After studying the Navy’s Request for Information (RFI) on industry’s frigate designs, “I wouldn’t say the RFI repudiates the LCS approach, because the idea of having a smaller, less-expensive, shallow-draft, fast ship makes sense,” said retired commander Bryan Clark, now with the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments. The new frigate isn’t really replacing the 3,400-ton LCS, he argued, but filling a gap between smaller coastal patrol craft like the 380-ton Cyclone class and larger multi-role warships like 9,700-ton Aegis destroyers.
To that end, Clark wants the future frigate to have both the weapons and radar to conduct wide-area air defense of nearby ships in a task force or convoy –a mini-Aegis like Spain’s Navantia frigates – rather than only defend itself – like the current LCS…
In fact, Bryan Clark and his CSBA colleagues argue the LCS’s flaw is it’s too large. (Ironically, the original concept for LCS, called Streetfighter, was much smaller). They call LCS an unhappy compromise between a smaller, more agile, and more affordable coastal patrol craft like the Cyclones and a larger, more capable, and more expensive guided-missile frigate (FFG).
“It tried to do the patrol ship job and the FFG job,” Clark told me. “The problem was LCS was not inexpensive enough to be affordable in large numbers … and lacked the organic capabilities to fight and survive in contested operating environments.” That said, Clark continued, LCS can fill the gap until we build sufficient numbers of both smaller patrol ships – his model here is Sweden’s 600-ton Visby corvettes – and larger frigates.