A coupled weeks ago I ran a post on the new up-gunned LCS that the Navy is considering to fill the shoes of the retiring OHP FFG-7 class frigates and at the time wondered, “Hey, why dont they just call them frigates instead of LCS 2.0, or the then-official Small Surface Combatant?”
Well I guess other people had the same idea.
According to the USNI the modified LCS class will be designated as frigates, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced on Thursday at the Surface Navy Association 2015 symposium on Thursday.
“One of the requirements of the Small Surface Combatant Task Force was to have a ship with frigate-like capabilities. Well, if it’s like a frigate, Let’s call it a frigate?” Mabus said. “We are going to change the hull designation of the LCS class ships to FF. It will still be the same ship, the same program of record, just with an appropriate and traditional name.”
An LCS by any other name…
The new class will be designated ‘fast frigates’ which historically had the old “FF” hull number prefix. The last fast frigates in the Navy were the old 1970s era Knox-class steam powered ships, the final hull of which, USS Moinester (FF-1097) was decommissioned from U.S. Naval service on 28 July 1994, just shy of her 20th birthday.
With that ship in mind, should the navy keep the same numbering sequence, the new frigates should pick up with hull number FF-1099.
Why not 1098? Well in 1979 the 15-year old research ship USS Glover (AGDE-1) was re designated FF-1098 in 1979 and reclassified formally as a frigate.
Now these supped up LCS’s are still woefully under armed, but hey the FFG-7 class that they are replacing only has a CIWS, a 25mm gun, a 76mm mount, and torpedoes, so its really kind of a apples to crab-apples type of thing.
And I would like to go on record that, as fitting frigates, they should also be named traditionally after naval heroes too, rather than politicians and cities, but that’s a whole different cup of coffee there…
