By Emelie Rutherford
A Marine Corps official said yesterday the requirements for the Navy’s nascent Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) may need to be tweaked if it is used as “a more all-around ship” for use by his service and special operators.
Brig. Gen. Timothy Hanifen, deputy commanding general of Marine Corps Combat Development Command, told a National Defense Industrial Association gathering of industry and military officials that the LCS does not have all the features the Marine Corps would want in such a near-shore ship.
“We’re joined at the hip with N86 [the Navy’s surface warfare division] looking at LCS,” Hanifen said at an expeditionary-warfare wargame in Quantico, Va. “But I have to tell you, the Navy purchased the LCS, Littoral Combat Ship, with three missions in mind–[anti-submarine warfare] ASW, anti-surface warfare, and maritime-intercept operations–not as a littoral-combat ship in the way that we describe littoral combat as Marines.”
Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway has talked about developing a Marine Corps-specific mission module for the littoral ship, which is designed to have such exchangeable packages.
Hanifen said the LCS is “very capable,” noting its large open bay and the mission modules.
“We are working with [Navy officials], [looking] at what [are] those modules and what are the mission ranges in which the naval team can operate,” the Marine Corps requirements official said.
But, for now, the Navy’s focus for the ship remains in the three aforementioned areas, for which he acknowledged the sea service has a “critical need” in shallow waters.
A Marine Corps assessment of LCS has shown weight-bearing work on the flight deck has not been done because of “cost caps and tradeoffs” for the closely watched program, Hanifen noted yesterday.
“We’ve gone back in through our assessment to say, as we work to build 55 of these, we probably need to revisit the requirement if you intend it to be a more all-around vehicle and a more all-around ship for the support of [Special Operations Command] SOCOM and Marine battalions in the littoral areas,” Hanifen said. “That discussion continues, but it will depend on money….The design right now has a limited capability.”
In terms of the Marine Corps’ use of the LCS, the vessel currently could not accommodate the service’s new MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft, which has not been deployed on any ships yet.
The Navy intends to buy 55 of the littoral ships, two variants of which are being built by competing companies, Lockheed Martin [LMT] and General Dynamics [GD].
The initial LCSs faced significant delays and cost overruns, which have been blamed in part on the Navy for changing the requirements for them.
Congress created a $460 million-per-ship cost cap for the LCS that is set to start when FY ’10 begins Oct. 1. House and Senate negotiators working on a final version of the FY ’10 defense authorization bill are debating whether to allow some modifications to that cost cap (Defense Daily, July 6).