The next ship in the littoral combat fleet will be named the Oakland, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus announced Wednesday at an Oakland Athletics baseball game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oakland will be the 24th christened LCS and the 12th in the Independence-classvariant<\/span>, out of 32 ships scheduled in the program’s first run before the class are redesignated as frigates.\u00a0is renamed under the frigate designation.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n LCS Oakland will be the third ship in the fleet under that name, according to a Navy release. The first served was commissioned in 1918 and served mostly as a cargo ship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second was commissioned in 1942, an Atlanta-class light cruiser\u00a0that served at Pearl Harbor, the Marshall Islands, Pagan, Guam, Iwo Jima, Rota, Peleliu and Okinawa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 419-foot ship will be built by Austal USA in Mobile, Alabama, the release said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mabus\u00a0announced earlier this year that any new LCS after number 32 will\u00a0receive the FF frigate designation, which is more in line with Navy designating tradition. Traditionally,\u00a0ship designations beginning with L are amphibious, unlike the LCS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It will still be the same ship, the same program of record, just with an appropriate and traditional name,” he said in January at the annual Surface Navy Association symposium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mabus said in January that the next order of littoral combat ships will bear the FF designation, but he hadn’t decided whether to rename the current LCSs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The renaming would revitalize the frigate fleet, which will fall out of the ship count entirely this fall when Kauffman, the last of the Oliver Hazard Perry-class FFGs, is decommissioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though the LCS program has been thought of as a replacement for the frigate fleet, the shallow-water littoral description\u00a0didn’t square up with the frigate’s role as a small surface combatant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “They don’t look like traditional Navy ships sometimes, and I think that’s one of the issues that traditionalists have, but if you look at the missions \u2014 if you look at what a frigate is supposed to be able to do \u2014 that’s what this ship does,” Mabus said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The next ship in the littoral combat fleet will be named the Oakland, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus announced Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":56348,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":65,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[12,65],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3308],"class_list":["post-27636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-your-navy"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"VV4O7C7IVRHGVHBJWQ7M4SEQCA","arc_canonical_url":"\/news\/your-navy\/2015\/08\/19\/secnav-dubs-next-littoral-combat-ship-oakland\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n