Littoral Combat Ships (LCS)

interestingly Navy Extends Two-Month Review of Littoral Combat Ship Program
On the heels of the conclusion of a
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review of the service's
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program, the chief of naval operations has asked for more time to complete the probe.

In a statement Thursday, Adm. John Richardson said he had met with Naval Surface Forces Commander Vice Adm. Thomas Rowden and other members of the LCS review team to receive an update.

While he said he was happy with the progress made so far, he needed more information.

"As the team walked me through their work it was clear that LCS crewing would be the main driver for many of the follow-on decisions about operations, training, and maintenance, so we will address that issue first," Richardson said in the statement.

"Before making final decisions, I asked the team to go back and provide me a few more details on some of the topics they presented," he added. "We will convene again in about a month to decide on the best way forward."

Richardson ordered the review in a Feb. 29 memo to study the program’s crewing approach, which cycles three crews between two ships, as well as operations, training and maintenance practices.

According to the memo, Richardson said he wants to find the right balance between ship training and simulation ashore, determine the right maintenance strategy, assess warfighting and operational capabilities, and more.

There are now six littoral combat ships in service: three of the Freedom-class monohull variant, and three of the Independence-class trimaran-variant. The Navy is planning to downselect to one variant of the ship in fiscal 2018.
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interestingly Navy Extends Two-Month Review of Littoral Combat Ship Program

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The Navy wants to start building
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of its
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a year earlier, the frigate program manager said. The
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, winner-take-all competition will “tentatively” happen in 2018 instead of 2019. To make that earlier date, Capt. Dan Brintzinghoffer said at the
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here, the Navy will be “less prescriptive” in saying how to implement the various features of the upgrade, giving each competitor more leeway as it modifies its current LCS design.

Who are those competitors? Currently, the Navy buys
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from two different shipyards: Marinette Marine in Wisconsin — partnered with aerospace giant
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— and Austal on the Gulf Coast. When Defense Secretary
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decided last year to
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, he also ordered the Navy to pick one design and one yard no later than 2019, when production shifted from the original flavor LCS to the upgraded frigate. Now the Navy is shooting for a “downselect” in late 2018, Brintzinghoffer said, with a formal Request For Proposals out late in 2017.

What’s the hurry? First of all, to have a healthy competition, you need both competitors to still be building LCS: Otherwise one will have to stop and then restart its production line, driving up its costs and crippling its bid. But the Pentagon’s five-year spending plan (the FYDP) only budgets for one LCS in 2018, Brintzinghoffer explained, and whichever yard got to build it would have a big advantage in a 2019 competition. Moving the decision to 2018 keeps things fair.

Second, while Brintzinghoffer didn’t emphasize this point, starting frigate production a year earlier means the Navy gets more of the upgraded frigate LCS. Conversely, it would get fewer of the original vanilla version, although the Navy plans to backfit at least some of the frigate upgrades on basic LCS. Specifically, the captain said, the number of frigates would go up from eight to 12, a whopping 50 percent increase. (The number of regular LCS would drop from 32 to 28).

Starting earlier is fact the only way to get more frigates. Continuing the production run longer is not allowed because Secretary Carter has capped the total production — original flavor LCS plus frigates, in whatever combination — at 40 ships.

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. “The requirement across the Navy — based on a 2014 Force Structure Analysis — is for 52 small surface combatants,” Brintzinghoffer said, echoing Navy leaders. (That figure is likely to increase in the Navy’s ongoing Force Structure Assessment). The Navy could build the 40 LCS and then 12 of something else, but so far there’s no clear alternative design.

The
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has voted to add an additional LCS to the administration’s proposed 2017 budget, but its Senate counterparts have not. In fact, the
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draft “prohibits revisions to or deviations from the current LCS acquisition strategy, which includes…a down-select to a single variant no later than 2019, and a reduction in the inventory objective to 40 ships.

So, at least for now, “we’re kind of rolling with the punches with the way the budget flows and the direction that we have receive,” Brintzinghoffer said, “working towards an FY18 downselect to a frigate design.”

So, I asked Brintzinghoffer at his briefing here, what’s the biggest obstacle to moving the competition up a year?

“The biggest thing is we have to come to an agreement with both of the primes…to make sure that the design, the level of design is sufficient and mature enough that they can competitively bid, because we’re going to be asking them for fixed price bids,” Brintzinghoffer said.

“In a competition one of the advantages the government gets is going to be a lower price,” the captain continued, but for the builders to squeeze costs out of their designs, they needed more freedom to make trade-offs. “We needed to give them back some of the trade space,” he said, “so we became less prescriptive in the way the two shipbuilders were going to… deliver a particular functional capability.”

That said, the Navy is very clear on the
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: a full suite of anti-ship and anti-submarine sensors and weapons, combining two of the three “
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” for the existing LCS, plus such improvements as a medium-range “over the horizon” missile
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.

The service also wants to backfit as many of these improvements on the vanilla LCS as possible, with a high priority on that Over The Horizon (OTH)
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. Some original flavor LCS may even get redesignated as frigates if they’re upgraded enough, Brintzinghoffer said, although just adding the missile won’t be enough to do it.

Nor is it a simple matter of bolting new gear onto the old design, he warned. It’s much easier to build a big component – say, an OTH missile launcher — into a ship in the first place than it is to add one to a ship already built. A backfitted LCS may well fit fewer OTH missiles than a frigate, for example, or have them in a different place.

When you sit there and say, ‘I want to put something internal to the skin of the ship,’ and it’s big enough that you can’t bring it in through a hatch, it now gets very expensive,” Brintzinghoffer told me after the briefing. Which brings you to “the other piece about forward fit and backfit,” he said: “When you forward-fit something (i.e. build it into a new ship), you’re paying for it with SCN money,
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funds. (Upgrades to an existing ship are) using OPN, which is Other Procurement, Navy.” It’s often harder for items to compete for OPN funds than SCN — just one more complication in the long saga of the
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.
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I thought "LCSs for Saudis" had already fizzled out :) but now I found this (mostly sales-talk):
New Saudi Frigate Design Details Emerge
he frigate Saudi Arabia will use as the backbone of its planned Eastern Fleet expansion will feature an expanded anti-air and anti-surface capability over the Lockheed Martin Freedom-class template, USNI News has learned.

The frigate will be built around a 16 Mk 41 vertical launch cells capable of fielding the Raytheon Enhanced SeaSparrow Missiles (ESSM) or Raytheon SM-2 and an Airbus TRS-4D active electronically scanned array (AESA) air search radar suite, according to a model of Lockheed Martin’s international multi-mission surface combatant at the company’s booth at Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition 2016.

“It has some of the same components as a [Littoral Combat Ship], especially from the propulsion train but as you look at some of the combat system we have some international content for different vendors that are out there,” Joe DePietro, Lockheed’s LCS international director told USNI News on Tuesday.

DePietro indicated the model wasn’t tailored to a specific international customer, but two industry sources with an understanding of the ongoing negotiations between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia for the Saudi Naval Expansion Program II (SNEP II) told USNI News the load out seen in the model was the same configuration offered to the Royal Saudi Navy.

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layout and the Littoral Combat Ship is the lack of modular reconfigurable mission space.

The Saudi guided missile frigate is 387 feet long, about nine feet longer than the Freedom-class template. It has the same combined diesel and gas propulsion configuration – two Rolls Royce MT-30 gas turbines and two Colt-Pielstick diesel engines connected through a combining gear.

At the bow, the 57mm deck gun has been swapped for a larger 76mm main deck gun. Additional weapon systems include launchers for eight Boeing RGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missiles, port and starboard 20 mm remote gun mounts. The ship is outfitted with port and starboard torpedo tube launchers capable of firing Mk 46 heavyweight torpedoes. The ship also features a Raytheon SeaRAM Anti-Ship Missile Defense System

The reconfigurable mission space forward of the boat area has been converted into machinery spaces and the boat launch itself is able to accommodate an 11-meter rigid hull inflatable boat. On either side of the boat launch of the ship are spaces where the ship can launch a variable depth towed sonar passive or active array and a towed AN/SLQ-25 Nixie torpedo decoy system.

The configuration can field a crew of 110 to 130. At 10 knots the ship has a range of about 5,000 nautical miles and can reach speeds in excess of 30 knots, DePietro said.

In October, the U.S. State department released a notification to Congress for a
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based on the Freedom-class.

“This acquisition will enhance the stability and maritime security in the sea areas around the Arabian Peninsula and support strategic objectives of the United States,” read the notification. “The proposed sale will provide Saudi Arabia with an increased ability to meet current and future maritime threats from enemy weapon systems. The Multi-Mission Surface Combatant ships will provide protection-in- depth for critical industrial infrastructure and for the sea lines of communication.”

However, following the initial notification, Saudi Arabia allegedly “balked at the price tag for the [four ship] package – thought to be more than $3 billion but less than $4 billion – and were unhappy with the time it would take to complete detail design of the ships, carry out systems integration, build the vessels, deliver them and install infrastructure improvements in the kingdom,”
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.

The total value of SNEP II is estimated at around $20 billion.
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FORBIN

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
Maybe posted ?

New Saudi Frigate Design Details Emerge
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Very possible same armamnet for the last 12 LCS, FFG eventualy only one Mk-41 with ESSM, it would be a much more capable combattant as current.
 

FORBIN

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
I have take a look for modules and dates for ships mainly on Wikipédia, CRS report also

Modules :
SUW : with 2 x 30 mm gun OK in service normaly for 2017 a launcher with 24 Helfire in more
ASW : in service normaly 2019/20 *
MCM : normaly 2020 ? the more delicate

*Planned LCS with it replace the 11 Big MS Avenger and the 28 MH-53E.

Ships :
USA LCS.PNG

In italic not delivered, normaly Little Rock for this year.
 
Maybe posted ?

New Saudi Frigate Design Details Emerge
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May 21, 2016
I thought "LCSs for Saudis" had already fizzled out :) but now I found this (mostly sales-talk):
New Saudi Frigate Design Details Emerge

source:
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there are two posts in between, FORBIN

Very possible same armamnet for the last 12 LCS, FFG eventualy only one Mk-41 with ESSM, it would be a much more capable combattant as current.
are you giving me "soon", "might", "possibly", "in the pipeline", "futuristic", "unbelievable", ... ?
no, it's "eventually" LOL!
 
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