[smacktoward]

They tried with the Littoral Combat Ship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littoral_combat_ship), but even when explicitly trying to design a ship that's cheap, easy to build and relatively disposable, they couldn't restrain themselves from larding it down with features until it was fat and expensive. And of course most of those features ended up not really working right anyway.

Sigh.

[learc83]

For Anti pirate work near the coast we have patrol boats that would work fine for coastal anti-pirate roles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_VI_patrol_boat