ARTICLE

March 2004

Partners Sought for Littoral Combat Ship

by Geoff S. Fein

The U. S. Navy is looking to tap the experience of foreign navies and shipyards in the design and development of its Littoral Combat Ship. The Navy envisions the LCS operating in coastal waters, clearing mines, chasing diesel submarines and potential terrorists, and ferrying special-operations forces.

While the United States lacks expertise in designing littoral ships, there are several foreign navies that have extensive experience and potentially could contribute to the LCS program, said U.S. officials participating in a Navy-industry international conference, in Arlington, Va.

Foreign navies have been focused on the littorals, while the U.S. Navy traditionally has operated in blue waters, said Rear Adm. Charles S. Hamilton, Navy program executive officer for ships.

Sweden’s Visby class corvette was designed for missions such as anti-surface warfare, mine countermeasures anti-submarine warfare and coastal patrol.

The United States and Sweden are collaborating on a study of littoral ship design and technology and infrared measurements on Visby and a Littoral Combat Ship prototype. A formal agreement will be signed this summer, said Rear Adm. Mark Milliken, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for international programs.

The Royal Norwegian Navy is building a fast-patrol Littoral Combat Ship. The first in the class was the P-960 KNM Skjold. The Norwegian ship participated in tests and trials with the U.S. Navy from February to August 2002. The United States signed a project agreement with the Norwegian Navy in February 2002, said Milliken.

The capabilities of the Skjold were evaluated as the Navy set its requirements for LCS, said Milliken.

International cooperation in LCS, however, will be hampered by the restriction on classified information sharing, and the requirement that the ship be built in the United States. But Navy officials said those obstacles can be overcome, and that bringing foreign partners onboard will set an example for future cooperative efforts.

“If we do this right, we can use this program as a model,” said Gibson Leboeuf, executive director of Navy International Programs Office. “The LCS can be the wave of the future of doing business.”

France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom are leaders in technologies such as propulsion and power generation, fuel cells, mission module concepts, integrated antenna systems, gun modules, laser detection systems, unmanned aircraft recovery and damage control. These are areas where the U.S. Navy can benefit from international cooperation, officials said.

Foreign sales of LCS are not a concern at the moment, said Milliken. LCS is only in the preliminary design phase. Overseas sales will be a “downstream issue.”

Because most countries tend to support their domestic industries, U.S. marketing efforts will most likely focus on subsystems and design, he added. However, it will be difficult for foreign companies to access information about specific aspects of the LCS, because the mission requirements are classified. But Hamilton stressed there is enough information available at the declassified level to make international cooperation feasible.

Vice Adm. Phillip M. Balisle, commander of the Naval Sea Systems Command, called the LCS a “viable program for international cooperation.”

Despite an aggressive push by the Navy to keep LCS on track for a 2007 delivery, the program has run into some rough waters on Capitol Hill. One source of controversy has been the perceived “rush” to build LCS, at a time when the Navy’s budget may be overstretched, critics contend.

The Navy’s fiscal year 2005-2009 spending plan includes 13 LCS ships. In 2005, the service requested $352 million for LCS research and development.

Navy officials claim that that the LCS program is not only needed to counter emerging threats, but it also serves as a model for the type of rapid acquisition that the Defense Department has advocated. While it took 14 years to develop and build the DDG-51 destroyer, the LCS acquisition cycle will be compressed down to five years.

Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., who sits on the Armed Services Committee, said it may be time for Congress to accept this new approach to defense procurement, given the rapid pace at which technology advances and the difficulties in setting definite requirements for a weapon system without limiting the ability to upgrade programs over time.

The Navy, particularly, has been criticized for not producing detailed enough analysis on why LCS is the best and most cost-effective platform to meet littoral warfare missions. But the lack of specificity, he said, does not mean that the Navy has not made a strong case for LCS, but rather it means that the service does not want to settle on a ship now and limit its ability to change it later, if better technology comes along.

“If Congress needs to know at the beginning of the process what equipment is going to look like, it means we are going to get equipment five years out of date at the end of it,” said Talent in a speech to the Precision Strike Association.

Rear Adm. (S) Raymond Spicer, deputy director for surface ships, said there is a “phonebook’s worth of analysis” to justify the need for LCS. The Navy is on an aggressive timeline to meet the requirement, he said at the Navy International Programs conference.

Hamilton said the Navy has a validated requirement for the LCS. “We received unambiguous signals that this was the direction the [Navy] wants to go,” said Hamilton. “I take that as ‘direction of intent.’”

Each LCS squadron would consist of three to five ships. Crew size will run from 15 to 50, and they will have to be highly skilled, said Spicer. “It’s vastly different from the way we do business in the fleet today.”

General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon each leads three teams vying for the LCS contract. They all include international partners.

General Dynamics—along with Bath Iron Works, Austal, CAE, BAE Systems and Maritime Applied Physics Corp.—is proposing a trimaran based on an Australian design. Lockheed Martin—with Bollinger, Marinette, Gibbs & Cox, and Gryphon Technologies—are designing a monohull ship. Raytheon’s team—Northrop Grumman, JJMA, Atlantic, Goodrich and Umoe—is competing with a high-speed surface-effects ship, based on Norway’s littoral ship.

One or two designs will be selected in May 2004. The first ship will be built by fiscal year 2005 and will be in the water by the second quarter of fiscal year 2007, said Hamilton.

But even though the Navy has committed funds to start LCS, experts caution that the service may be in denial about its future ability to support LCS, along with all the other shipbuilding programs.

Ronald O’Rourke, a naval analyst at the Congressional Research Service, said the Navy is not likely to have enough money to buy both LCS and the DDX next-generation destroyer. In light of the rising war costs and the ballooning federal deficit, the Navy should not expect larger budgets in the years ahead. “The outlook is very different from November 2001, when the DDX and LCS were first announced,” O’Rourke told the Surface Navy Association annual symposium.

“Intensified competition for funding will lead to greater scrutiny of defense programs,” he said.

Further, the Navy has not provided estimates of what LCS will cost when mission modules are included, O’Rourke noted. Each hull is expected to cost no more than $220 million, but the mission modules could add hundreds of millions more.

O’Rourke criticized the Navy’s lobbying campaign for LCS as being too quick to point out that there is a “desperate” need for the ship, without clearly articulating the reasons for the urgency.

He wondered whether the need for LCS qualifies as “desperate,” similar to the Army’s need for body armor, armored Humvees, helicopter survivability equipment and Arabic-speaking translators.

Lawmakers, many of whom are still angry about the administration’s questionable assertions about WMD threats in Iraq, may react skeptically to statements about the Navy’s need for the LCS to encounter imminent littoral threats, he said.

The controversy over the Air Force tanker lease also has raised the level of skepticism about how the military services set requirements for procurement programs, said O’Rourke. “The Air Force abruptly reversed its position on whether a new tanker was required now, rather than years from now and, in the process, disowned previous analysis of the mission.”

As a result, he said, “there may now be increased skepticism about how military requirements are identified, particularly when a service abruptly discovers a need for major near-term acquisition program for which previously there was no near term stated requirement.”

This is particularly relevant to LCS, said O’Rourke. “Before the Navy announced it in November 2001, it had resisted proposals for ships like LCS and had insisted for years that its littoral warfare programs were sufficient.”

The Navy, before announcing LCS, “does not appear to have done an analysis of alternatives of multiple concepts that identified a ship like LCS as the most promising way to provide additional littoral warfare capability,” O’Rourke said.

In a study, O’Rourke identified several alternatives to LCS: helicopters operating in the littorals; sensors and weapons aboard airplanes, helicopters and submarines; a non-combat littoral support craft for deploying helicopters and unmanned vehicles into littoral waters; and unmanned vehicles that can be launched from aircraft, submarines or other larger surface ships operating further from the shore than LCS would.

Sandra I. Erwin contributed to this article.

Back To Top