Any decision to employ a single combat system on both variants of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) most likely won’t apply to the current production plans for the first 24 vessels, Rear Adm. James Murdoch, the LCS program executive officer, said this week.
The LCS comes in two hull designs based on the first two ships of the class, the Lockheed Martin [LMT]-built USS Freedom (LCS-1) and Austal USA’s USS Independence (LCS-2), and each operate separate combat systems.
Murdoch said introducing a common system on both ships would require some re-engineering and upfront investment that would have to be justified based on the cost savings of a single system over the long run.
“There has to be a business case for that,” Murdoch said in an interview with Defense Daily. “It’s going to cost this investment up front and we might not choose to make that investment because it might make more sense under a business case to continue doing what we were doing.”
Some congressional lawmakers have criticized the Navy for buying two designs in a class of ships intended to perform the same missions, but the Navy maintains doing so helps maintain competition between two shipbuilding yards to keep prices down.
Murdoch did not rule out the possibility of moving to a single combat system for both variants on the current block buy of 20 ships–10 from each manufacturer–but said such a scenario is unlikely.
“It’s easiest to do it after the block,” he said. “But if there is a compelling case for something, we could do during the block.”
The Navy plans to procure an additional 31 LCSs beyond the ones already under contract, for a total of 55. The service has also kept open the option of going to a single hull design for the remainder of the ships.