By Geoff Fein
Amid the debate over which variant of the Littoral Combat Ship LCS) best suits the Navy, one top service official said a key piece of the decision is determining which industry team can deliver the product on time, on budget, and will the ships perform to the required specifications.
Additionally, the Navy’s revamped LCS acquisition strategy is providing greater flexibility in the out years, Robert Work, undersecretary of the Navy, told Defense Daily recently.
The first thing that needs to be understood is that the Navy is content with either of the two ships, Work said.
“They both meet our KPPs (Key Performance Parameters). “We can live with both, so we would be happy regardless of who wins,” he said.
The Navy issued its final LCS request for proposals (RFP) Jan. 26. Responses are due from the two industry teams no later than March 29 (Defense Daily, Jan. 27).
“We think both of the contractors, even after all of the troubles, have given us ships that will be a very good fleet asset and meet the parameters as we set up,” Work said.
One issue that arose with the release of the RFP was that total ownership cost (TOC), a topic the Navy has been very vocal about, appeared to carry less weight in the overall scoring of the platforms.
Work noted that both Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] USS Freedom (LCS-1) and General Dynamics‘ [GD] USS Independence (LCS-2) were designed from the beginning for total ownership cost.
The first thing to look at is the crew size of both ships. Although the two ships are about as dissimilar as one could ask for–Lockheed Martin has built a semi-planing monohull and General Dynamics has developed an all aluminum hull trimaran, based on commercial ferry designs–and even though the two ships are quite different in size, they are the same crew size, Work said. “That’s going to be the biggest contributor.”
“Then you take a look at the ship over its life and you say, ‘OK, how is it going to be operating, how much of its life is it really going to be going at full speed, how much of its life is it going to be closing on an objective area, how much of its life is it going to be doing sprint drift type operations in its mission mode,'” he said. “We are happy with total ownership cost for either of these two, so it really comes down to which of these two ships can you build and which of the program managers and industry teams can say, ‘this is how we are going to build the ship and this is how we are going to save money for the [Navy].’ That is going to be a very, very key thing.”
The Navy and the two industry teams are confident they can deliver LCS on cost, Work added.
“Both of the industry teams are extremely bullish on their product. Both of them are telling us [they] think [they] can get pretty darn close if not below,” he said. “We just don’t know until we see the responses to the RFPs.”
The key thing the Navy is very focused on, and this is not just with LCS, Work noted, is performance and cost.
“Can you deliver the platform for the cost that you said you could do it? Perform to the specs that we said we wanted it to, and do you have a good management team and a good industrial base plan to keep these in continuous production?” Work said.
When the Navy altered its LCS acquisition strategy last year, the service took criticism for what some perceived as a move away from capability and toward cost.
Work said there was another piece to the new acquisition strategy that many people haven’t focused on yet.
The original plan was to build LCS at a rate of five to six per year to reach the goal of 55 ships as soon as possible and then stop building for 10 to 12 years before restarting the program, he said.
“What we have now throughout the 30-year plan is continuous build. That’s going to allow us to do continuous improvements on the hull as the price comes down. It’s going to allow us, if we need more than 55, we have capacity to go above 55. If we don’t need to go above 55, perhaps we could provide sea frames to our allies,” Work said. “We haven’t made a decision on what will happen because we can’t foresee the future, but we have a lot better plan.”
Work pointed to the Navy’s recently released long-range plan for construction of naval vessels for fiscal year ’11. The small surface combatant line shows 42 ships in FY ’11, with the numbers staying at or below 40 over most of the next 15 years. During that time, the Navy will begin retiring the frigates in FY ’11 and its mine warfare vessels will be completely retired in the 2020s.
“Meanwhile, we are keeping the LCS in continual production, so we reach 54, 55 in ’35 and then we flatten out,” Work said.
“I think it is a very good plan. If you look at the number of ships they are building per year, you see the small surface combatants…that line is totally LCS.. So you build a whole bunch, then you get into a sustaining rate,” he added.
That sustaining rate starting in 2025 builds at a pace of one LCS in every odd year and two in every even year out to 2034. The build rate then returns to two per year, Work noted.
“We are going to be able to compete those. We will be able to compete three every two years and one of the yards will win two and one yard will win one. Sometimes, we’ll do a five multi-year. We have all sorts of flexibility in here,” he said. “I just don’t think enough people are looking at the whole way we have reconceived LCS. I think it provides us with a lot of flexibility.”