Future combat ship commissioning at USNA Saturday
The future USS Sioux City arrived in Annapolis Tuesday, in advance of the ship’s commissioning ceremony.
U.S. Navy officials said the Freedom-variant littoral combat ship, the first ship named after the fourth-largest city in Iowa, Sioux City, will be commissioned at the U.S. Naval Academy, Saturday, November 17.
When considering names for the Navy’s littoral combat ships, Ray Mabus focused on a number of variables. He wanted to name the new class of warships after smaller cities located not on the nation’s coasts, but far away from the seashore. He researched how long it had been since each state had had a ship named for a city within its borders.
The former Secretary of the Navy determined that Iowa, with a long history of sending men and women to the Navy, deserved a ship bearing the name of one of its cities.
Looking at a list of Iowa cities, Sioux City was the right size, Mabus said. Other than that, he can’t say what led him to choose it. He’d never been here before, had no knowledge of the city, other than there had never been a ship named for Sioux City before.
“Sioux City fit really nicely in this,” Mabus said. “I can’t give you any ‘a-ha moment,’ but Sioux City just seemed to fit.”
Dozens, if not hundreds, of current and former Sioux Cityans will travel to Annapolis this week to witness the USS Sioux City’s commissioning at the U.S. Naval Academy on Saturday. Find details about the ship’s commissioning and public tours here.
Find some Sioux City Commissioning Week cruises by Watermark here.
LCS is a modular, reconfigurable ship designed to meet validated fleet requirements for surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare and mine countermeasures missions in the littoral region.
A mission package is embarked on each LCS that provides the primary mission systems in one of these warfare areas.
Using an open architecture design, modular weapons, sensor systems and a variety of manned and unmanned vehicles to gain, sustain and exploit littoral maritime supremacy, LCS provides U.S. joint force access to critical theaters. Find some very cool tech specs and a “by the numbers chart” here.
