Drop ‘Littoral Combat’: America’s 17 Independence Class Ships Are Surveillance Frigat

[Peter1469]

The author argues that the Navy would be better served by using its Littoral Combat ships as surveillance frigates.


Drop ‘Littoral Combat’: America’s 17 Independence Class Ships Are Surveillance Frigates

In all the debate over the Navy’s battered and largely derided “Littoral Combat Ship” concept, the Independence Class littoral combat ship has been both misnamed and consistently misunderstood. The Independence Class trimaran is better described as a surveillance frigate capable of boosting America’s craftiness at sea.


While the old-school naval warfare planners from America’s cruiser/destroyer community have tied themselves up in knots to make the aluminum trimaran a conventional “trade broadsides with the enemy” surface warfighter, the electronic lethality and intelligence-gathering potential of these flexible, commodious and fast vessels have been consistently overlooked.


Properly kitted out, an Independence Class surveillance frigate can serve as an electromagnetic warfare threat, collecting everything from tactical targeting data to strategically relevant emissions. Potentially add in a Marine Corps reconnaissance element, and things could get interesting.


The Navy’s current rush to add ship-killing Naval Strike Missiles to the littoral combat ship fleet may offer a boost to conventional lethality, but, these days, surveillance data and the more subtle and sophisticated “lethality” offered by electronic attack capabilities is no joke.

Make Some Simple Changes:

The primary “littoral combat” missions of mine and undersea warfare are, at heart, exercises in sensor deployment and information collection, so why not extend the mission and make protected intelligence collection and electromagnetic warfare the real future of the Independence Class?


The aluminum trimaran’s added warfighting capabilities demand better over-the-horizon targeting capabilities anyway. By cobbling on the long-ranged Naval Strike Missile, the 100+ nautical mile range of the Independence Class’ new weapon extends beyond the range of the ship’s original sensor suite.


So, with that in mind, a first step to boosting the Independence Class’ lethality in the electromagnetic spectrum might well be to replace the ship’s existing Sea Giraffe radar with Raytheon Technologies’ scalable Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar. That swap extends the ship’s sensor range, better supporting the new anti-ship missiles. But Raytheon’s new radar offers additional capabilities as well, and, with Raytheon’s small radar already slated to go aboard the new Constellation Class frigate, buying a few extra sets now will help speed along the development of radar training infrastructure, drive platform commonality and reduce the per-unit cost of the already-pricey “old-school” multi-mission frigate.


Add in a cooperative engagement capability, high-bandwidth data links and a secure organic command and control facility aboard, an updated Independence spy ship can pump data from a diverse range of sensors into multi-agency data webs for analysis, targeting or action.
The requirement exists.

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