The Trump Administration is “supportive” of procuring two Littoral Combat Ships (LCSs) in fiscal year 2018 rather than the one in the federal budget request released Tuesday, the acting Navy acquisition head said on Wednesday.
Allison Stiller, acting assistant of the Navy for research, development, and acquisition, told the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee that “the administration recognizes the criticality of our industrial base and supports funding a second LCS in FY ’18.”
The announcement of a second LCS comes a day after the Naval budget requested just one LCS for FY ’18 (Defense Daily, May 23).
After the hearing, Stiller told Defense Daily that on Wednesday morning the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) told the Navy they could be supportive of one more LCS. She stayed tightlipped on details of this second LCS when asked in comments after the hearing ended.
“The administration is supportive of the second ship in the seas. I do not know the details, I do not know how that’s going to manifest itself,” she said.
When asked if she was surprised that OMB would come to the Navy a day after budget day and allow this support she responded “that’s OMB’s prerogative” and “I’m relaying what I was asked to relay.”
Earlier in the morning at a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense (SAC-D) hearing neither acting Secretary of the Navy Sean Stackley or Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson mentioned this additional LCS.
At that hearing Stackley said that any break in production for Navy shipyards would be “devastating” and unacceptable for a major shipbuilding program. He noted the three LCSs appropriated in FY ’17 with the single LCS in the FY ’18 request “ensure continued production at both shipyards while the Navy refines the requirements and acquisition strategy for the future Frigate (FF).
He noted the Navy is procuring one LCS at a time and the administration will take the FY ’17 ships and “combine it with the 2018 ship that we have requested in order to go out with a single procurement of those two years to provide as much stability across the current LCS builders as we can.”
This is occurring while the Navy continues to refine requirements and make progress in the design of the Future Frigate. The FY ’18 budget defers the first year of future Frigate procurement to FY ’20. LCS is set to continue through FY ’19 as a bridge before future Frigate procurement occurs later, Stiller said in her opening statement.
Stackley noted “we want to keep the LCS and the frigate heel-to-toe as best as possible so that we have a healthy industrial base to compete for that future frigate program.”
The LCS is produced at the Fincantieri Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin and the Austal USA shipyard in Mobile, Ala. Nine LCS ships have been delivered to the Navy thus far with 17 others being constructed. Lockheed Martin [LMT] is the prime contractor on the Fincantieri team.
Late in the SAC-D hearing, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) favored raising the FY ’18 LCS procurement to the optimized level of three per year. She noted the importance of avoiding production gaps and resulting layoffs at LCS shipyards.
Baldwin said she believes procuring just one LCS in FY ’18 will create this worst case scenario where if production drops to unsustainable levels, the shipyards will begin to shutter, resulting in upwards of 800 job losses at Wisconsin Marinette Marine.
Stackley responded that challenge of the FY ’18 budget is to restore readiness but not at the cost of procurement and modernization. Procuring just one LCS in FY ’18 makes sense when three were appropriated in the FY ’17 budget so that each shipyard gets at least one LCS per year.
He acknowledged one LCS procured in FY ’18 is below the optimal number, but that they would come back with more in the FY 2019 request more. Stackley also noted potential of a Foreign Military Sale of LCS-type ships sold to Saudi Arabia may add additional stability to the larger defense industrial base (Defense Daily, May 22).