NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Due to the planned procurement of only one Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) in fiscal year 2018, the Navy aims to award a contract for the frigate program and downselect to a single vendor late that year, the service’s program manager said Wednesday.
The Navy initially expected to begin procuring 20 frigates, split by shipbuilders Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Austal, in 2019. However, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s 2015 memo—which stipulates a total combined by of 40 LCS and frigates and a downselect to a single vendor by fiscal 2019—led to a change in plans, said Capt. Dan Brintzinghoffer, the frigate program manager.
“The current profile, the way that it’s put in the budget, has a single ship in the FY ’18 year, which leads us to a problem when it comes to holding a fair competition between the two primes,” he said. The program office’s solution is to move the competition to the left, with a request for proposals to be issued late 2017 and a contract awarded the following year.
That schedule could still be in flux, as the congressional defense committees have differing ideas on how to structure the future of the program and could interfere with the Pentagon’s plan. While the Senate Armed Services Committee included language in its 2017 defense authorization bill basically codifying Carter’s memo in law, the House took the opposite stance in its version of the bill—restoring a third LCS in 2017 and prohibiting a downselect before 2019. Those differences will have to be ironed out in conference committee.
“We’re kind of rolling with the punches with the way the budget flows,” Brintzinghoffer said.
The current program of record would split the 40 ship buy between 12 frigates and 28 LCSs with FF-29 as the lead ship in the frigate class, he said. Lockheed Martin’s COMBATSS-21 continues to be the Navy’s preferred combat system for the frigate program.
The Carter memo also affected the projected frigate designs, which became less prescriptive in the hopes that more leeway would allow competitors to push down their bids even further.
“In a competition, one of the advantages that the government gets is going to be the lower price because both of the primes are going to be working hard to get the best price to deliver the capability,” he said. “So we became less prescriptive in the way that the two shipbuilders were going to have to strive to perform, or deliver a particular functional capability, with the intention of them getting more trade space for them to be more competitive in the way that they provide the designs.”
The biggest challenge will be ensuring the frigate design is mature enough so that Lockheed Martin and Austal can offer competitively-priced proposals, so the program is working with both companies to ensure that there are no surprises in its RFP, he said.
“We’re going to be asking them for fixed price bids,” he said. “If there’s not a clear level of understanding and maturity in the design, what the government will force industry to do is to bid higher prices in their proposal, and that’s certainly not something that we want to do.”
To have a more even balance of LCS and frigates, the Navy could backfit some LCSs with capabilities on its more lethal sibling, however Brintzinghoffer noted that the retrofitted LCS might not look exactly like a frigate. For example, integrating an over-the-horizon missile capability on LCS is a priority, but the system could potentially be installed in a different location or perhaps fewer missiles could be stowed onboard.
“Each of the alternatives in the lethality and survivability enhancements that come with the frigate design will be looked at for backfit, and then you have to evaluate the ability to make that from both an engineering change and the cost, and see whether or not the budget is there to be able to implement them all,” he said.
Moving to a single shipbuilder is politically fraught because a downselect could lead to the closure of one of the current shipyards. Austal produces the Independence-class LCS in Alabama, while Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Wisconsin builds the Freedom-class for Lockheed Martin (Defense Daily, Feb. 25)