By Geoff Fein
While the Navy reworks the acquisition plan for its Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), moving the first buy of six to FY ’13, the real question is how fast can the service get up to speed on production, the Navy’s top civilian said.
LCS is a critical part of the Navy’s future, Navy Secretary Donald Winter told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“Littoral combat is clearly a major focus item and it is an area, for historical reasons, our Navy didn’t focus [on]. So the demand function is clearly there,” he said. “Part of the issue here, quite frankly, is going to be how quickly can we shift our acquisition from buying a ship at a time, or two ships at a time, to the point where we can actually have more of a production approach?”
Winter acknowledged that getting to 55 LCS is a challenge. Because of the large quantity buy of LCS, Winter has been discussing how the Navy needs to look at LCS procurement more like how it buys aircraft and less like it buys ships.
“We need to be able to buy them in such a way we support the business case for the type of facilities that will enable those ships to be built in a cost effective manner,” he said.
Additionally, orders need to be done in such a way that the Navy can take advantage of economic order of quantity for all the subsystems on the ship, he added.
“Making that transition is part of what we are going to be working on this year,” Winter said. “[We are] still working very hard to get both ships into trials this year. We fully expect that will happen. That will be a major factor that will help inform our future acquisition.”
Lockheed Martin [LMT] is leading an effort to build the USS Freedom (LCS-1), a semi-planing mono hull design being built at Marinette Marine [MTW] in Wisconsin. The lead ship of the new class is expected to begin trials before mid-year.
General Dynamics [GD] teamed with Mobile, Ala.-based Austal USA to build an aluminum hull trimaran. The USS Independence (LCS-2) is expected to begin trials later this year.
Winter gave the commencement address Saturday at Northrop Grumman‘s [NOC] apprentice school graduation in Newport News, Va. On the return trip to Washington, he noted the effort of Northrop Grumman to invest in its people, processes and equipment.
While he praised the apprentice school, Winter noted he still had concerns about the shipbuilding industry.
“One of the concerns I have about the long-term viability of shipbuilding in the U.S., is to ensure we provide for generational transitions that are going to be needed, and to make sure we have a workforce that is going be around for the long-term,” Winter said. “Having programs like this training the next generation, it’s great. I am very pleased to see the size of the class…to see the energy.”
Winter said he was encouraged by the recent changes within Northrop Grumman to move its Newport News and Gulf Coast facilities under one roof.
“Having all of these shipyards under one management structure should help a lot in terms of sharing best practices, sharing of work, being able to shift work back and forth, to equalize the work flows. All of that should provide benefits to both the Navy and the corporation.”
Winter, who is likely in the final year of his tenure as Secretary of the Navy, has been at the forefront on a number of issues including instituting acquisition reform and working to curtail requirements creep, as well as presiding over the service as it deals with a number of issues from building the next generation surface combatant to designing and fielding the next presidential helicopter.
Curtailing the growth of requirements has been a major focus, Winter said. The effort has led to a modified process within the Navy to make sure a program’s specifications and requirements are reviewed very early on in the effort, at very senior levels.
One of the problems the Navy has had over the years, is that although there was senior level review, it tended only to be at the macro level, he said.
“We restructured the review process…established product control [teams],” Winter noted.
It is still important, however, that both the Navy and Marine Corps buy in to what is being done at the most senior levels, he added.
“We just started on that process. It is going to take a better part of this year, I think, to get up to speed in that regard,” Winter added. “It’s a major investment in trying to get this process right.”
Another major investment for the Navy is revamping its acquisition process. Winter said the Navy needs to separate out what it wants to buy, how the service buys it, who do they want to buy it from, and finally contract negotiations.
The first effort will be the follow-on to the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), or NextGen.
Other areas of concern are what things should and should not be outsourced.
Additionally, looking at how the Navy wants to buy something gets into the question of whether the service wants to issue one big contract or whether the service wants to subdivide the contract.
“Actually we are going through that argument with some of our MILCON (military construction) activities. By just focusing on that–do we really want to buy all these barracks in a single contract, or perhaps do we want to geographically separate business so we can enhance competition, we repackage the work to enhance competition,” Winter said. “It’s a trade off. It means you have more contracts to deal with, more administrative overhead. But hopefully we’ll be able to get more competition…some better prices.”