During a visit to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus announced that the new class of fleet replenishment oilers—up to now known as TAO(X)—would be named for civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.)
The Navy wants to buy 17 new oilers, which distribute fuel to ships in theater, extending the endurance of those vessels and their embarked aircraft. It plans to procure the first ship in the class, USNS John Lewis (T-AO 205), in fiscal 2016. Congress approved the Navy’s request for $674 million in the appropriations bill passed late last year.
A final decision on whether to award the oiler contract to General Dynamics [GD] NASSCO in San Diego and Huntington Ingalls Industries [HII] Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Miss., will be made this summer, and construction is scheduled to begin in 2018, Mabus’ spokesman said.
Before being elected to Congress in 1986, Lewis played a seminal role in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. He is known for speaking at the March on Washington in 1963 and leading more than 600 peaceful protestors across the Edmund Pettus bridge during the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.
As Navy Secretary, Mabus gets to decide on new naming conventions for ships, he said during the ceremony. For example, aircraft carriers are traditionally named for presidents, while destroyers are named for naval heroes.
“For the John Lewis class naming convention will be people who fought for civil rights and human rights,” he said. “This ship is going to be a part of our fleet for decades. There are men and women not yet born who will sail on it.”
Last summer, the Navy issued a combined solicitation consisting of separate requests for proposals for detailed design and construction of the first six TAO(X)s and detailed design and construction of the LHA-8 amphibious assault ship (Defense Daily, July 13, 2015). Under this construct, NASSCO and Ingalls would submit bids for the both oilers and LHA-8, with each vendor guaranteed to build one of the contracts so long as it meets requirements.
Each contract has an equal estimated award value, a Navy spokeswoman said then. The lowest combined bid, however, would also get a bonus: an award for about 75 percent of the design work on the LX(R) program.