Grand tour of the USS Jackson navy combat ship

[Music] watch your step watch your step this way and walking when I walk all right good morning I am fire-control my first class Petty Officer bright stationed on board USS Jackson I've been on board since February of this year I've been in the Littoral Combat Ship program since December of 2012 this is my third ship in the class we're going to start the tour here as you can see the space we're in is very very massive the Mission Bay roughly 40% of this ship's entire volume is empty space when the ship is built that's so we can reconfigure it for different missions currently we have none of those mission package modules on board because after this trip to Portland we're expecting to go into the shipyard for an overhaul which is normal practice after the ship gets built commissioned we finished final contractor trials and this is a chance for the Builder to rectify any any issues that may become known at that time like I said this we can load in different waterborne or other modules needed for the different missions the Stern door here opens up which we have it currently open and a 11 meter rigid inflatable hole boat or a multi-mission vehicle which is a semi submersible or even a remote-controlled surface vessel could be launched out of here by use of our twin boom extendable crane which you can see above us right now the boom the twin boom crane would lift up anything converts it out of the ship and lowers down to the waterline other things we could take in here would be five to seven ton trucks if they need to be transported we could be used as a ferry armored assault vehicles there's a plan for some of those so we do have a way to bring those onboard and move them around the battlefield because of our speed in excess of 40 knots it allows us move things from one side of the battlespace to the other very very quickly and very efficiently should we bring on containers which would be birthing modules for personnel or equipment as necessary we would use this piece of yellow gear behind me there is the mobile con it articulates out it extends opens up and can pick up any standard shipping container or anything set on that sort of platform and we can bring it in through a side door we have just after me that whole side door opens up and we can drive things on and off the pier alright so as previously discussed one of the things that we can bring on board is a birthing module to support a larger number of crew currently we have 61 people are 62 people on board for the crew from various cruise not just USS Jackson's crew but we also have LCS crew 2:06 onboard as well as mine warfare detachment 3 so some of those ladies and gentlemen have been sleeping out a birthing module much like this one the accommodations aren't the worst in the Navy it's pretty standard they unfortunately have to share heads so bathrooms and showers with the rest of the crew we don't have a birthing module for that just yet hopefully it's in the work things we actually do normally after we check on board is we have to figure out how to get from our living spaces and our working spaces out to topside spaces in the event that there's a fire or other casualty like that where we would need to get to fresh air so most sailors on board are very versed at moving throughout the ship quickly we kind of know where we are as you can see I'm walking backwards without having to look as long as someone doesn't run into me we'll be good so we're down to the birthing module first eye you can see as we go around the ship there's damage control gear pretty much everywhere so if there's a fire that breaks out or if we have to do shirring like a bulkhead gives way due to damage or some some sort of casually there's there's gear all over the ship to fight that sort of casualties that may arise not standard any US warship so what I'm about to show you is going to make a lot of the fleet jealous most enlisted sailors are in burnings that are roughly on the small side if they're lucky sixty to eighty personnel per berthing this happens to be my birthing and there are four of us in this stateroom style birthing so each birthing has four wrecks our own commode and shower in every four-man birthing most warships in the fleet would have to share three or four showers to an eighty person birthing six personnel to one shower one commode you can't really ask for better than that and as the entire Navy most people like I said it's three commodes three or four commodes to about a sixty person birthing and then three showers if you're lucky we've got items that were on loans from the city of Jackson Mississippi like the street sign of 3rd Street which is was a flourishing business area for African Americans and as part of the national historic district you'll see stuff like that on most US warships their namesake generally have items from if it's named after a person either personal effects from that person or if it's a city or area it'll be things of this nature from the city alright so moving forward see if doc Singh so our medical department on a larger ship would include officers and corpsman us being a small crew the Navy's mandated that we have just one independent Duty corpsman I don't believe he's in right now he's probably still up in the hangar bay uh we'll try to hook up with him later and he could show you off all of his gear I guess it's he doesn't have a lot but he's very very well-versed at it and like almost Navy warships your corpsman is lovingly referred to as doc so we will try to find hm1 later of course we have the ward room this is where the officers all eat we'll be moving because we're moving after forward we'll be getting to the mess decks and the mess line shortly officers you hear unlike most of your bigger warships where your ward room is attended by food service attendants which can be sailors from any part of the ship who will either serve the officers or the officers will request food which will be plated by those food service attendants and then given to the officers or brought directly to where the officers seating on board here because it's such a small crew everyone does their own messing which means they'll go grab their tray they'll go through the same mess line as everyone else including our captain will go through the same mess line who get the same food as us he will bring his food to the ward room as will all the rest of the officers they will eat here then they will take their trays into our scullery which is where we wash and sanitize our trays and that's everyone from our our youngest seaman all the way to our captain so this is where the officers would eat enlisted e6 and below would be the crews mess [Music] one thing you can kind of see as you move around regardless of your paygrade we all kind of have the same living standard and that's that's the nature of a small ship and a small crew we just don't have the room or the personnel to really be splitting stuff up gentlemen so Lieutenant Commander was jokingly saying that the coffeepot never stops which is true u.s. Navy runs on two things coffee and DFM diesel fuel marine grade there's a bunch of different names for it but it's the joke is that's all sailors need to keep the Navy fighting so as I was saying the everyone goes through the same mess line this is the mess line you would start at the far end and work your way this way we're going to actually go through the mess decks that are through the galley here where they prepare food the CSS are very busy though so we ask that you don't disturb them you know sharp knives and looking over your shoulder is not the way to go so after you would eat I know we're doing this a little bit backwards but after you would bring your dishes here you would rinse wash rinse off the soap stack your tray here and then run it through this little sanitizer next to you if you were the last person to load up one of the trays and run the dishes through the sanitizer you will also be the one drying off the dishes and putting them away exceptions would be if you're trying to get to watch which then the polite thing we do is ask the next sailor hey would you mind picking up the slack for me so this is the entire galley every all the food that's made is made right here by fine young Navy sailors women and men we only have the one grill we have no fried food on board we're trying to get healthier I know I know I don't look that great in shape around as a shape I've heard one grill our hotline is here one mixer looks like we're having chili mac for lunch pretty excited two coppers for hot food and our ovens this is everything gets made in this little space for 60 plus today I believe the numbers with all our ship riders is up over a hundred so they are making over a hundred meals or just lunch they already made 60-ish meals for breakfast and they'll do the same for dinner so three meals every day regardless of what's going on like I said usually this this morning it was a little earlier for breakfast because we had to get the ship underway and last night they pushed it a little later because we knew we're going to have a late night coming in so this is cs1 Smith he's our food service officer culinary specialist first class he is also the head of all the cooks on board and there's my third LCS ship third crew and they're the best they really are appreciated appreciate it yeah this one Smith Bishop when it was designed is designed to be able to get underway for approximately 21 days we're working on modifications of the ship where we go into what's called me as they are most shakedown availability when they do a little bit more modification of the ship so we have a little bit more storage in order to take more people on under ways with us the three storage areas that we have right now are our dry provision storeroom here our Reaper or fresh fruits and vegetable in derry box which is here and our freezer which is right there these are the three and only three - a couple small cabinets that you see for coffees and creamers and things like that that we have in order to provide all of the meals for day-to-day operations as well as all of our underway operations with a full load out with what we have as the ships are coming out of the shipyards right now we have the capabilities of getting underway for approximately 14 days they're working on getting a little bit more storage in the ships to come so we can have the ability to take more people on boost the number of crew members and still have the stowage capabilities to be able to feed all of those crew members so and right now it's about 14 days straight underway before we wouldn't have to come back in - you know who's our supply level again fresh fruits vegetables dairy and bring us back up to our high level or get it underway replenishment or get it underway replenishment we are when the ships come out we they have to qualify they have to go through qualifications to be able to do a vertical replenishment where helicopters come and drop bar food off onto the flight deck but we do have those capabilities we have the manpower we have them trained up to be able to do so so yeah that's coming down that's like this is the laundry facilities on board so your larger ships of the fleet you would put your dirty clothes into a dirty clothes hamper which would then be picked up by whoever's doing cleaning of messing and berthing and then they would send it down to ships laundry you would have SH es or someone running hotel services they would wash your clothes it would be returned to your birthing people doing birthing cleaners and put it on your rack and then you put away from there here again the small crew mentality everyone has to pull their weight we just have a washer and dryer here and another one behind our our door here so when your clothes start to get dirty you wash them we dry them we put them away nobody takes care of you here at this point on most ships where your forward mooring station is which is where the lines go off the ship to the pier you would also have your anchor we do not our anchor is one deck above which will be going shortly it's pretty sparse there's racks for forward storage miscellaneous parts things that we we might need you to run time hours on engines of you know oil filters things like that are stored up here our engineers also work out of here this is their office back behind you which is the general workshop we do not have repair facilities on board more of your larger ships there general workshop would include drill presses lathe that sort of thing again small crew small ship mentality we don't have any of that on board if we needed a major repair we pull in and up get someone in the Navy to take care of it or contracted out staying on the nature of the job oh nice so this is the foredeck we are now two decks above the forward mooring station as you can see one of the things that makes this ship special this little hatch right here this plate currently there's nothing in that station but it is set up for one of our mission zones either vertical launch Hellfire can go in there or 30-millimeter change on basically anything that's designed to be in there I'm going to take these glasses off before they get all fogged up affair to that you see our 57-millimeter Bofors rapid firing cannon one of the special things about it besides firing at a rate of 200 rounds a minute is that we have three p ammunition which is basically a round filled with a thousand or so tungsten pellets and ki be programmed via something very much like bluetooth before we fired so we could tell it to detonate when it hits the target before it hits a target after it hits a target so we pay for one round and it can do what you would normally have to carry several different rounds for two decks down there was uh there was a hatch that I said was the magazine that's where all the ammunition is kept for that gun it has been loaded onto an elevator that lifts two rounds at a time all the way up and it has three magazines inside per side it's got an intermediate magazine it's got a ready magazine and it's got the actual load into the gun so you could have multiple types of ammunition in both sides you could have the three P in one side and then the training round in the other so you could get spot correct for splash that sort of thing with a cheaper round and then use your more expensive destructive round without having to stop download and change out and that's the bridge up there we'll be going there shortly as you can see we fly Jackson Mississippi's flag quite often when we're underway especially doing transits like this and then the flags all the way to our right which would be portside that is the Navy identifier for Jackson Mississippi as those four flags up there so up here is also where we would have if there was a force protection issue we need to man up all of our crew served weapons we would put a 240 m240 machine gun up here which is chambered in 7.62 millimeter it was the replacement for the m60 so we put one here one on the other side if you look at you can actually see the barrel to one of our 50 cals our 50 caliber machine guns are currently manned up because we are doing a river transit and while we don't expect an attack we're always prepared to defend this ship nothing buy right now is our decontamination station so should we get hit with a chemical radiological biological attack and you happen to be outside you have to make it back into the ship there's a process to do that and normally you would have a team of people helping you scrub down and decontaminate we don't have the number of bodies being a small crew to do that so we have speaker boxes like this one over here where we would be able to talk to people on the other side of the bulkhead and instruct them what they need to do and there's also viewing ports on either side this station here is fun because it's on the inside it's nothing but water hoses and Jets nozzles basically the world's biggest saltwater shower and you'd come into this room they would tell you what your next step was and then they would turn the water on by flipping this I wish I could do it right now it would be so awesome to watch you flip that and it would look like a car wash in there with a person stuck inside that is how you would decontaminate and then you would come once that was done you'd come through this door you'd be fully decontaminated and you would be able to carry out your duties on board the ship we're going to go through stage one to get back outside like I said you would come in to here first this would be your first stage you would take out any of your clothes that was exposed to the chemical radiological a biological attack there would be pans for you to step into that had chemicals in it to clean and treat your feet and then you would go into the next room and it's basically just a big you ending in that Superfund saltwater shower we needed fuel while we were out to sea this rig here actually accepts a probe it's pretty standard for NATO forces and there'd be a refueling ship about 300 yards to that side of us 2 to 300 yards to that side of us and we would fire lines over them and they would fire lines over to us and then now we'd haul over line which would then be attached to cable we hook the cable up here which would pull this probe out to them while facing them and then we'd start pulling over massive fuel hoses which in slam into this probe and we take on fuel that way so underway replenishment for fuel is here for our main diesel fuel and then we'd have just a hose that we take out along the deck to the little purple pipe over there that's where the aircraft fuel goes into and then if we needed stores underway we would just helo them back onto this flight deck which is the largest flight deck that you will see on any small ship of this nature it's about the same size as a LPD class ship which means we can land almost anything no v-22 Ospreys just due to the heat that they put off from the engines and mh-53 which are also known as the sea dragon or the Jolly Green Giant that's more of a weight issue which they are talking about upgrading the flight deck to take care of that anyway further forward we have one of our 50 caliber gun mounts for ship self-defense passing one of our many antennas for communications off the ship [Music] life rafts we have twice as many life rafts on board than we need standard maybe issue that's just because if you take a hit take damage and you need to abandon ship you want to make sure you have more of these than you need these will fit 50 peacefull per life wrap we have four currently on board and they just fall in the water self inflate we swim out to them hopefully we don't ever have to do that on board here because that means something bad happen so we're talking about the flight deck being uh fairly massive for a ship this size we have before launched to CH 60 variant helicopters at the same time one from up forward on this part of the flight deck and then the other one app where that gentleman standing over there they both took off at the same time came off from the ship we also have the capability of launching the fire scout which is a remote helicopter it's like a drone helicopter currently mostly for surveillance the next version that's supposed to be making out we should be weaponized and that we would just launch from also back with that gentleman standing there's a small radar we don't have currently on board due to the shock clouds we went through they didn't want to install it we'll be getting it after our PSA and that can fly surveillance missions search and rescue missions all without endangering pilot or any enlisted members that would be running the payloads whether that be cameras or weapons so we do have that capability it's one of the few ships in the Navy it's set up already for Fire Scout which gives us just one more versatile tool without having to put more people on the ship standard we would deploy with 160c Seahawk variant and to fire Scouts which are currently not on board unfortunately but we do have pictures of them if you would like your standard 60 this is just kind of showing a little bit of what we're capable of bringing on board the N Mo's missile non-line of sight that's been replaced by vertical launch Hellfire this is a picture 130 millimeter weapon systems before it's installed as a mission package we talked about earlier sea ram is staying on the ship all the time it is a closing weapon system with 11 rolling airframe missile for ship self defense point defense capabilities and that's 11 meter rib that we'd bring on board for boarding search seizure that sort of stuff and then to get the the helicopters we fold them up to stow them in the helicopter hangar may be brought out with this it's called the Mantis hook up to the rear wheel pull it out they get it on deck where they wanted to and then they'd unfold it I'm not really sure how long that takes I want to say about 30 minutes all right to the bridge so we have a captain at sea cabin it's really up to him whether he wants to use the actually cabin or import cabin it also depends whether we bring a chaplain onboard or another officer that he would want to share quarters with so we have an integrated ship and combat Information Center most ships have the bridge and then at a location usually further inside the ship and down would be the combat Information Center yeah so a standard US Navy warship would have anywhere from 25 or more people just for safety of navigation you have someone monitoring the charts where you're going where you're at where you've been you'd have a Bose tomato to watch passing words over the ship's internal communication system you have in Cuba keeping the log you have a offs on the deck a junior officer the deck a helmsman driving the ship Ally helmsman possibly operating the throttles for the ship so it basically be like having someone for the gas pedal your car someone for the steering wheel and then someone backseat driving a beer officer the deck conning officer that sort of thing traditionally underway your officer the deck would make a course change so he would tell the junior officer the deck changes ship of course zero three eight repeat back zero three eight aye and he would tell the conning officer counting officer move the ship to course zero three eight zero three eight I go back and forth back forth all the way down to the helmsman the helmsman would actually make the course change and then repeat all of that back up saying that they've studied up on course here we use a lot of auto pilot which is very good currently our inbound transit down the river is being done by autopilot so we lay the chart we have a chart out electronically we lay the track the ship will follow the track within parameters that we give it no turns greater than this no speed changes greater than this and it will do all of that we've gotten underway from our home port in San Diego pulled away from the pier it start on the autopilot and it took us all the way and San Diego's notorious for pleasure craft people just enjoying the weather I personally like you guys's weather but uh so to avoid that that's the only time they take control move out of out of the way of danger if necessary and then as soon as they relinquish control go straight back onto autopilot so we will be going up here shortly we only have two people on watch doing all of that and it's just officer the deck entering your officer today and you as you're saying it's usually led about and you usually 15 or more because then you also have the apt lookouts you have the port starboard lookouts and they're just there to monitor what might be around listen for for foghorn stuff like that and that's not even including at low visibility low visibility you'll increase those numbers we have microphones around the outside of the ship so they can hear 360 degrees around the ship and we have cameras all over the ship to see a astern of us port starboard various angles including in our engine rooms Mission Bay helo hangar flight deck so we don't have to have people in all those places where traditionally you would have so that allows us to have fewer people on board which allows us to be more effective with the people we do have [Music] you

Channel: The Oregonian

Views: 546,526

Rating: 4.7842078 out of 5

Keywords: auth-teresamahoney-auth, uss jackson, navy ship, combat ship, navy, ship, littoral, astoria, portland, fleet week

Id: OtqoiDi3yrM

Length: 28min 16sec (1696 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 13 2017

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The Challenges of the LCS-Part 1

The US Navy wants a replacement for its aging Cruiser Fleet. Destroyers are fulfilling the role of Cruisers. They got rid of the Frigates and need something to do the Destroyers job.

Enter the LCS. It’s grey, it looks cool and is fast. Problem is it isn’t really a warship. It’s meant for the littorals, not the open ocean.

It can’t fill in for Destroyers or Cruisers or Frigates. It can really only fill in some niche rolls so the Frigates can go back offshore and support the fleet. Oh but there aren’t Frigates anymore

The End