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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.
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