The Navy's award in late May of two contracts for phase two of the littoral combat ship (LCS) program pushed the vessel onto center stage, as the second member of the "transformational" family of ships intended to redefine surface warfare for close-in, shallow -water operations. The first program, the DD(X) land-attack destroyer, is on line for lead-ship contract award next year, aiming at delivery in 2011. Concept work is under way for the third family member, the CG(X) next -generation cruiser.
The LCS milestone, aimed at construction of four "Flight O" ships, also highlights the new emphasis on modular design for ship systems the Navy hopes will promote the shift to highly reliable commercial interfaces and components, thereby slashing procurement, training, and maintenance costs, and boosting mission effectiveness in all naval warfare domains.
The missions envisioned for LCS include special operations launch, intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, maritime interdiction, homeland defense, and antiterrorism force protection. Other missions may be added later.
One of the May contracts, valued at $536 million, went to prime contractor General Dynamics Marine Systems, teamed with General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, Austal, BAE, Maritime Applied Physics, CAE Marine Systems, and several other companies. The second award, for $423.3 million, went to Lockheed Martin Surveillance and Sensor Systems, which is leading a team of Gibbs & Cox, Bollinger Shipyard, and Marinette Marine.
The Lockheed Martin contract is for a seven-month system design and includes options for detail design and construction of possibly two vessels. The General Dynamics award, for 16 months, will produce a final system design and also contains options for two ships, to be completed by 2006. The two efforts, overseen by the Program Executive Office for Ships, will provide the "seaframes" for three mission -module types: mine warfare, antisubmarine warfare, and surface warfare.
The office's director, Rear Admiral Charles Hamilton, said at a mid - june briefing that the LCS "is very much built to be part of the joint warfighting force, to respond to the antiaccess threat, fully netted with the battle force, and built with a network, or what I prefer to call a 'net-centric means.'
"We worked very hard to get reconfigurable mission modules to get at mines, small, fast, surface craft, and diesel submarines," he said. "We've also worked to get a modular open-system architecture that permits the mission modules to be brought on and off the ship rapidly."
The open architecture, with its common interface, enables commanders to configure the combat -systems suite of mission modules based on current mission needs. Admiral Hamilton added that the open architecture "also allows us to work even harder on life -cycle modularity to insert new technologies and package them, without fundamentally cutting and refitting the ships."
Rear Admiral William Landay, Program Executive Officer for Littoral Mine Warfare, said at the same briefing that "the three mission packages address those gap areas that our analysis has indicated the LCS ship and the mission modules can provide a significant benefit."
The effectiveness of the modular design, based on common interfaces, is based on the ability to "swap out" systems quickly and easily to meet changing mission conditions. Admiral Landay said that "the fact that the mission modules are not embedded in the ship allows us to bring new capability and new technology to the module at a rate that we've never been able to do before." Flight O ships will be fitted out with modules based on current systems. The Navy is expected to issue a request for proposals for mission modules for Flight 1 ships probably in 2006.
The LCS mine -warfare package, for example, addresses the need to survey ocean conditions through such systems as the Battlespace Preparation Autono-mous Underwater Vehicle being developed by the Office of Naval Research. The Remote Minehunting System (RMS) now being fielded on board surface combat ants will provide a bottom mine search capability. The H-60 multi-mission helicopter will be fitted with an Airborne Mine-Neutralizatipn System to destroy mines detected with the RMS.
The thinking behind the reliance on modular design extends to the Navy's highest -profile surface warfare and undersea system programs. The advanced rapid commercial insertion, or ARCI, process for the Los Angeles (SSN -688)-class attack submarines identifies common hardware and software modules for fast fielding of capability upgrades. Initiated in 1988, the ARCI process fielded common acoustic processing systems beginning with a multipurpose processor. The program serves as a model for the open archilecture initiative to move current frontline surface combatants, aircraft carriers, and big -deck amphibs toward an architecture of common combat -system modules.