By Carlo Munoz
The decision by the Navy to issue dual contract awards for its Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program is not an argument for buying a second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), service secretary Ray Mabus told Congress yesterday.
Mabus’ comments during yesterday’s House Armed Services Committee on the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget request were in response to assertions made by committee member Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J).
Andrews argued that the same reasons Navy officials opted to award two LCS contracts in January–to increase competition in the program and drive down costs–are the same reasons why members of Congress are pushing for a second engine for the JSF.
In January, the Navy late last month awarded dual multimillion procurement deals to Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Austal USA to build dual versions of the LCS. The 20-ship deal was split down the middle, with separate 10-ship contracts being awarded to both companies. The Lockheed Martin team was awarded $437 million for development and construction on its half of the LCS, while Austal USA won $432 million for its portion of the build.
A month later, House members voted to terminate the controversial F136 engine program as part of its version of the FY ’11 defense appropriations bill. Currently, the JSF is outfitted with the F135 engine built by Pratt & Whitney [UTX]. The F136 is built by a joint development team of General Electric [GE] and Rolls-Royce.
For their part, Mabus said Navy acquisition officials had called upon their counterparts in the Air Force, just to see if there was any overlap in what the service was planning and the ongoing JSF second engine debate, as part of the sea service’s internal discussions over the dual LCS buy.
“It is a very different [program]…that was their answer back to us. It was a very different plan,” Mabus said. “On the LCS we always, always planned to have two suppliers. Even if we went down to one version, we were going to bid out for a second shipyard. That has not been the case with the second engine.”
Mabus also noted that Navy procurement officials have already financed up front “all of the non-reoccuring engineering, all of the [research and development] for both variants” of the LCS. On the other hand, the most recent estimates for similiar work required for the F136 engine variant were close to $3 billion, he added.
FY ’11 began last Oct. 1, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates has agreed to fund the engine on a monthly basis while the government is running under a temporary CR keeping all funding at FY ’10 levels until March 4. With Congress now cobbling together the details of another temporary CR to prevent a government shoutdown that would begin on March 4, the future of the F136 remains hazy.
Even if the LCS approach could be applied to the F136, getting the engine into the field successfully would pose its own slate of problems, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead said during the same hearing.
Any cost savings generated by having to engine producers would be eaten up by the need to maintain separate logistics and supply lines for each variant, Roughead pointed out.
Given those supply lines would have to be supported by support vessels and aircraft, the Navy “cannot afford to have redundancy” because space is so limited on those boats and aircraft. By acquiring two engines, the sea service’s logistics and support operations would be overstessed, he said.