 LCS is a major sea change from any platform that the Navy has ever procured. What it really comes down to is people don't really understand LCS. There's a lot that we can do with it. It's not a destroyer, but it's not meant to be a destroyer. We're a truck, and we can do a lot with this truck. Dominique, Mikayla Fraser Jones. I'm a Mime in Third Class Petty Officer in the Navy. The LCS, we call it the Smartphone of Ships because it's designed to be reconfigurable, meaning you can change out the mission that the ship is able to do. This ship in particular, the USS Indianapolis, will be billeted to be configured for mine kind of major operations, which means we'd be doing exactly the job of a mineman finding and neutralizing underwater mines. Well, I think if you look at it, mines are an asymmetric threat because they're relatively cheap to produce. You put them out there and it basically prevents traffic from passing through an area. It gives countries that don't necessarily have a real strong capability to project force through aircraft and ships to be able to project force or deny access to other countries by virtue of mining an area. I think the threat is very real today. And as countries realize that they can't really match up to the United States in terms of just raw power, they may resort to those mechanisms because that's the only way that they can gain an advantage or stop our activity. My name is Eric Sabineau. I'm a gunner's mate on board the USS Indianapolis. Command Master at Arms and Assistant Anti-Terrorism Officer on board. I'm originally from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I joined the Navy straight out of high school and just wanted to do something different in my life. So I wanted to take an adventure, but use my skills and help out. I wanted to serve. I always was intrigued by the military. I always wanted to be part of the military. And so I figured that was a good place for me. I don't ever adjust my helmet. What's wrong with you? It's definitely interesting. When you get underway for the first time, you got to learn how to get your sea legs about you. Especially this platform, it moves a lot. It rolls a lot, rocks a lot. And if you're not used to it, it catches up to you pretty quick. So you find the areas of the ship where you can kind of take ease from it a little bit. You definitely don't want to be all the way forward when the ship's pitching and rolling. Or when you're eating breakfast and the ship takes a 15 degree roll and all your food and your drinks and stuff goes flying off the table. I like being able to see it's very busy. It's challenging. It's not easy by any means. Everybody's tired. Everybody's worked real hard. You don't sleep a lot. Watch rotations. We call it five and dimes. So you stand five hours watching and 10 hours off. But it's not 10 hours just to go to sleep. That's 10 hours to do work. That's 10 hours to attend meetings. That's 10 hours to do training. So you just find time to get some sleep in when you can. Figure out how to take care of yourself. It's a challenge. Every day is a challenge. And something new to learn from that. LCS apart from a legacy ship is its versatility of its crew. You get to perform in a multi-faceted row. You get to learn other people's jobs. You get to be part of almost everything. On a legacy ship, you have a lot more manning. People doing one job and their job only. They get to a state where they have a lot more experiences than their peers on other platforms. On LCS, we like on a mine sweep we'll wear a lot more hats. A couple of centers I'm gonna put up right now. So I have called E&2 Jones and M&3 Woods to the pilot house. And now it's going to be E&1 Jones and M&2 Woods. What makes LCS sailors unique is the fact that they have to go through a very long training pipeline. Junior sailors are able to do more things than their peers on other platforms just because we only have so many people to perform similar duties that you would have to fill in other ships. The training that they get out of this really sets them up for success in terms of having a marketability as they go on to other platforms that they can really bring a lot to the fight. So another thing unique about LCS is the blue and gold rotation concept. So initially with a pre-commissioning crew one of the crews stays on a little bit longer in order to complete the combat system ships qualification trials. And that allows us to not have to repeat training and maintains the continuity necessary to get through all the different certification events to complete the testing. Then we get into the more typical rotation of four to five months of rotating the crews through. And what this does is facilitate longer on station time for the littoral combat ships. My name is Michael Anselag. I am a third class boat's mate serving on board USS Indianapolis. We're basically like a first mate deck hand when it has to come to anything with the ship. Getting underway, being out at sea to pull them back into the pier between the mooring lines, the anchor, anchoring evolutions. I wake up every day and I never know what the day's gonna be like. Whether it's flight operations, boat operations, such as rescue, mob s, drills or dropping the anchor, mooring up lines. Basically anything on the boat you do maintenance on. We've definitely tried a lot of things in terms of minimal manning. This is the first class of ship to have water jets on this scale. We've definitely changed the whole mindset in terms of training, which I think is a very positive direction that LCS has gone into. Now I think you're gonna start seeing LCS start to bear the burden of deployments and fulfilling the mission that we needed to and moving forward. And I think it has a lot of capability in terms of not just the mission packages for the surface warfare, mine warfare and anti-submarine warfare mission packages that were initially designed. But I think we have a lot of flexibility to take LCS, exploring things like embarking seals, force recon marines, as well as being a platform to serve as a medical base. You could bring on mobile operating rooms as well as patient care facilities if we needed to evacuate personnel, say in a humanitarian assistance or disaster relief kind of response scenario. I wouldn't consider it as unique. I think we've all been through a lot and a lot of long hours and long nights, long days. You know, you're like siblings, so of course you'll have your moments of weakness where you're fighting like cats and dogs, not literally, because it is a business, a professional working environment, but we all have our ups and downs. You can name almost everybody on the crew. So that's a blessing and a curse sometimes. Sometimes it can be a little bit hectic. People get tired, people get grumpy, and you're always around the same people all the time. But at the end of the day, you know who you can count on. We're away from our family a lot, and so we are each other's family. All right, what it is that we have to do or where we have to go or what the mission is that we're gonna be having each other's backs and we're there for each other.