US Navy’s next warship will have an Italian accent
Sean Gallagher - 7/22/2020, 11:30 AM
The search for a replacement for the US Navy's "little crappy ship" is over. On April 30, the US Navy announced that Fincantieri Marinette Marine, the US shipyard subsidiary of Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri, had beaten out the rest of the field to take on the FFG(X) frigate program, the shipbuilding effort that will replace the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship (LCS).
Frigates were once the workhorses of the Navy—small, fast escort ships that hunted submarines, acted as part of the air defense ring around carriers and other big combatants, and could patrol the seas on their own when necessary. The Oliver Hazard Perry (FFG-7) class of frigates, the first US Navy ships with gas turbine engines, were worked far beyond expectations during their service; they survived attacks by errant Iraqi anti-ship missiles (in the case of the USS Stark) and Iranian sea mines (the USS Samuel B. Roberts) during the US Navy's confrontation with Iran in the 1980s.
They were replaced by the LCS—a ship that was supposedly designed for multiple missions and the sort of close-ashore fighting that looked like the future in the late 1990s and early days of the Global War on Terror. But that didn't turn out too well.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/us-navys-next-warship-will-have-an-italian-accent/
