A militarized civilian-spec ship for "show the flag" missions and support ops where no one can shoot back is indeed not inherently a terrible idea, but instead we have the LCS (excuse me, "Small Surface Combatant" - which it is not and will never be, save as an overpriced coffin for its unfortunate crews) which is in fact a terrible idea from start to finish.
It was started as the proverbial "horse designed by committee" - it was going to do everything, cheaply, and be amazing and revolutionary even though the Navy had no concept of operations that called for an LCS; in reality it quite literally does nothing, has no prospect of doing anything, and is a rather expensive and over-budget nothing at that. In practice, the LCS is a terrible
implementation for a whole host of reasons: the Navy won't actually come out and
admit that its purpose is "show the flag against people who can't fight back" and instead keeps trying to cram it into the fleet (where it is truly worse than useless), it probably can't even do
that (show the flag) job (in either version) because its so badly designed and non-functional, and their cost is high ($150 million per hull at last count) and going higher. And that last is a huge opportunity cost - we could have bought or built a great many
useful frigates or corvettes with the money that we are instead pouring into LCS-shaped holes in the water.
tl;dr - the LCS makes the F-35 look good by comparison.
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For anyone interested in the South China Sea, this (hour-long) speech by Admiral McDevitt is quite good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...9aF4roGI#t=270