The Navy issued several contracts last Friday worth a total of $2.76 billion to sustain and maintain Littoral Combat Ships (LCSs) based on the East Coast.
Under all of the contracts, the work will “consist of Chief of Naval Operations dry docking selected restricted availabilities and selected restricted availabilities, continuous maintenance, emergent maintenance, ship assessments, preventative/planned maintenance, facilities maintenance, and corrosion control in the contiguous U.S.,” the contract announcements said.
It also includes “continuous maintenance, emergent maintenance, preventative/planned maintenance, facilities maintenance, and corrosion control, outside the continental U.S.”
The maintenance work aims to support sustainment efforts for LCSs homeported in Mayport, Fla., the East Coast basing site.
BAE Systems Ship Repair yard in Jacksonville, Fla., and Fincantieri’s Marine Systems North America, based in Chesapeake, Va., were awarded a combined $1.3 billion maximum ceiling value multiple award contract (MAC I).
A second multiple award contract (MAC II) worth a combined maximum ceiling value of $965 million was jointly issued to Austal USA; Colonna’s Shipyard Inc.; East Coast Repair & Fabrication LLC; Epsilon Systems Solutions Inc.; General Dynamics’ NASSCO-Mayport [GD]; North Florida Shipyards Inc; and Tecnico Corp.
The Navy also issued a third multiple award contract (MAC III) worth up to $499 million to smaller firms Life Cycle Engineering Inc.; Neal Technical Innovations LLC; and Valkyrie Enterprises Inc.
The delivery orders under all three MACs will be competitively awarded and are expected to be performed in both Mayport (58 percent), outside the continental U.S. (28 percent), and other contiguous U.S. locations (14 percent) as appropriate. Each of the three contracts has an estimated ordering period of five years, ending in August 2026.
While future delivery orders will be competitively awarded within these MACs, each company is receiving $10,000 in fiscal year 2021 operation and maintenance funds for each initial delivery order, which will expire at then end of this fiscal year.
The announcement said the contracts were competitively procured using “full and open competition” with 16 initial offerors, but the Navy did not disclose those not proceeding to this stage.
“The purpose of these sustainment execution contract efforts is to continue and expand the contractor base of shipyards capable of performing the required maintenance, repair, and modernization of LCS class ships by awarding [indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity or IDIQ] MAC prime contracts,” Alan Baribeau, a Navy spokesman, told Defense Daily in a statement Monday.
He continued that these ship repair IDIQ MACs “are supply contracts with incidental service elements. The supply being procured is the repaired, mission-ready vessel, which is returned to service within the Fleet. The work will be for LCS ships homeported in Mayport. After contract awards, the Government will solicit individual Delivery Orders among the MAC-IDIQ holders based on actual work packages.”