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Tankersteve, your post is very similar to the one posted two days earlier (right above your post).
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Yes they do. The ability to offload any/all cargo "On Call" vice having the stuff you need "right now" having 20 vehicles between it and the well deck.Originally posted by JA Boomer View PostComment
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Didn't they call that "combat loading" or something like that? Being able to access all parts of the cargo at any time and the most important parts being the most accessible?Comment
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Is that because you could move stuff around on the deck of a Charleston whereas in a well deck ship there's no room to maneuver?Originally posted by Gun Grape View PostComment
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Surfgun,
You are right - I didn't read it, just referenced the date. If I could, I would delete the article information and just reference the previous post.
TankersteveComment
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Posted: February 3, 2015 3:37 PM
Next Amphib Type to be an Independent Deployer
By RICHARD R. BURGESS, Managing Editor
WASHINGTON — The Navy’s next-design amphibious warfare ship, LX(R), will not be another dock landing ship dock (LSD), a Marine Corps general said.
“LX(R) is not an LSD replacement,” said MajGen Andrew W. O’Donnell Jr., deputy commandant for Combat Development and Integration and deputy commanding general of Marine Corps Combat Development Command, speaking Feb. 3 to an audience at the Amphibious Warfare Industrial Base Coalition (AWIBC) forum on Capitol Hill. “It will be an independent deployer.”
O’Donnell was referring to the ship that will succeed the LSD as a unit that will deploy with amphibious ready groups (ARGs), along with amphibious assault ships (LHAs/LHDs) and amphibious transport dock ships (LPDs). The Navy has stated its preference to base the LX(R) design on the hull of the LPD 17. Procurement of the LX(R) is scheduled to begin in 2020.
“We think that was an unbelievably smart move,” O’Donnell said of the LX(R) design plan.
The LX(R) will have greater capabilities that the current Whidbey Island-class and Harpers Ferry-class LSDs and be able to more effectively operate in a disaggregated ARG, the way in which ARGs have operated in recent deployments.
The 2016 budget proposal was good news for the AWIBC in that it fully funded the 12th San Antonio-class ship, LPD 28, which once was part of the program of record. O’Donnell said the ship would be a technological bridge to the LX(R) and a means of sustaining the industrial base until construction begins on the LX(R).
“I believe the LPD 17 is a great platform,” said Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., noting that LPD 28 is a great segue to LX(R). “LPD 28 will allow us a learning curve to how we should build [LX(R)].”
LtGen Robert B. Neller, commander, Marine Corps Forces Command, briefed the AWIBC on Exercise Bold Alligator, an amphibious exercise held last year. For one aspect, the exercise was used to evaluate alternate platforms including a joint high-speed vessel and a Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo/ammunition ship to carry Marines. He said the alternate platforms would require more evaluation if they were to be used for amphibious lift.
“For any ship to be viable, I’ve got to [be able to] land an Osprey,” Neller said.
Col William R. Dunn, commanding officer of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), together with CAPT Todd A. Lewis, commander of Amphibious Squadron Six, briefed the audience on the recent deployment of the USS Bataan ARG, which often operated in a disaggregated manner. The ARG was the first to operate the MV-22B Osprey routinely on deployment from a San Antonio-class LPD, and the long-range and speed of the Osprey greatly enabled the effectiveness of the scattered force.
Neller also said that future amphibious operations are likely to aggregate ships rapidly from various scattered locations, rather than forming up from the start and steaming to the scene of action.
“It’s about speed,” he said.
The AWIBC represents the 2,000 suppliers in 48 states who provide components for the construction of amphibious warfare ships.
“Funding of amphibious warfare ships is vital to the shipbuilding industrial base,” said Brian Schires, vice president of government relations for Rolls-Royce and chairman of the AWIBC.
O’Donnell stressed that amphibious warfare capability “is a national capability we need to have to preserve decision space” for the national leadership.
“We need these ships,” he said. “We’ve used them over 120 times [in real-world operations] since 1990,” he said.
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., in whose state Huntington Ingalls Industries assembles the amphibs, called the ships “the Swiss Army knives of the sea” and “major players in our national maritime strategy.”
“The ARG/MEU team is worth every penny we spend on it,” Dunn said. “There is no doubt our enemies know that we will come and kill them.”
SEAPOWER Magazine OnlineComment
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The industrial base that supports the amphibious transport dock (LPD) construction hopes Congress will help accelerate the follow-on LX(R) dock landing ship replacement program by two years, an idea first floated in the House Armed Services Committee last year.
As it stands now, the Navy intends to buy its first LX(R) in 2020 and then procure one a year beginning in 2022. Based on the timing of LPD-28, the final ship in the class, the industrial base believes Fiscal Year 2018 is the best time to begin the new LX(R) program, rather than waiting two more years. Through its advocacy group, the Amphibious Warship Industrial Base Coalition, the suppliers wrote to Congress to ask for continued support in the FY 2017 budget to make this happen.
“As the House Armed Services Committee noted in its report accompanying the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2016, ‘[T]he optimum construction start for the LX(R) class of vessels is in fiscal year 2018 rather than the current Navy program of record of fiscal year 2020,’” according to the Feb. 4 letter AWIBC wrote to Congress.
“Accelerating and optimizing the start of LX(R) construction to 2018 will minimize the production gap between LPD 28 and the first LX(R) and strengthen the amphibious warship industrial base by leveraging the many advantages offered by a hot production line and supply chain. These advantages include acquisition and life cycle cost savings through production learning; batchbuying of material; mitigation of nonrecurring costs; and reuse of logistics support, training, maintenance, and outfitting products.”
The Navy’s FY 2017 budget request will be released Feb. 9 and will reveal more about the service’s plans for the LX(R) program. Last year, during FY 2016 budget negotiations, the House and Senate armed services committees added in money the Navy did not request to support an earlier start to the LX(R) program.
During a Feb. 4 AWIBC congressional forum in the Russell Senate Office Building, coalition chairman and Rolls Royce Vice President of Naval Marine Programs Brian Schires said that “we have spent millions of dollars training our employees, our craftsmen, our metallurgists, to do what they do today, and we have spent millions of dollars on our facilities to be able to perform and deliver as they are today. And if we have to shut down those facilities for a short period of time while we’re waiting for LX(R) to come online, it’s going to drive up cost, it’s going to interfere with quality and it’s going to delay the delivery.”
AWIBC is administered by public relations firm Powell Tate on behalf of Huntington Ingalls Industries.
An unspoken assumption in the drive for accelerated LX(R) funding is that the same industrial base currently working on the San Antonio-class LPDs– more than 2,000 companies total, Schires said– would move over to the LX(R) program. HII builds the LPDs at its Ingalls Shipbuilding yard in Pascagoula, Miss. The company, however, is not guaranteed the LX(R) contract – it will have to compete for the construction contract for the new ship program.
The Navy is finalizing its big-picture design efforts now – going through the LPD design, taking out features not necessary for the LX(R) mission, adding in new features where needed – and will hold a competition for contract design this spring, program officials have said. Only after that more detailed design is complete would the Navy host a competition for the ship construction, which is currently scheduled for FY 2020. It is unclear if that timeline could be bumped up if more funding were available for the program.
http://news.usni.org/2016/02/05/indu...-2-years-earlyComment
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Well, it sounds like I'm still beating this dead horse, but this recently showed up:
http://news.usni.org/2016/03/02/amid...up-deployments
Increasing challenges in Europe and Northern Africa have sparked a discussion in the Marine Corps and Joint Staff about revamping how to deploy amphibious groups, including the idea of splitting up the three-ship Amphibious Ready Group from the start.
Today, the ARG is given to U.S. Central Command, and the ships and Marine Expeditionary Unit deploy as a whole ARG/MEU – though in recent years, the ships almost always split up in theater to cover multiple parts of the Middle East. Sometimes, the amphibious transport dock (LPD) goes into U.S. European Command for a particular mission in the Mediterranean, but that decision only occurs mid-deployment and the LPD then returns to CENTCOM after finishing its mission.
With the threats in Europe and Africa growing both more numerous and more complex, though, Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration Lt. Gen. Robert Walsh said the Marines and Joint Staff are kicking around the idea of nixing the three-ship deployment in favor of sending an LPD to the Mediterranean from the start.
“There’s been some discussion on the joint level – just discussion, no formal taking it to any kind of OpsDeps (Operations Deputies) tank or anything like that. But also within the Marine Corps, as we’re looking at this,” he told USNI News after a House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee hearing Feb. 25.
“We’ve developed a conops, concept of operations, for disaggregated ARM/MEU operations. So now what that means is, you’ve got a conops, you’ve got doctrine to train to, we organize train and equip (for disaggregated operations) in their workup cycles – before we weren’t doing that, they were all supposed to be together. Now we’re training for that so we can get out there and do it.”
The next step, now that the Marines are training and preparing for disaggregated operations, is to officially change how the Global Force Management process assigns amphibious forces.
“What if you could split off a ship in advance? A ship, instead of all three going to CENTCOM and getting over there and trying to say ‘hey, can you split one off for EUCOM,’ why not in advance make those decisions? That’s what’s going to potentially happen anyway, why not just schedule it and say we’re going to send one into the Med” Walsh said.
“Right now it’s conversations within the joint world, but also within senior leadership in the Marine Corps we’re looking at that and going, we always fought ever disaggregating but now we’re doing it and we’re doing it pretty well and effectively and being in more places than one. Now should we do this from the planning start?”
USS Makin Island (LHD-8), alongside the dock landing ship USS Comstock (LSD-45), right, and the amphibious transport dock ship USS San Diego (LPD-22) on March 14, 2014. US Navy Photo
USS Makin Island (LHD-8), alongside the dock landing ship USS Comstock (LSD-45), right, and the amphibious transport dock ship USS San Diego (LPD-22) on March 14, 2014. US Navy Photo
Walsh noted that two more LPDs are set to join the fleet within the next year or so – John P. Murtha (LPD-26) and Portland (LPD-27), which will increase the options available for covering the Mediterranean.
“If you had a single ship that could go over there outside the ARG/MEU, and you had the three ships that went to CENTCOM as an ARG, they’d stay there,” he said.
“If you had an extra one, you could put the (Europe-based) Special Purpose MAGTF (Marine Air-Ground Task Force) on it, and that was the original request was to get an LPD-17 and put the Special Purpose MAGTF on it. We didn’t have enough ships. So my point would be, take one of the ships out of CENTCOM and put it there, that’s an option. Or have another ship that just comes over and meets up with the SPMAGTF,” whether that ship is an independent deployer LPD or an auxiliary ship such as the Expeditionary Mobile Base (formerly Afloat Forward Staging Base).
Navy officials have increasingly talked about the need for more presence in EUCOM and AFRICOM, as terrorism, piracy and other threats continue to pop up around Africa and the Mediterranean. Vice Adm. Joseph Mulloy, deputy chief of naval operations for integration of capabilities and resources, said at the HASC hearing last week that the Global Force Management system has primary provided presence in the Mediterranean in the form of ships sailing through on their way to and from CENTCOM, but “the forces we have go where they need to be. We have clearly used our amphibs to operate as necessary off Libya on a number of occasions, and other ships, whether it’s on a national mission like grabbing the terrorists in Libya or other events that happened over there.”
This week Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson told the House Appropriations defense subcommittee that the carrier strike groups would begin to spend more time in the Mediterranean but that Navy can still only meet about half the combatant commander’s demand for aircraft carriers due to increased threats from Russia and the Islamic State.
Last week, Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Robert Neller and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus advocated for putting the new expeditionary mobile base USNS Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller (T-ESB-3), which is destined for the Middle East when the ship makes its maiden deployment late this year or early next year, in the Mediterranean instead to help move the Special Purpose MAGTF around Europe and Africa.
“I would like very much for that ship to be based in the Med. Right now that’s not the plan, but we’re going to continue to work on that,” he said.
“The COCOMs, both AFRICOM and EUCOM, have written a letter saying hey we’d like to have this capability in the Med to service West Africa and the Med because there’s stuff going on there that we need to be able to move around. You don’t want to be tied to a land base.”
Mabus agreed, saying “the Lewis B. Puller, that’s an expeditionary seabase, it’s an incredible capability. It carries a lot of stuff and it’s got a flight deck. We need one in the Med, we need one for Africa and for Europe. We’re building two more because we need ones in other parts of the world too.”
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So it looks like only the LPD can be split off and the LSD, at least as currently designed, remain attached to the LHD. Is there no middle ground, where an LPD-lite or enhanced LSD could fit in the ARG, allowing all 3 ships to be completely independent, if only for extended time periods of a float? Right now, that doesn't seem to be an option.
I know there are big dollars involved, but from a truly optimal (pie-in-the-sky) concept, giving the LSD a hangar/flight detachment, as well as some OTH Comms/C2 capabilities would broaden even more the potential of the ARG to be where/when it is needed. I would think there is trade space available in the hold for more aviation fuel, giving up some of what was gained in additional hull volume of the bigger ship.
Maybe we don't need 3 independent-capable elements in the ARG today, but we may in the future. I doubt 1 or 2 decades ago, the USMC ever envisioned peeling parts of the MEU off from the rest (the article says it was heavily fought), yet now it is habitual and we are about to make it a doctrinal capability.
TankersteveComment
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In the 90s we did it all the time.. Just another example of "Institutional memory" that sucks.Originally posted by Tankersteve View Post
I've been on a MEU where the LHD was off the coast of a small country in Africa conducting a NEO. The LPD was conducting an embassy reinforcement in Europe and the LSD was involved in a Partnership For Peace exercise in the Black Sea.
Do the people that are in charge now think nothing happened before we went to the desert?Comment
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While the USN decides when to start construction of the LXR type ships, the shipyard of Pascagoula will give us the perfect steel beach party ship the Fort Lauderdale!
http://www.fortlauderdaledaily.com/u...ort-lauderdaleComment
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Well it appears that Huntington Ingalls has tweaked the LXR concept with more San Antonio features such as an improved aircraft hanger, upgraded radars and the 30mm cannons.
http://www.huntingtoningalls.com/lxr/compareComment
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One of the advantages of the larger well deck is of course more room for LCACs or other landing craft. Helos and Ospreys are nice, they get you where you want to go quickly, but they get you there LIGHT! Yes, you can pick up a LAV-25 with a CH-53, but it won't have a heavy load of gas or ammo, the bare vehicle itself pushes the 53's lifting capability, plus you need another aircraft for the vehicle crew. Bringing that LAV-25 over the beach on an LCAC, along with three of his buddies on one lift, all combat loaded and crewed, is invaluable. So the LPDs are sort of a nice compromise, they can do some air ops and they have a well deck that can handle one or more LCACs, but they cannot handle the number of helo sorties that an LHD/LHA can generate nor can they push the number of vehicles and supplies across the beach that an LSD can push. There's a reason for the current mix and its been working nicely. You could possibly stretch the LPD hull to lengthen the well deck, but then you've got almost a new hull, requiring bigger engines, etc.Originally posted by Tankersteve View PostComment
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It would appear Huntington-Ingalls is pushing for an MK-41 VLS for the LX(R).
http://www.navyrecognition.com/index...k=view&id=4161Comment
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I have to wonder what the purpose of a 16 cell MK-41 would be on an LSD. ESSM? BMD?Originally posted by surfgun View Post
I tend to think of LSDs as big floating trucks, and it would seem like investing in an expensive radar to make use of VLS capabilities would be wasted on only 16 cells. Perhaps they are thinking of cooperative engagement so that it can act as a firing platform for other ships?Comment
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