Littoral Combat Ship Cut Plan Reopens Navy Riff: Build ‘Em Fast Or Rugged

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/01/littoral-combat-ship-cut-plan-reopens-navy-riff-build-em-fast-or-rugged/



The two Littoral Combat Ship variants, LCS-1 Freedom ($584,000,000) (far) and LCS-2 Independence ($704,000,000) (near).

Littoral Combat Ship Cut Plan Reopens Navy Riff: Build ‘Em Fast Or Rugged
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on January 17, 2014 at 4:30 AM

CRYSTAL CITY: The Littoral Combat Ship was supposed to be one of the fastest things in the fleet, but it seems like the skeptics – and the sequester – have caught up with it. The question is, what’s next?

After a Pentagon memo recommended slashing the program by more than a third — from 52 ships to 32 — its backers came out swinging. “We have heard for the past 12 years about the importance of the LCS to our future Navy,” House seapower subcommittee chairman Rep. Randy Forbes said in a press release Thursday afternoon. “Although this platform has had its share of development difficulties, I believe it has a necessary role to play in the future fleet.”

What’s more, LCS proponents have at least a year to reverse the decision. The Navy is locked into a long-term contract for Littoral Combat Ships that ends in fiscal year 2015 with the purchase of the 24th LCS. Short of breaking that contract and paying penalties, the Pentagon can do nothing to LCS in the budget it is currently preparing to send to Congress. “This year is another oversight year and next year is a decision year,” one Hill source told me. What will really decide the LCS’s fate is the next contract, which will be in the 2016 budget.

It’s also possible that there could be no new contract and no 2016 money at all, which would end the program at 24 ships. The 32-ship number leaked this week certainly has the smell of an internal Pentagon compromise between going the full 52 and stopping dead at 24. Noted naval analyst, author, and LCS critic Norman Polmar still hopes the slam-on-the-breaks school will prevail: “24 might be a better total number for the current LCS program,” he told me in an email.



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