> it is absolutely not obvious that building and then maintaining fleet of 12 different role ships is easier/cheaper than having LCS reconfigured on some bases,

> it is absolutely not obvious that building and then maintaining fleet of 12 different role ships is easier/cheaper than having LCS reconfigured on some bases, even if it is relatively large procedure. It very much is obvious to anyone with any familiarity. You're taking a system, adding a lot of cost and complexity to it, and not eliminating any substantial cost or complexity from the original system. > it is also not clear if US can maintain such capability plus logistics and training without actual fleet in place. You'd still have a fleet in place. But rather than building 10 expensive ships designed to last for 40 years, you'd build 40 cheap ships designed to last for 10 years. At any given time you have a fleet of 10 ships, but they are newer, and better optimized ships. You don't need to worry about maintaining decades old ships with a mix of out of date systems, unavailable components and haphazardly integrated upgrades that could never fully take advantage of lessons learned. You can afford to take risks because you don't need to live with mistakes for long, you make fewer mistakes because the people involved have personally done this before, if something does go awry you can nip it in the bud because you don't have large sunk costs, and since you're sending out a steady stream of work, your suppliers and partners are more concerned with maintaining a long term relationship than securing a single massive contract.