Marinette Marine Corporation JANUARY 10 www. bus- ex. com 15 Navy cannot operate," McCreary explains. " LCSs do have the capability to deploy worldwide and sail blue waters, but because they draw less water, they can get into areas that the balance of the Navy cannot reach." Marinette Marine is a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin, the primary contractor with the US Navy for building and delivering the LCSs. " Lockheed is the lead systems integrator for the ship, providing all the C4ISR [ command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] components," McCreary reports. The modular design allows an LCS to be reconfigured very quickly, depending on which of the three major missions it will undertake. " Any one of these mission packages can be deployed pierside in as little as four days, so these ships are designed to be multi- mission ships," McCreary says. A critical factor of the LCS is its highly automated design, requiring fewer people to crew the ship. " A comparably sized ship crewed in the normal manner of the US Navy would require more than 200 people aboard. But the LCS goes to sea with a base crew of only 40 people, with surge berthing LCSs are unique ships, designed for fast maneuverability in shallow, near- coastal waters. The USS Freedom, 378 feet in length, is a specialty ship operating in shallow waters. " It can operate in waters where destroyers and other blue- water ships of the US " An LCS can operate in waters where destroyers and other blue- water Navy ships cannot. LCSs do have the capability to deploy worldwide and sail blue waters, but because they draw less water, they can get into areas that the balance of the Navy cannot reach"