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APPARENTLY SERIOUS... The Navy appears to be serious about challenging cost overrruns on the Littoral Combat Ship project:
The LCS program manager was canned; the admiral in charge of ship-building was reassigned; work on the ship was suspended.Winter demanded that the second LCS contract be renegotiated. The old one was a "cost-plus" deal that paid out big bucks, no matter how the firm did its job. Winter wanted a firm price for his ship. That was something Lockheed refused to accept. So Winter pulled the plug on the third LCS.The LCS project is designed to supply the Navy with a large (50-80) number of smallish (2500 tons) super-fast (45 knots!) ships capable of fighting in the littoral (shallow, interior water). These vessels will constitute a large proportion of the future fleet, and unlike the Zumwalt destroyers, have a plausible mission set. The first two ships were built more or less competitively by Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, and the Navy has just brought the axe down on Lockheed's second ship. This is remarkably important for the future of the Navy; serious cost overruns in what could become a tight defense fiscal environment could significantly cut into force size. It remains to be seen if General Dynamics can deliver a good ship at a reasonable price.Speaking of the Zumwalt, there appear to be serious questions about whether the enormously expensive and mission-challenged destroyer (which is really a cruiser, incidentally) will even float properly. According to Defense News, experts in and out of the Navy have expressed concerns about the radical hull design, suggesting that it could roll over in certain conditions. That would be bad, not least because the damn things cost an amazing amount of money. Incidentally, the success of this campaign to name the second Zumwalt class destroyer after Robert Heinlein would, I think, push the project from the absurd firmly into the surreal.--Robert Farley
