The USS Marinette Passes By

 I saw that the next Littoral Combat Ship would be passing Detroit last night, so I decided to head down there to catch her.

There was a little bit of traffic on the way, so I was a little later than I hoped but I didn't miss her.

The littoral combat ships are made in Marinette, Wisconsin which is on the border of Wisconsin and Michigan.

This is the 25th littoral combat ship and is one of the Freedom class portion of these ships.

There are 16 planned from this class and 13 of them have been built.  Five of them have been retired despite the class being less than 18 years old.  One of them retired was the USS Detroit which was only seven years old although there is the potential of her getting sold to a foreign country.

These ships have been plagued with many problems, one of them being that the propulsion has not been reliable.  The contractor blames the Navy and vice versa.

The other (bigger) problem is that these ships haven't had the endurance they were promised.  When these ships are running at full speed, they run out of fuel quickly.

The other problem is that these are supposed to have mission modules and those don't work as promised.

The Navy has scrapped these because the maintenance costs are higher than promised and it's cheaper (for some reason).

These are getting replaced by a class of frigates.  I'm not sure if any of those are going to be built in Wisconsin.

The Marinette is the first commissioned warship to wear the name.  

She is the second ship to wear the name.  The first was a tugboat.

The contract for the ship was issued in 2016.  She was launched in 2020 and christened in 2021.  She was commissioned in September of this year.  She will be homeported in Florida.

She passes the subject of my next post.

And she heads off into the distance.

One of the Coast Guard boats that was escorting her.