By Geoff Fein
As the Navy nears release of the final request for proposals for a winner-take-all competition of up to 10 Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), a top service official said either of the two variants of LCS will meet the service’s needs.
“The reason why we made this decision to go to this strategy is we are extremely happy with both ships,” Robert Work, under secretary of the Navy, told reporters yesterday at the annual Surface Navy Association symposium in Arlington, Va.
“Each ship has its strengths and each ship has its weaknesses. The flight deck on LCS-2 is a little bit bigger. The way you handle boats is probably a little easier on LCS-1, but both of them meet the Navy’s needs,” Work said.
The USS Freedom (LCS-1) was built by a team led by Lockheed Martin [LMT]. A General Dynamics [GD]-led team built the Independence (LCS-2). That ship will be commissioned tomorrow in Mobile, Ala.
Freedom was commissioned in November 2008.
Work said the Navy would never have pursued the new acquisition plan if there were any doubts about either ship.
“We never would have said let’s go to a downselect unless we were confident that both ships could compete and no matter who won we’d be happy,” he said. “I think both of them are fine ships.”
The Navy opted to pursue a new acquisition strategy for LCS in September 2009.
“Both of those ships are extremely capable. We are very very happy with the design,” Work said. “We think both meet our requirements. That’s why we said let’s have a fair, balanced, selection.”
Last year, before his nomination to become the under secretary of the Navy, work told attendees at a Surface Navy Association luncheon that his idea would be to make the LCS available to almost any nation that wanted it and to have those customers then pay for the mission packages.
Yesterday, Work said he sees that LCS is going to be an extremely attractive platform for other navies.
“But you have to be a really rich navy to afford the overhead if you want to do all sorts of swaps,” he added. “In most cases, navies will buy specific modules for their specific needs for their specific navy. I am hopeful that with whichever ship we get into production other navies will say ‘the [United States] Navy is serious about this and, yeah, I’d like to have these hulls.'”
Whatever the Navy can do to help international sales, what type of strategies can the Navy pursue, is just good business, Work added.
“It remains to be seen how that will play out,” he added.
Earlier, Work told attendees at the conference that he refers to LCS as a small battle network combatant.
“[It] is designed explicitly to be modular and flexible. It is a battle network solution, an elegant one in my view,” he added. “We can put what we want on it. Do we need to put a lot of stuff on it now? No, we need to test it, we need to make sure we understand what that thing brings to the battle network.”