The Navy has awarded General Dymanics [GD] a multimillion dollar contract to develop the first two mobile landing ships for the sea service, according to a service statement issued late last week.
The $744 million contract issued on May 27 will cover design and development of Mobile Landing Platform (MLP) 1 and 2, which will be the first of its class of MLPs designed to support the Navy’s Maritime Prepositioning Ship Squadrons, according to the statement.
“This contract award culminates a substantial effort to drive down cost in our shipbuilding programs while delivering necessary capabilities,” said program manager Capt. George Sutton, in the same command statement.
The recent MLP award to General Dynamics’ shipbuilding arm is a follow-on to a $115 million deal inked last August between the Navy and the company to begin procurement of long-lead items for the MLP development.
As designed, the new MLP fleet will allow the Navy to transport vehicles and equipment ashore, while leveraging “float on/float-off” technologies, as well as a modifiable mission deck “to maximize capability,” the statement adds.
That capability will provide Navy amphibious forces “the flexibility to incorporate potential future platform upgrades, which could include additional capabilities such as berthing, medical, command and control, mission planning, vehicle transfer system, a connected replenishment, a container handling crane and an aviation operating spot,” according to the Navy.
Once complete, the new MLP ships will also be able to support a maximum of three Landing Craft Air Cushioned (LCAC) amphibious ships.
“The Navy worked very closely with [General Dynamics] to identify cost savings early in MLP design work while pursuing a concurrent design and production engineering approach,” the Navy notice states. “These efforts ensured a high degree of design and production-planning maturity prior to the start of construction to minimize cost and schedule risk and resulted in a in a very stable ship design that is ready to start production.”