Questions continue after the USS Sioux City was decommissioned this week barely five years after being put to sea. Sioux City Chamber of Commerce president Chris McGowen attended the decommissioning Monday. “While the commissioning is a combination of a really fun wedding reception and a great graduation party, decommissioning is the exact opposite it’s more akin to a funeral,” he says.
McGowan says there’s questions about why other littoral combat ships are still in service. “What’s really troubling is we’re LCS 11. LCS number 3, USS Fort Worth commissioned in 2012, six years prior to us is not being decommissioned. Now wait a minute why is that a reasonable person might ask,” McGowen says. He says the answer is likely that the chair of the House Appropriations Committee is from Texas.
McGowan says no one seems to know either why one of the ships is sill under construction. “LCS 25, The USS Marinette, is going to be commissioned next month,” he says. “It is a freedom class variant littoral combat ship just like the USS Sioux City. Those are the things that I personally cannot reconcile.”
Iowa Senator Joni Ernst says the Navy never wanted to build the ships and they cost $50 million a year to maintain, and some of the 13 ships in the class have developed cracks in their hulls. them.
(By Woody Gottburg, KSCJ, Sioux City)