By Emelie Rutherford
While the Marine Corps continues to weigh use of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), it may need to pursue an upgraded precision-attack missile, an official steering the ship program said yesterday.
Navy Capt. Mike Good, program manager for the LCS Mission Module Program Office, said Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway and Assistant Commandant Gen. James Amos visited the first pair of littoral vessels and “saw a lot of potential for the two ships.”
Marine Corps Combat Development Command and the service’s warfighting lab are “looking at how would the Marine Corps work with an LCS;” still, “no official requirement has been articulated,” Good said at the Surface Navy Association Communication Forum in Arlington, Va.
“There’s been lots of good discussions and we’re continuing those,” the Navy official said.
Conway is looking for fire-support capability for the Marine Corps, and Good said, “there’s some potential” for satisfying that need with LCS.
Yet, Good added: “The only thing that I caution my Marine Corps friends is, today, NLOS (the Non-Line-Of-Sight launch system), its design and its requirements for the Army and the Navy, don’t include fire-support to the long ranges that the Marine Corps desires.”
“So, if the Marine Corps is more interested in that, we’d happy to continue the dialogue as a partnership between the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Army to look at what the future potential (is),” Good said. “It would require an upgrade to get longer legs on the precision-attack missile.”
When Conway recently visited LCS-2, General Dynamics‘ [GD] Independence, he talked about the potential for putting vehicles such as Humvees and troops in the littoral vessel’s mission bay.
“You’ve got a lot of room to work with and that’s a unique feature of these ships, and the ability to move things rapidly within theater,” Good said.
The Navy announced in September that during this fiscal year it will select one LCS design from the two competing industry teams, led by Lockheed Martin [LMT] and General Dynamics. The service plans to award fixed-price contracts for as many as 10 LCSs from one shipbuilder and then, using that ship’s same technical data package, up to another five vessels from a second company (Defense Daily, Sept. 18).
Capt. Bernard Gately, assistant LCS program manager, said yesterday the Navy is “right in the midst of drafting” the request for proposals that will result in an award to one of the two industry teams “probably in the spring of the coming year.” The intention is to award two ships with options to award two follow ships per year from FY ’12 to FY ’14, he said.