By Carlo Munoz
Lockheed Martin [LMT] will begin construction in June on the first Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) under the company’s recent multimillion dollar deal with the Navy announced last month, and anticipates having the second ship under contract within the same time frame, according to a company executive.
Company officials are in the midst of contacting supply vendors and subcontracting firms to line up the necessary manpower and materiels to begin construction, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for Business Development Paul Lemmo said in an interview yesterday.
Once construction begins on the first Lockheed Martin ship under the new Navy contract, known as LCS-5, program planners anticipate conducting the keel layout for the ship by the end of this year, he said. Lockheed Martin also plans to have the second ship awarded in the deal under contract by June as well, Lemmo added. The deadline to lock in the details for the second ship deal is June 30.
In December, the Navy awarded dual multimillion procurement deals to Lockheed Martin and Austal USA for LCS construction. Austal USA’s ship will be dubbed LCS-6 (Defense Daily, Jan. 4).
The 20-ship deal was to be split down the middle, with separate 10-ship contracts being awarded to both companies, according to a Dec. 29 service statement. The Lockheed Martin team was awarded $437 million for development and construction on its half of the LCS, while Austal USA won $432 million for its portion of the build.
Construction for LCS-5 will be done at the Marinette Marine shipyards in Wisconsin, Lemmo said. The USS Ft. Worth (LCS-3) and USS Freedom (LCS-1) were also built at the Marinette shipyards.
To that end, Navy and industry program officials are preparing for builder’s trials for LCS-3, which are tentatively set to take place along the shores of Lake Michigan later this year, he said. While Lemmo could not provide a specific date as to when acceptance trials could begin for LCS-3, he did note those tests would likely be held two to six weeks after the builder’s trials wrap up.
The time gap between builder’s trials and acceptance trials for LCS-1 was two weeks, he added. Once the ship clears both trial milestones, it will be cleared for active duty within the Navy’s fleet.
Initially, Navy officials had planned to issue a single, 10-ship LCS contract to either Lockheed Martin or Austal. But the sea service moved to shelve that plan, in favor of the dual award, due to the proposed savings that approach would generate.
The Navy is shooting for an average per unit cost of $362 million for the Lockheed Martin-built LCS variant and $352 million per ship on the Austal versiov, Navy procurement chief Sean Stackley said in a Jan. 29 briefing with reporters. Defense Daily reviewed a transcript of the briefing provided by the Navy.
However, critics of the dual-contract strategy claim the approach could end up costing more, due to having to maintain two separate training, maintenance and logistic support systems for both ships.
However, Lemmo noted that a number of the subsystems and capabilities on board both the Lockheed Martin and Austal USA variants are common with each other, as well as other vessels already in the fleet.
“It does not go for everything, but it is not as bad as people [may] perceive,” he said. The command and control system on the LCS is based on the Aegis system, which has commonality with the sea service’s cruiser and destroyer fleets, Lemmo noted. The ship’s main 57mm deck gun and decoy launch system are also common with the systems on board the Navy’s newest Zumwalt-class destroyers.