If given additional funding, the Navy could speed up its construction plan for its newest amphibious vessel and award a contract in 2019, but moving any quicker than that could harm the maturity of the ship’s design, the service’s top acquisition executive said Wednesday.
The Navy currently plans to begin procurement of the LX(R) amphibious ship, which will replace Whidbey Island– and Harpers Ferry-class dock landing ships, in fiscal year 2020. That’s already a year earlier than originally planned due to an extra $279 million that Congress inserted into the 2016 appropriations bill, which allowed the Navy to simultaneously do preliminary design for the ship as well as order long lead materials, said Sean Stackley, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition.
Additional advanced procurement funding will not further accelerate the program, and the Navy does not have enough funding in its shipbuilding budget to pay for the LX(R) a year early, he said. But incremental funding could allow the service to speed up the design process by a year, pulling contract award and construction to the left by proxy.
“The challenges that we have in the budget today stand as a hurdle between us and pulling that ship to the left another year. So what I would propose is we take a hard look at what the funding stream would be required to support that additional year’s worth of acceleration,” he said during a Senate Armed Services seapower subcommittee panel. “Without pulling the whole ship to the left, what additional funding with incremental funding authority would allow the acceleration without breaking our budget?”
However, Stackley noted that fiscal year 2019 is the earliest the service could reasonably award a contract to either Huntington Ingalls Industries [HII] Ingalls Shipbuilding or General Dynamics [GD] NASSCO, the two competitors on the program.
“If we try to accelerate to 2018, the design will not be at a level of maturity and completeness,” he told reporters after the hearing. “So there is an industrial base issue there that we’re trying to bridge.”
Stackley’s comments could be a blow to the defense industry’s call to begin LX(R) construction in 2018. In a Feb. 5 letter to Congress, the Amphibious Warship Industrial Base Coalition urged lawmakers to insert additional funds for LX(R) so that, if Ingalls wins the contract, it can move directly from constructing LPD-28 to the new class of amphibious ships, which will be based on the LPD 17-class design.
“Accelerating and optimizing the start of LX(R) construction to 2018 will minimize the production gap between LPD-28 and the first LX(R) and strengthen the amphibious warship industrial base by leveraging the many advantages offered by a hot production line and supply chain,” Brian Schires, chairman of the advocacy group and vice president of Rolls-Royce North America, stated in the letter.
Stackley acknowledged that the current LX(R) schedule is not optimal for the potential vendors.
“If Ingalls were to win the competition, and we were not able to further accelerate the LX(R) [to 2019], there would not be the overlap that you want for the shipbuilding program to retain efficiencies to retain a skilled workforce,” he said. However, the Navy is surveying the industrial base to identify any potential issues and work them out before construction starts.