By Geoff Fein
Lockheed Martin [LMT] is laying the ground work for a comprehensive sustainment program for the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), and the company anticipates awarding a number of contracts to small companies by mid-2008, a company official said.
Lockheed Martin is building the lead ship of the LCS class, the USS Freedom (LCS-1), with its partners Wisconsin-based Marinette Marine [MTW], Louisiana-based Bollinger Shipyard, and ship architects Gibb & Cox. Part of Lockheed Martin’s effort will include sustainment of the new Navy ship once it is homeported in San Diego.
The company held an industry day several weeks ago in San Diego to meet with companies that do Navy vessel sustainment, Paul Lemmo, director business development Littoral Ships & Systems, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
Lockheed Martin issued a request for information (RFI) earlier this year, he added.
“The next step was to have the industry day and lay out our approach and meet one-on-one with these companies,” Lemmo said. “The third step will be sometime next year…early next year…we will issue a RFP (request for proposal). Companies will get an opportunity to bid on components of the sustainment plan.”
Lockheed Martin is using an open business model–while the company will manage the sustainment effort, the work will be carried out by local San Diego companies, Lemmo said.
Freedom will be delivered in the second half of 2008, Lemmo added, so the company needs to get moving on developing a sustainment plan.
“We need to begin organizing and getting under contract the folks who are going to sustain the ship. We anticipate doing that early next year,” he said.
Lockheed Martin has actually been under contract for sustainment activities for most of 2007, Lemmo noted.
“We are actually doing what we call the interim sustainment planning phase. Essentially a planning contract where we are developing the maintenance concept for the next few years for the ship, how she will be maintained, then early next year we anticipate beginning that process, hiring the companies,” Lemmo said. “We are going to select a number of companies, each with their own niche.”
The contract will just be for Lockheed Martin’s ship. It will not be for sustainment of a second variant of LCS being built by a General Dynamics [GD]-led team that includes Austal USA. General Dynamics is building its ship, the USS Independence (LCS-2), in Mobile, Ala.
Lemmo said the processes and plans Lockheed Martin is putting in place could be applied to General Dynamics’ LCS. However, that will be a Navy decision, he added.
Sustaining LCS will present some unique challenges, Lemmo noted. Among those are the fact the ship will have a crew size of approximately 50 and the second is that the ships will have two crews, blue and gold, that will swap out while the ship is forward deployed.
Traditionally, when a Navy ship returns to port, the Navy crew will do a lot of maintenance, Lemmo said. However, because LCS will be forward deployed so much of its time and not be spending a lot of its time in port, and because the 50-person crew is going to be very taxed for normal operations on the ship, they are not going to have a lot of time to maintain it, he added.
“So the concept would be to have an industry team available in those ports to come on the ship, whether it is a forward port internationally or in San Diego, and they will go on board and do all the maintenance,” Lemmo said. “It is sort of a privatized concept for doing that kind of stuff–cleaning, maintenance, painting–all those kind of things, instead of having the crew do all of it. They are such a small crew, they’ll have enough to take care of with the operation of the ship.”
The Lockheed Martin LCS program folks began to look at sustainment expertise across other company sectors, most notably in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program, for examples on how to efficiently and effectively handle sustainment, Lemmo said.
JSF has what F-35 program officials call the Autonomic Logistics System. Basically, an F-35 can be flying and ground crews can monitor the engine from a ground station, Lemmo explained. That system informs crews about what maintenance needs to be done when the plane returns.
“We looked at that concept, that would be a goal for LCS. We didn’t quite have the budget for the full extent of that, but to the extent we can take advantage of things that already exist, for example, in the Rolls-Royce (LCS) engine case,” he added.
Rolls-Royce makes the engines for Freedom. The engine manufacturer has a monitoring system in place on its commercial airliner engines, Lemmo said. “We can take advantage of some of that. We could do that with [the LCS] engines, the capability is already there with the engine. We just need to spend a little money and take it to the extent and hook it up.”
Lemmo added Lockheed Martin is looking to move toward performance-based logistics (PBL).
“What that really means, in the case of engines, is power by the hour, or delivering parts within a certain amount of time. We are setting up a performance-based type of sustainment process. We would get paid based upon certain metrics whether it be delivery time in parts or operational availability of the ship, those kind of things,” he said. “That’s where we are ultimately headed. We won’t be there when the first ship delivers because part of it is you have to collect metrics data on the lead ship–how it operates, the kind of maintenance it is going to need and those sort of things–so it will take a few years to get there, but that is where we want to go.”
Lockheed Martin is also working very closely with the Navy to develop a training plan for the LCS crew, Lemmo said. “The Navy likes to refer to these sailors as hybrid sailors.”
On a big ship, the Navy would have somebody who would know gas turbines, and a different person who knows diesel, and someone else who knows a different piece of machinery. On LCS the Navy will train somebody to know, for example, both diesel and gas turbines, Lemmo said. “It may not happen that way, but a lot of these sailors will be cross trained. That’s why they are calling them hybrid sailors…cross trained in multiple maintenance operations.”
Lockheed Martin is also looking at providing the capability for flyaway teams, he added.
“If there really is a serious problem [you can] have a fly away team of contractors that would include perhaps shipyard people, Lockheed Martin people, OEM (original equipment manufacturer). If its is an engine problem Rolls-Royce people [could] get on a plane and they go to the forward deployed area to help out with the maintenance,” Lemmo said. “Another would be distance support via video link or teleconference link. That capability exists today for distance support. It is something that hasn’t been robustly implemented because of funding, but it certainly something we and the Navy are looking at for LCS.”