By Carlo Munoz
Defense giant Lockheed Martin [LMT] has wrapped up a multimillion dollar deal to upgrade the Navy’s heavy torpedo arsenal to take out shallow water targets, according to company officials.
The $50 million contract awarded by Naval Sea Systems Command to Lockheed Martin this week will cover the initial and full-rate production of over 100 Common Broadband Advanced Sonar System (CBASS) replacement kits for the Mk48 torpedo.
Outfitted with improved guidance and signals processing systems, as well as wide-band sonar systems, the CBASS kit will allow the Mk48 to seek and destroy targets in both deep and shallow water, according to Lockheed Martin’s Senior Program Manager for CBASS Mike Gifford.
“Torpedos were made from both a guidance and control and acoustic performance level to run” against mostly deep water threats, Gifford said during an interview with Defense Daily yesterday. But as those threats moved closer to shore, the Navy needed a way to hit those targets with the same speed and accuracy as deep water targets.
The CBASS kit, developed by NAVSEA for the Mk48, was designed to do just that.
“As the intended targets have moved into a more shallow water environment, improvements were made so they can perform better in that shallow water environment,” Gifford said. The kits, he added, would not affect the range or speed of the weapon, but “affect the [weapon’s] performance while in operation.”
Under the contract, Lockheed Martin will produce between five to seven CBASS kits for the 16-month long “proof-of-manufacture” (POM) phase, where program members will “do some engineering work to resolve part obsolescence and that sort of thing and then qualify the design with the Navy, where it demonstrates it meets their requirements,” Gifford said.
That upfront engineering work set for the POM phase will update specific parts of the kit that have become outdated, since it took so long for the Navy to move CBASS from design to production, Gifford said.
“Over that period of time, the components, the sub-assemblies that [were] used in that design have become obsolete,” he said. “We must resolve [this] in order to deliver [the kits] to the Navy.”
Once complete, the certified CBASS design will switch over to full-rate production with the first 100 kits slated for delivery to the Navy by 2014. After the delivery of that initial batch of CBASS kits, NAVSEA will have the option to buy another tranche from Lockheed Martin. With the options, this initial contract could result in kit production of “hundreds per year” for the company, according to Gifford.
The majority of the work will be done at the company’s facility in Marion, Mass., with portions of CBASS development and production from Lockheed Martin’s Akron, Ohio location, according to Gifford. He could not comment how soon the CBASS-kitted Mk48 torpedoes would make their way on board Navy submarines after the 2014 delivery deadline.