Since last summer, the U.S. Navy has been evaluating hardware for Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] Integrated Combat System (ICS) aboard an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG-81).
“We’re seeing results, and we’re seeing how it [ICS] operates, and it’s operating well,” Capt. Brian Phillips, the service’s major program manager for ICS, told reporters at a joint Lockheed Martin-Navy briefing on ICS at the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium on Jan. 9. “We’ve taken it to sea, and they’ve operated it with our ships and run a number of tests.”
The service plans to install the ICS hardware on three or four other destroyers with the Baseline 9 Aegis system and Technical Integration-16 (TI-16) components over the next year, Phillips said.
Last September, the Navy awarded Lockheed Martin an ICS systems engineering and software integration (SESI) contract that could be worth more than $1 billion (Defense Daily, Oct. 2, 2023).
In addition to SESI, the Navy has ICS software coding, hardware, secure voice, and console contracts that may be worth another $2 billion, Phillips said.
The ICS is the Navy’s future overarching combat management system for surface ships, but the service has not disclosed how many ships it plans to outfit with ICS. The service has said that ICS is to allow the ready transfer of sailors from ship to ship without the need to train them on new hardware and software.
Destroyers, cruisers and Littoral Combat Ships use different versions of the company’s Aegis Combat System while aircraft carriers and amphibious ships use the RTX [RTX] Ship Self-Defense System.
The ICS work is also for U.S. Coast Guard ships.
If the Navy exercises all SESI contract options, the work would extend through September 2030.
The service is drafting an ICS Capabilities Development document.
Project Overmatch and ICS “are very much complementary in the same way that you have a Verizon network and an iPhone,” Phillips said. “You really need both. A network without devices isn’t useful, and a device without a network [in this case, Project Overmatch] isn’t useful.”
ICS is to result in a delivery of new information technology to the fleet–for example, improved displays– every year “or sooner,” rather than every several years, Phillips said.
The former Ticonderoga-class cruiser USS Monterey (CG-61) was the ICS pilot ship before its decommissioning in September 2022.
An independent cost estimate of ICS indicated that system commonality among Navy ships could lead to cost savings, as the service dispenses with the buying of old hardware to outfit those ships, Phillips said.
While the Navy would still have to buy new ICS hardware every decade, as the hardware wears out, the cabinetry to hold ICS aboard ship is to stay the same.
“Ultimately, it looks like, over the life cycle of the program, we could proliferate up to 10 times the number of ships at scale [with] a 20-fold reduction in cost,” Phillips said. “Today, you wouldn’t be able to proliferate to those ships. You would only get a subset of those ships. To hit everybody, you would have to spend all this money that you just don’t have. Now [with ICS], you can afford to hit everybody with the budgets that you have.”