The USS Freedom's (LCS-1) Troubled First Operational Deployment

In January we reported that the U.S. Navy was preparing the first monohull designed LCS 1 (littoral combat ship) USS Freedom (in contrast to the trimaran design LCS 2 USS Independence) for its first deployment. This was welcome news considering the bevy of mechanical issues that had cropped up during sea trials in 2011.

Of course, on the eve of that deployment the roughly 3,000 ton combat ship was blasted in a report issued by the Defense Department’s director of operational test and evaluation. A report that concluded the USS Freedom is "not expected to be survivable" in combat and unable to "maintain mission capability after taking a significant hit in a hostile combat environment."  Nevertheless, at least the ship was about to deploy and maybe work out some of the problems otherwise plauging it. Unfortunately, not so fast...

Aviation Week is reporting that the USS Freedom has managed to lose power three times in transit from Pearl Harbor to Guam. In total the three power outages managed to leave the ship dead in the water for a total of nearly 30 minutes. Who wants to be a sailor on that ship if and when it ever enters an actual hostile environment in a time of war? I must say that between the disaster that is the F-35 JSF program, the inability of the F-22 raptor to keep from injuring or killing its pilots, and the overall dreadful state of the LCS program is it too much to ask how Lockheed Martin continues to get Pentagon contacts?