Littoral Combat Ships (LCS)

"The Navy will scrap the

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meant to

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from its controversial

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, replacing it with a different type of robot boat, Navy Secretary

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said today

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FORBIN said:

The famous Milwaukee ...

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“The fuel efficiency that we derive is incredibly impressive. We’re not talking about one or two percentages – we’re talking about 10 percent improvement in efficiency from the waterjet,” Rear Adm. Mathew Klunder, Chief of Naval Research told members of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Defense Subcommittee May 14.

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Navy Secretary Ray Mabus raised the possibility of a restored Littoral Combat Ship /Frigate program, noting for the first time publicly that the next administration – not this one – will make the final decision about how many small surface combatants to buy.

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that decreed the LCS/Frigate program would be halted after buying 40 ships instead of the planned 52, and that only one builder instead of two would finish out the ship class, clearly contradicted the Navy’s vision for building its future fleet. The Navy originally declined to comment to USNI News on the Carter memo. However, in contrast to the Carter memo’s statement that “the Navy’s strategic future requires focusing … more on new capabilities, not only ship numbers,” a “

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” memo was signed the next day and listed the top platform-related goal as “buy more ships.”

The Navy has several times reiterated that its validated requirement for small surface combatants – LCSs and frigates – remains at 52 despite Carter’s decision.

The discussion on LCS heated up last week when Navy acquisition chief Sean Stackley told the House Armed Services Committee that the downselect from two shipbuilders to one – either Austal USA or Marinette Marine – would “drive, likely, one of those shipyards out of business based on their other workload.”

“While today we have two shipbuilders who have been in this program from day one and have invested in their facilities, driven down cost, and are delivering in accordance with contracts, once you go to this level of construction you have to downselect, there’s not enough workload there to sustain two shipyards,” he said.

And today, Mabus made the point publicly that many had been making privately since December: “the decisions about what to do, the number of Littoral Combat Ships, the type of Littoral Combat Ships, will not be made by this administration. They will be made by the next administration and by Congress, and this [FY 2017 budget request] allows the decision space for the next administration and Congress to go whatever direction they want to,” he told the House Appropriations defense subcommittee at a hearing.

Mabus also said that buying two in FY 2017 – Carter’s memo called for one, but the Navy successfully argued it would need to buy two to help set up a downselect to one builder for the remainder of the 40-ship class – would keep both yards open and thereby preserve decision space for the next administration.

The defense appropriators made several comments in support of the Navy shipbuilding budget and the shipbuilding industrial base, and though it remains to be seen what budget, if any, lawmakers will be able to pass during an election year, there seems to be plenty of congressional support for keeping the LCS/frigate program alive until a new administration is voted in.

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With the size of the small combatant force rapidly expanding, US Navy chief of naval operations Adm. John Richardson is ordering a major 60-day review of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program.

“The idea,” said a Navy official, “is that with two deployments complete or nearly complete, and with new ships coming almost every six months, it’s time to see where things stand and get a feel for what’s been working, what’s not been working, and what we might need to change.”

In a memorandum signed out on Feb. 29, Richardson directs the acting head of the Warfare Systems N9 directorate, the commander of naval surface forces, and the principal military adviser to the acquisition directorate to “lead a review of the LCS program to include crewing, operations, training and maintenance of the ship class.”

Under manning, Richardson wants the review team to look at how the 3-2-1 LCS crewing construct is working, and compare it with how a traditional, single crew for each ship approach would work. With six ships now in service – three each of the Freedom (LCS 1) and Independence (LCS 2) class – the rotation of three crews among two ships has only recently been put into practice. Two more ships will be commissioned this summer, allowing for 12 crews rotating between eight ships.

For example, aboard the Fort Worth (LCS 3), on deployment in the Western Pacific for over a year, crews have generally rotated every four months, moving between four months ashore for rest and training four months aboard the Freedom, and four aboard the Fort Worth.

But other forward-deployed ships, including those operating out of Japan, Spain and Bahrain, usually have traditional, non-rotating, permanent crews.

The use of and size of the mission detachments assigned to mission modules is also to be studied.

“There are a lot of moving parts,” the Navy official said about the LCS crewing scheme.

Richardson also wants a review of the use of ashore training and simulation methods compared with shipboard experience, and he wants the team to look at whether or not training-maintenance-deployment schedules developed for the surface fleet under the Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP) could be applied to LCS.

“We’re working hard to get the rest of the surface force on this OFRP, and yet LCS is on its own,” said the Navy official. “Is that the right thing to do? The rest of the fleet is on a completely different training and deployment cycle.”

The LCS maintenance strategy will also be reviewed, including the current scheme of regular maintenance periods for forward-deployed ships to a “periodic, preventive maintenance approach.”

With their small crews, LCS sailors are not expected to handle heavy maintenance duties while in port. Rather, a mix of Navy and contractor support teams is to come aboard for pierside maintenance. But in Singapore, where the US is sensitive to stationing too many people to support the ships, crews have routinely been brought out from the US mainland when needed to handle specific tasks.

“We want to know whether it makes more sense to station support teams closer to the operational area,” said the Navy official. “So, if not in Singapore, for example, perhaps in Guam or Hawaii.”

The review is also tasked with looking at the mission module scheme, where separate modules optimized for anti-submarine, surface warfare, and counter-mine warfare can be loaded on and off each LCS.

The team, Richardson wrote, is to assess “a revised approach where mission modules remain with a specific LCS hull.”

The review, the Navy official said, falls in line with previous efforts such as the creation of a program executive officer for LCS to oversee the combined development of ships, systems and modules, and the LCS council, a short-lived, high-ranking group established to transition the LCS to the fleet.

“The idea of a PEO LCS was to bring the program to life and manage the shipbuilding part of it,” the official said. “The idea of the LCS council was to get the Freedom out the door and do all the things necessary to deploy it.”

The idea of the review, the official said, is that “we’ve got some run time, we know some bads, we know some goods. So are the assumptions we’ve made correct or do we need to make new changes?”

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WASHINGTON:

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helped write the requirements for the

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some 13 years ago. Now Neagley, who’ll pin on his second star, is returning to LCS as Program Executive Officer at

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.

Rear Adm. John Neagley

LCS is still trying to right itself after

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overhauled the program

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and the

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cut it by one quarter

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.

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are constant. And at this moment, there’s also a 60-day Navy review underway of the ships’ performance so far. (See the group’s chartering memo below). Littoral Combat Ships have suffered high-profile breakdowns off both the

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and

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. Navy officials say mechanical teething troubles and reviews of lessons-learned are both routine for such a new class of vessel.

Neagley brings extensive experience in both the operational fleet and the LCS program to the job. After joining the Navy headquarters staff (OPNAV) in 2003, Neagley became lead

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officer for LCS, overseeing the official performance objectives that drove the much-debated design: its jaw-dropping but gas-guzzling

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, its fast but fragile hull, and its

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. In 2005, he moved over to the procurement side and became principal assistant program manager for LCS, focusing on the unglamorous but essential work of sustainment. It’s always challenging to get the spare parts, repair procedures, and other logistics in place for a new ship, but it’s particularly difficult for a small vessel with a small crew that critics say is

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just keeping up with routine maintenance.

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Navy officials say mechanical teething troubles and reviews of lessons-learned are both routine for such a new class of vessel.

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The Navy plans to release a draft request for proposal for its planned new class of frigate – based on one of the two existing Littoral Combat Ship hulls – to shipyards later this year, Program Executive Officer LCS.

The draft RfP will lay the groundwork for an eventual 2017 RfP that will outline the how the Navy will pick a single design for the frigate follow-on to the two Flight 0 variants of the Littoral Combat Ship – the Lockheed Martin Freedom-class (LCS-1) and the Austal USA Independence-class (LCS-2).

“We’ll be coming out with a request for proposal draft later on this year and full RfP next year to be able to get to, ‘here are some of the good ideas and the innovation the shipbuilders can come up with their proposal for what a frigate should look like against our requirements and capabilities’,” PEO LCS Rear Adm. Brian Antonio said last week.

The Navy and big Pentagon are now working through the acquisition strategy for the frigate following a December memo from Secretary of Defense Ash Carter to Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus to trim the Navy’s intended buy of 52 small surface combatants – split between existing LCS designs and a modified frigates – to 40 of the ships.

“Forty LCS/FF will exceed recent historical presence levels and will provide a far more modern and capable ship than the patrol coastals, minesweepers, and frigates that they will replace,” read the Carter memo.

Under the directive from Carter – codified in the release of the FY 2017 budget last month – the Navy will downselect to a single frigate design by 2019 from Lockheed or Austal.

As of last week, the overall acquisition plan for the Littoral Combat Ships and frigate going forward was before Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall awaiting approval, sources told USNI News.

“As we’re transitioning from LCS to frigate, we’re working through an acquisition strategy that’s going to allow us to reflect the execution of what was in the PB 17 budget and of course the Secretary of Defense direction. And we’ll do that in a way that makes the most sense from an acquisition strategy,” Antonio said.
“We’re continuing to work with both of the ship builders and with [Office of the Chief of Naval Operations] on what the requirements will be so we can marry those up and get to a focused multi-mission platform that addresses both the surface warfare and the [anti-submarine warfare] mission areas.”

The frigates –

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– will shed much of modular design of the Flight 0 LCS and place an emphasis on anti-surface and anti-submarine warfare.

Those changes include beefing up armor on the frigate, adding an over-the-horizon missile to tackle surface targets and up graded sensors.

News of the RfP plan comes as the Navy kicks off a new

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, logistics and manning plans as more ships enter the fleet.

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Jura said:

I put one sentence in boldface:
Navy Draft RfP for Littoral Combat Ship Follow-on Frigate Due to Shipyards this Year

source:

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will shed much of modular design of the Flight 0 LCS and place an emphasis on anti-surface and anti-submarine warfare.

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Brumby said:

... back to a more traditional frigate design rather than modular.

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