GALVESTON -- The ship the Navy will commission the USS Fort Worth today is faster, more efficient and longer in range than the first littoral combat ship that went into service in 2008.
And the Navy and the builder -- a team led by Lockheed Martin -- said they've corrected many of the deficiencies that surfaced in the first vessel, the USS Freedom."We've already seen in Fort Worth a significant reduction in deficiencies at builders' trials," Adm. Mark Ferguson, vice chief of naval operations, said in an interview."We have consistently looked at wherever we can get lessons learned, either operational or production, and we try to roll those ahead as quickly as possible," said Joe North, Lockheed Martin's vice president of littoral ships and systems.The ships are the Navy's next-generation vessels -- speedy and lightweight, designed to operate in coastal waters against threats such as piracy and terrorism, with interchangeable modules for missions such as anti-submarine, mine clearing and surface warfare.The Navy has 21 under contract, split between Lockheed and General Dynamics, and says it wants to build up to 55. The ships are meant to replace certain frigates, mine-countermeasure vessels and coastal mine hunters. The Fort Worth will be Lockheed's second LCS to be commissioned. Each version is supposed to cost around $350 million.The Navy wants to deploy several of the ships to Southeast Asia, where Ferguson says it will be "ideal" for protecting key waterways.A step upLCS-3 -- the Fort Worth -- is almost 3 meters longer than Lockheed's first LCS, the Freedom, which allows it to go up to 5 mph faster and be "slightly more fuel-efficient," the Navy said.It has 10 percent extra fuel capacity, which gives it more range. Thanks to technology and automation, the ships can operate with a crew of 40 and an additional 35 on board for specific missions, a substantially lower number than on comparable older ships, like frigates.The Navy and production teams have worked to correct deficiencies in the first two littoral combat ships, one apiece from Lockheed and General Dynamics, with significantly different designs.A faulty weld caused a crack between two steel plates in Freedom's external hull. Lockheed changed the welding process, North said. The Navy said the crack is repaired, and "this has not been a problem on LCS-3."The Freedom's anchor design drew the chain into an enclosed compartment, but at high speeds and bad weather, water came up and in, creating maintenance headaches for the crew and raising the risk of corrosion.For the Fort Worth, Lockheed redesigned the anchor and positioned it and the chain on the top deck, and Freedom will be reconfigured that way, North said."We basically have solved the problem we had on one," North said. "It wasn't a new invention of any kind. It's really traditionally what you see on a lot of ship designs."Lockheed set out to fix problems with seals on the Freedom's stern door that caused it to leak and on its shaft.The four seals on Freedom were replaced and the Fort Worth will get the same fix, North said. The Fort Worth hasn't experienced a problem with its shaft seals, the Navy and North said.Navy documents also surfaced that questioned Freedom's "directional stability" -- or its ability to steer and maintain course. The Navy and Lockheed said it has never been an issue."It's not a deficiency at all," North said. "When we did the original test on [Freedom], they had predicted in model tests that we would have an issue with directional stability to keep the ship aligned."But "the first two days at sea, one of the folks with the lab that had come with the analysis just basically said we're not seeing that at all.""LCS does not have a problem with directional stability," the Navy said.Some criticismThe littoral combat ships have faced questions from critics who focused on the problems and said the government should have picked one contractor instead of two.Ben Freeman, a national security investigator for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, said there's little available data on the Fort Worth's test performance."They've certainly had the claim that a lot of the problems have been fixed," he said. "I'll believe it when we see it. They haven't really fully tested" Freedom.The group also questions the ship's survivability against air and missile attack, focusing on its weaponry and hull thickness."It's going to be highly vulnerable to attack from various angles," Freeman said. "Speed is well and good, but the trade-off is you have to forgo a lot of other things."The Navy disagrees."LCS does not have a survivability problem, as LCS ships meet the Navy's Level 1 survivability requirements needed to perform LCS' required missions in the littorals," or coastal waters, the Navy said."Lessons learned" has been the chorus in Galveston this week as the Navy readies for the commissioning."What we've done is we've learned a lot of lessons" from all three ships, said Warren Cupps, one of the Fort Worth's two commanding officers. "We've improved it into Fort Worth, and the follow-on ships from Fort Worth will take lessons learned out of Fort Worth. So each ship in the class gets better."With the Fort Worth, "we are much further along, I think, than the Freedom was at this point in her life."Scott Nishimura, 817-390-7808
Watch a rebroadcast of Saturday's commissioning ceremony
Videos: Interviews with USS Fort Worth school art contest winners
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