By Emelie Rutherford
More time, money, and design work would be required to create a build-to-print acquisition plan for the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) that would permit it to be made by companies beyond the current two competitors, a top Navy official told lawmakers yesterday.
Rear Adm. William Landay, program executive officer for ships, gave a House panel a “broad” estimate that reorienting LCS plans to permit additional companies to build the two already designed versions could cost $60 million per ship and take up to two years.
Landay also told the House Armed Services Seapower subcommittee that the Navy could not craft a build-to-print plan for LCS until all revisions to designs for the first two ships have been finalized.
“Under a build-to-print concept…we would not want to go into a build-to-print contract until we had been through our post-shakedown availability, all of our testing, all of our evaluation, to ensure that the ships you put under that contract have got a very solid baseline,” Landay said.
The Navy commissioned the first LCS from Lockheed Martin [LMT] last November and expects to receive the first littoral ship from rival builder General Dynamics [GD] this year. The service is negotiating contracts for each firm to build one LCS each in FY ’09, and also is conducting a competition for three additional LCSs in FY ’10.
Subcommittee Chairman Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), whose district includes Northrop Grumman‘s [NOC] Ingalls shipyard, has talked about opening the LCS program to companies beyond Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. Opening up LCS to competition does not necessarily ensure the industry-wide challenges of developing ships will be easily solved as Ingalls has experienced its own share of problems developing platforms such as the LPD-17-class for the Navy.
And other lawmakers indicated yesterday they are not comfortable with that idea.
Subcommittee member Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) said he is “concerned about the suggestion for moving this LCS program to other shipyards,” citing added costs and further delays to the ship program. Wittman co-chairs the Congressional Shipbuilding Caucus with Taylor.
Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), whose district includes workers for Lockheed Martin LCS shipbuilder Marinette Marine, touted the shipyard’s work on LCS-1, the only one of the littoral vessels delivered to the Navy. Stupak, who is not a member of the subcommittee but sat in on the hearing, also prompted Landay to cite benefits of keeping LCS production at the current shipyards, such as streamlined processes.
Taylor and subcommittee ranking member Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) questioned the LCS’s affordability following delays and cost overruns, blamed in part on the Navy’s changing of requirements and standards.
Landay acknowledged the Navy overlooked “hard-learned fundamental lessons of shipbuilding” with LCS. Looking ahead, he said new performance baselines are in place for each contract to monitor and control costs, staffing has been increased at the Navy program office and the shipyards to monitor performance, and senior managers and technical authorities are on waterfront to aide technical decision making.
Rear Adm. Victor Guillory, the Navy’s director of surface warfare, told the panel the service remains committed to buying 55 LCSs and cost-reduction measures are being pursued.
Congress has temporarily lifted a $460 million per ship cost cap on the LCS, which initially was pegged at $220 million. Taylor told reporters the cost of one of the first two LCSs is approaching $600 million.
Taylor talked yesterday about opening competition for future LCSs to additional shipyards, but did not speak about it at length.
He did cite his frustrations with the LCS program, including the amount of hand welding conducted on the initial ships and that he has not seen prices drop as a result of lower steel and aluminum costs. He more broadly faulted the Navy for “flawed strategic planning.”
“Flawed in the belief that the government can pass on to industry decisions that are inherently governmental; flawed in the belief that untested and unproven concepts, such as reconfigurable mission modules, can be incorporated into an acquisition program without testing and verifying the concept on surrogate platforms; and finally flawed due to the absence of a ‘plan B’ for needed capability in the fleet,” Taylor said.