By Carlo Munoz
Program officials developing the new open architecture system for the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship are looking to market that same operating system to other service vessels and international navies.
General Dynamics [GD] has stood up a new open architecture-based computer infrastructure system, known as Open CI, for the Austal USA-built variant of the LCS, Chris Montferret, director of surface navy programs for General Dynamics, said during an April 9 interview.
The Open CI system seamless integrates and operates the command and control structures for both day-to-day operations and combat missions on the LCS, according the Montferret.
But as work continues on the LCS variant of the system, company officials are already looking at possible modifications to Open CI, allowing it to work on board other Navy ships.
“We have taken what we did on LCS, and we have actually scaled Open CI down to the requirements of Joint High Speed Vessel,” Montferret said.
The JHSV does not have the same “heavy combat requirements” as the LCS, he said, adding the eventual Open CI system produced for that ship will be much simpler as a result.
“It is a much, much less complex system,” he said, noting the process to adapt the Open CI system to the JHSV was “very, very straightforward…to scale [the system] down.”
The same development team that created the Open CI system for LCS used the same basic design from the LCS version of the system to stand up the JHSV variant, according to Montferret.
A version of the open architecture system has already been integrated onto the JHSV set to launch this summer, and is currently undergoing testing, he said.
“We have completed factory acceptance tests of the equipment. We have done some pre-integration tests on the ship and it will be formally tested after launch of the ship,” Carlo Zaffanella, vice president for Open Combat Solutions within General Dynamics’ Mission Integration Systems division, said during the same interview.
General Dynamics officials are also looking toward potential international opportunities to field its Open CI system.
Specifically, program members are modifying the Open CI system to be used by the Saudi Arabian navy, as part of a massive planned overhaul of its eastern fleet.
Beginning in 2008, the Pentagon and the Saudi military have been negotiating the involvement in the Saudi Naval Expansion Plan II (SNEP II). The deal, if approved by both sides, would have the Pentagon sell between $10 billion to $20 billion in equipment to the Saudi fleet.
Looking to gain a foothold in that lucrative deal, company officials have begun modifying the Open CI system “into a much more robust [system] that we are offering on an international basis,” Montferret said.
The international version of Open CI would be much more focused on command and control of weapons and radar systems, he added.
As part of that effort, General Dynamics program officials are working toward the standards of an “objective set of equipment” provided by the Navy, to base its work on.
That version of Open CI would likely be fielded on board an international version of the Littoral Combat Ship, which DoD is offering to the Saudis to support the SNEP II effort.
To that end, Navy officials are looking to have design and development information for an “LCS-like” ship handed over to Saudi officials sometime this spring, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told Congress last month.
“The Navy is clearly offering the LCS to the Saudis…that case is very active, and clearly we are looking to get our system out to whatever the Saudi requirements evolve out to,” Montferret said.