The Danish Frigate and flexible operations: thinking through an LCS alternative

Iver Huitfeldt F361 (Photo: Danish Defence) The Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) are a unique class of new ships that are being built and deployed as hybrids between a Frigate and a Fast Patrol Boat. There has been voiced much concern around building a unique class of ships as these require a unique class of mission modules. On the contrary, the trend nowadays is to build frigates that have capabilities for a variety of combat operations. At the Airpower Symposium held in Copenhagen earlier this month journalist Robbin Laird and Editor Ed Timperlake from Second Line of Defense Forum sat down with CEO and founder of Risk Intelligence, Hans Tino Hansen, to talk about the introduction of the LCS in relation to the Danish Frigate. In the Danish Frigate, the new Danish Iver Huitfelt class of frigates constitutes an example of a recently acquired frigate that is leveraged to operate in a variety of missions. The acquirement of the ships are based on a vision of a sound frigate that can evolve over time, Hans Tino Hansen explains: “Earlier, the Danish navy had small and fast ships along with submarines to operate in the Baltic. After the end of the Cold War, thinking moved to having larger ships able of more a wider-range of operations”. The Danish frigate now provides command and control for a variety of missiles: “We can buy missiles not even yet developed which use this launch tube, and we can evolve the C2 to use these missiles in a broader engagement as well,” Hans Tino Hansen informs. “Two frigates can more or less cover Danish airspace… and they can provide area coverage for the Baltics.” With the Danish Air Force not having missile defense capabilities any longer, the frigates thus possess a potentially central role in a future missile defense system for the region. In relation to the possible future use of LCS, Hans Tino Hansen concludes, “They really fall between the classes of ships we use, and the various sea states in which we have to operate. I can see perhaps their value in UN missions or very low conflict spectrum settings, but we simply do not have enough ships to build a ship for the lower end of the warfighting spectrum… The LCS seems more like the corvettes, which the British used, in the last war to provide convoy support. They had limited weapons, primarily for convoy defense and could not hunt submarines”.