362 Million Dollar “Unstoppable” Futuristic Super-Ship Breaks Down In 3 Weeks. Gets Towed.

Here’s your tax-dollars hard at work; the USS Milwaukee is the Navy’s newest “Freedom”-class littoral combat ship. Check out the epic video of it cutting through the sea, taken from its acceptance drills:

Money well spent, no? In fact, Commander Mark Haney went as far as to describe the crew as being “truly unstoppable.”

He forgot to add “unless fine metal debris accumulates in the lube oil filter,” because after that it transforms into an “truly unusable” metallic iceberg just three weeks after launch…

According to NavyTimes, “the ship suffered an engineering casualty while transiting from Halifax, Canada, to Mayport, Florida, and ultimately its home port of San Diego.”

John McCain said, according to the Journal Sentinel, “Reporting of a complete loss of propulsion on USS Milwaukee (LCS 5) is deeply alarming, particularly given this ship was commissioned just 20 days ago. U.S. Navy ships are built with redundant systems to enable continued operation in the event of an engineering casualty, which makes this incident very concerning.”

According to the Navy, “the Milwaukee is a fast, agile, focused-mission platform designed for operation in near-shore environments yet capable of open-ocean operation. It is designed to defeat asymmetric ‘anti-access’ threats such as mines, quiet diesel submarines and fast surface craft.”

Yup, but lay off the symmetric “pro-access” threats like… dust. Didn’t they ever learn from the Death Star? Stop making super-expensive weapons that have gaping design-flaws.

The Milwaukee cost 362 MILLION tax dollars to build, and has a projected lifespan of 25 years. Its navigator Lt. Alexander Gallagher fatefully said, “basically what it can do is walk sideways without the use of tugs.” However, after this recent development, it appears the ship won’t be going forwards or backwards without tugs either.

“It can corner much faster and can get into shallower areas than other ships can. There’s no screws or rudders on the bottom of the ship to be damaged.”

Cmdr. Kendall Bridgewater describes the ship’s finer details, explaining that the ship’s purpose can be changed at port: “The way we load these mission packages on board the ship is through this hatch over our heads,” Bridgewater said. “So as we come ashore and need to change out a mission module, we have a shore-based crane lift off this hatch and then we drop these modules in. ”

The utility of the ship, before it broke down, was already called into question.

“Now you’ve got to go back to your port, swap the module, swap part of the crew and then come back out and do the mission,“said Eric Wertheim, author of the Naval Institute Guide to Combat Fleets of the World.

“Many argue, understandably so, that a larger ship that’s multi-missioned does not need to swap those modules, does not need to swap it’s crew.”

He might want to add that not being able to move is also a major disadvantage when it comes to swapping out these modules at port.

Sources: ZeroHedge, Daily Mail, Wisconsin Public Radio, Business Insider

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