"Star Wars" ship commissioned

MOBILE, Ala. - The newest Navy warship, a 379-foot aluminum three-hulled vessel, was commissioned Saturday in Mobile. The USS Independence is a new breed of ship designed to be fast and to operate in shallow water. Built by Austal USA, part of the General Dynamics team, it's competing against Lockheed Martin's conventional monohull littoral combat ship for billions of dollars of follow-on orders. The Lockheed Martin ship, commissioned in 2008, is in Norfolk, Va., awaiting deployment to the Caribbean. The Independence is heading to Virginia for testing before its permanently homeported in California. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, who said the ship looks like something out of Star Wars, said the new class of ships would be useful for a wide range of missions, including responding to humanitarian disasters like the earthquake in Haiti. (Source: Reuters, WKRG-TV, 01/16/10)