Habemus Papam!

Habemus Papam! (We have a Pope!) – well, not really. No doubt all the Church potentates will See (sorry) their way to name a new Holy Father in due time. What we got here is even rarer – it looks like the Navy has finally found a mission for which the Littoral Combat Ships – well, work. And pretty well.

Not surprisingly, the mission is generally a relatively shallow water one – counter-narcotics.

USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul, a Freedom-variant LCS, recently stopped two suspected drug smuggling operations within 72 hours “through a combination of air and surface operations” while deployed to the Caribbean, according to the Navy.

A Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment that is embarked aboard the ship and Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 50, Detachment Three helped the Minneapolis-Saint Paul seize nearly 1,279 pounds of cocaine worth about $9.5 million along with 2,480 pounds of marijuana worth roughly $2.8 million, according to an April 17 Navy news release.

The successful operation is one of several examples in recent years of an LCS nabbing drug smugglers. In 2020, USS Gabrielle Giffords stopped a vessel in the Eastern Pacific that was carrying $106 million worth of suspected cocaine. In 2021, USS Wichita and USS Sioux City seized $17 million and more than $20 million worth of suspected cocaine, respectively in the Caribbean Sea.

These are ships so well designed and built that then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday actually suggested giving them away; presumably to folks who could use them (not just to folks whose Navy we didn’t like.)

But the LCS is “almost perfectly made” for operations against drug smugglers, said Brian Persons, who previously served as the civilian chief engineer and executive director of Naval Sea Systems Command and later became deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems.

Freedom-class ships are among the smaller warships in the Navy. At 387 feet long, they are more than 100 feet shorter than an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and displace less than half of the total tonnage, 3,400 tons to a destroyer’s 8,400.

But Littoral Combat Ships are fast, carry embarked helicopters and are brimming with air- and surface-search radar, all of which are helpful for nabbing drug smugglers, who tend to use go-fast boats and rudimentary submersibles, Persons told Task & Purpose.

Typically the narcotraficantes try to run away rather than fight, so using high-tech expensive destroyers or cruisers is a poor fit. But the LCS in this case is j-u-s-t right. And hopefully smugglers will continue to run and not try to fight. Per  James Holmes, the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island:

“If the Russia-Ukraine war and the operation in the Red Sea have shown anything, it’s that naval warfare has been ‘democratized,’” Holmes told Task & Purpose. “Capabilities once available only to great powers are becoming available to many contenders.”

Ukraine has managed to inflict losses on Russian ships using shore-launched missiles and drones, even though it does not have a significant navy itself, Holmes said. And Houithi rebels in Yemen have used missiles and drones to challenge Western navies, even though they have not hit any warships so far.

“Now, I doubt drug cartels will ever field antiship cruise or ballistic missiles, but they could well deploy cheap surface, air, or even subsurface drones against littoral combat ships,” Holmes said. “LCS has been doing pretty well now that it has found its niche, but these are very lightly armored warships. The trimaran variant, the Independence class, even has an all-aluminum hull and a legacy of hull cracking. These are not rugged ships.”  Task & Purpose

Category: Crime, Navy