The Perry class USS Rodney M Davis in the Pacific. (Photo: Michael Nitz, German Navy Press Office)By Norman Friedman*
AT THE end of September the navy decommissioned USS Simpson, the last Perry class frigate. The fifty-one Perrys were the most numerous class of US warships built since World War II until the current LCS program, and the retirement of the last Perry suggests that it would be appropriate to compare the two programs.
When they were conceived, the Perrys were certainly as controversial as the LCS; they were derided as toothless and pointless, with a particularly ineffective hull sonar. The advent of towed arrays transformed their value for anti-submarine warfare, since with their gas turbine engines they were inherently quiet, compared to geared-turbine steam predecessors (the Knox class, which was nearly as numerous). The Perrys were also valued for their Standard Missile system, which seemed to offer a degree of protection against the pop-up missiles the Soviet navy deployed on board ‘Charlie’ class (Project 670A) submarines.
