No. The LCS ships are pretty dramatic failures. It would take more effort to fix them than it would to fix the Connies.
I genuinely ask this because the average unit cost of a Legend is $670 million USD compared to what, less than $580 per Independence? Ok, you can definitely argue the last NSCs were less expensive by roughly $23 million USD but that comes at the cost of aviation facilities, stealth characteristics, self defense capability, MCM and surface warfare capability.
That's cool but that has nothing to do with the cost of re-engineering the LCS into viable ships for the job. They're simply not built for it.
What do you think the MCM module uses lmfao
Something that will go on the LUSV when the LCS classes go to the breakers sometime next decade, ideally.
FF(X)s strongest soldier I guess but idk how that detracts from LCS as a third rate surface combatant
Because LCS was built for a world that never happened and its CONOPS never worked out in practice. They're barely functional pieces of garbage that spend more time pier side than not and will likely be destroyed within a few months of serious conflict. I'm not sure why you're so obsessed with them.
Admittedly I like the lines on the LCS-2 but everything inside, and about, the ship is a mess. It has about 100 too few crew to do anything, it's cramped and difficult to maintain due to its awkward narrow hull designed for high speed (this is both for LCS-1 and -2), and it requires bloated contractor support in a manner similar to F-35 due to the lean manning. That drives the cost up massively.
There's a reason the USAF took control of the IP and TDPs from Boeing when it signed on for NGAD, and the same for B-21, because it didn't want another F-35 and the mess of ALIS and contractor support. That's why the F-35 in US service is sitting at 50% MC rate. Israel, which also operates F-35, has their own depots and works it more like an F-15E than whatever Lockheed demanded, which is why they have 90% MC rates.
For a similar bundle of reasons the USN is taking full ownership of FFX and intends to make it a very boring ship comparable to something like the Gowind, the MEKO, etc. instead of asking Austal and Lockheed to sell them a good package deal. The things that spawned the ships of the 00s and the early GWOT were dumb ideas that probably shouldn't have happened, with the exception of Zumwalt and the San Antonios which both could have been done better but are otherwise excellent hulls, because the ideas behind LCS weren't very good.
It will potentially turn out that it is cheaper to make 50+ ships of a modest design rather than 30 speedboats, assuming the USN intends to build ships through 2050, and right now they do. It's entirely possible that FFX, DDGX and BBGX all fail, in which case the US Navy can just pack up and leave Asia, because it won't have anything else on the table to bring out going into the latter half of this century.
FFX is literally a do-or-die ship which is why it's so aggressive in its austerity. Well, aggressive for Americans, but it's just a normal frigate to literally anyone else in the world. If it dies, then the US will likely need to give up EUCOM, AFRICOM and CENTCOM to buy back the escorts to fight in INDOPACCOM, when that fight comes. Which means giving it up to an adversarial power if the US-EU rivalry ever rears its head again.
Oh god, literally acting as though the FFTS threat environment is real and still schizophrenic
What does that have to do with the price of shale in Texas?
