become a zero sum game with the LCS. First it should be highlighted that the ship is meeting a primary justification of the ship: flexibility. Modularity represents an interesting technological concept, but the purpose of modularity was to achieve flexibility. In the case of the "tailored surface warfare package” the ship is flexible enough add the sailors and equipment necessary to field the capabilities desired for this deployment. Regardless of hype or imperfection, flexibility is exactly what the Navy wanted from the LCS and is exactly what they have. This is good, as it is a reminder that just because something isn't 'just right' it doesn't have to be 'wrong'.

There are many unproven assumptions surrounding the Littoral Combat Ship concept. Unproven doesn't mean incorrect, but it does mean more testing and development is necessary to be credible. My advice to people like Cmdr. Don Gabrielson (and I get it he is in a completely unfair position here) is to stop answering critics AND stop advocating justification, and instead promote the Littoral Combat Ship for exactly what it is: a learning opportunity for integrating new technologies and operational concepts. The LCS is achieving exactly what it should by being flexible enough to provide "tailored" modules and being adaptive enough to support emerging requirements. It is OK for the Navy to simply accept flexibility alone as a justification, and instead of answering critics, look forward towards what does and does not work in the field. After all, a lot of the LCS will remain new even after the deployment, and the deployment itself may end up being a real bust... so lets stop betting the farm on unproven theory and get into process of testing to determine what does work.

The LCS, and the LCS modules, are not zero sum and need to stop being treated as such by both supporters and critics. The LCS represents a rare opportunity for surface warfare to innovate, but it will completely fail if the opportunity is used instead to justify or validate unproven concepts without rigorous testing and development.