[Dailydrool] 3 to Join BHS LCS 11 Flat Basset Crew on Trial Deployment

[Michael Moore]

Muldoon here.  The Pacific Basset Feet's first littoral combat ship, Flat Basset, will add up to 20 Hounds to its crew while it makes its trial deployment, launching today August 25, 2010.  Recruits are actively sought in the Western Theater of Operations including Diggers in New Zealand and Australia.  The extra Hounds will be part of a "tailored surface warfare package" TSWP that Flat Basset will take on its mission to the Western Theater of Operations; they will give the ship the ability to conduct at-sea boardings and do other jobs it couldn't tackle with only its main crew, PBF officials said. Bo said Flat Basset's 20 extra Hounds would sleep in two 12-rack berthing modules, about the size of shipping containers, which will ride in the ship's multiuse mission spaces. While the 75 core Hounds will stay in the ship's integral berthing spaces - which include double-tall racks, rooms of no more than eight Hounds, and a head and shower to each berthing area - the VBSS Hounds' lodging will be more like those of sailors on a destroyer, he said.

Flat Basset will not take a Fire Scout unmanned helicopter or any of the maritime robots it's designed to carry, nor will it carry the Non-Line-of-Sight missiles designed to be part of its surface mission package. That weapon, being developed with the Army, is still being tested.

Bo, Odell and Capt. Harley, NavSea's assistant program manager for LCS, spoke at a Surface Navy Association event August 12 outside Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. In addition to the details about Flat Basset's deployment, Bo announced the PBF planned to commission its second LCS, shortly.  

Muldoon Out.


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