Congress Backs Pentagon Budget Heavy on Future Weapons

Dan Morgan, Washington Post, June 11, 2004

As Congress moves ahead with a huge new defense bill, lawmakers are making only modest changes in the Pentagon's plans to spend well over $1 trillion in the next decade on an arsenal of futuristic planes, ships and weapons with little direct connection to the Iraq war or the global war on terrorism.
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The defense budget before Congress looks far different from the one Rumsfeld envisioned when he first came to office. At that time, he was pushing the armed forces toward a "transformation" creating lighter, faster, electronically networked and smaller forces. That approach already has resulted in plans for the Army's Future Combat Systems and the Navy's proposed Littoral Combat Ship
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The House-passed defense authorization bill reduces funding for developing the Littoral Combat Ship and the next-generation DD(X) destroyer.

It's hard to tell from this article whether the LCS has any place in the global war on terrorism.

The answer is yes.

Littoral Combat Ship Sensors Pose Integration Challenges, Sandra I. Erwin, National Defense Magazine, December 2003

As to whether other ships, such as destroyers or cruisers, could be assigned to littoral warfare missions, Spicer said that would be wasteful. The Navy’s billion-dollar multi-mission warships are not "optimized" to take care of missions such as mine and submarine detection, or maritime interdiction, he said. "Everything points to a smaller, high speed more agile combatant."

If you're going to catch terrorists traveling in small ships in congested waterways, you're going to need a small fast ship.

-HJC