Holy Moses II - LOL - I love it! :-)

 

That's the thing. There's already enough technical and integration challenges with selecting the right weapons fit. The whole thing is exacerbated by the disgusting state of procurement cycles and processes within the DoD today. Whoever gets selected will likely end up in some five year cycle of engineering and integration. By the time there are six to eight hulls of LCS, they'll all still be effectively just gunboats until the missile solution is finally put to sea. I guess there's really nothing wrong with that, other than the fact that it's an $850 Million gunboat, but hey, who's counting. Another hundred million here or there and then we'll be talking real money. Whatever happened to the amazing R&D cycles in WW2? We've overengineered and overbureaucratized (is that even a word?) ourselves to death since then.

 

Read Friedman on Destroyers.  The Destroyer-Escort Program had nothing but bureaucratic hurdles to leap before completion....The difference between than and now is that THEN we were at war, now we're not, at least the Navy's not.  THEN every day had the USN confronting Italian/German FAC's, SSK's, Japanese CA/CL/DD's and everyone's a/c...EVERY DAY, the USN could, if not did, lose ships and men.  And that's not true today.  So, the impetus for change is less.

 

The Ground Forces ARE at war and you see things like the RFI.  Once Afghanistan and Iraq are over, watch RFI die and the old way return.  Let the USN have to take on the PLAN and you'll see rapid innovation...it only took six months to field the Side Kick Jammer on the Oliver Hazard Perry's after the USS Stark was hit by an Exocet.  It's a different threat environment in peace time, the costs of acting are more obvious than the costs of NOT acting.