Beyond LCS: Navy Looks To Foreign Frigates, National Security Cutter

[nitpicker]

http://breakingdefense.com/2017/05/beyond-lcs-navy-looks-to-foreign-frigates-national-security-cutter/

Beyond LCS: Navy Looks To Foreign Frigates, National Security Cutter
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on May 11, 2017 at 3:34 PM

[UPDATED with Sec. Stackley comments]

WASHINGTON: The Navy is seriously considering derivatives of foreign designs and the Coast Guard’s National Security Cutter for its new frigate, after three years pursuing an upgraded version of its current Littoral Combat Ship. The shift has shaken up the industry, panicking some players, while others quietly reposition:
◾Wisconsin’s Marinette Marine, which currently builds the 3,500-ton Freedom variant of the LCS, may instead offer an Americanized version of the FREMM, a 6,000 to 6,700-ton frigate built for the French and Italian navies by Marinette’s parent company, Fincantieri. If so, Marinette would probably part ways with its current prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, and contract directly with the Navy.
◾Maine’s Bath Iron Works (owned by General Dynamics) will probably revive a previous partnership with Spanish shipbuilder Navantia, whose 5,900-ton F-100 family has the same Aegis radar and air defense system as American destroyers. That makes it the most sophisticated but also probably the most expensive contender, unless they deliberately downsize the radar to cut cost.
◾Mississippi’s Ingalls — whose parent company, HII, also owns Virginia’s massive Newport News — is dusting off proposals to militarize its Legend-class Coast Guard National Security Cutter as a 4,675-ton Patrol Frigate, the smallest and likely the cheapest competitor. Offering the only alternative to LCS that’s invented in America, Ingalls has a definite edge.
◾Alabama’s Austal, which builds the 3,100-ton Independence variant of LCS, specializes in building lightweight, high-speed aluminum ships, leaving them with little option but to offer an upgraded Independence. Austal says that hull is still large enough to accommodate high-end equipment like Vertical Launch Systems.
(snip)

In general, many foreign frigates are over-built for the US Navy’s needs. Global navies often use frigates as the mainstay of their battle line, a role the US reserves for much larger destroyers, so they pack their frigates with expensive high-end systems, especially for wide-area air defense. The US Navy wants to keep the frigate affordable, with more air defense than LCS has today but less than its scores of Aegis destroyers already on hand.

“They are looking for something in the $700 million to $1 billion range,” said Bryan Clark, a retired but well-connected Navy strategist the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, which itself recommended a larger frigate in a recent congressionally-chartered study. That’s as compared to $550 million for the latest Littoral Combat Ships, whose price has come down dramatically since early overruns, and about $1.8 billion for an 8,200-9,700 ton Aegis destroyer. “If it could be half the price of a destroyer, that’s probably the ideal.”

[UPDATED] “It’s going to be a best-value type competition, so cost and capability will be factors,” acting Navy Secretary Sean Stackley told reporters this evening after the US Naval Institute’s annual meeting. “I expect there to be a range of designs,” both LCS derivatives and others. "If you’re an existing builder (i.e. Austal and Marinette), you are in a competitive position because you have a hot production line (and) you’ve got mature costs,” he said. “Now their challenge is integrating new capabilities.”

At the same time, “definitely, the competition will be open to foreign designs,” Stackley said. “There are going to be some caveats”: All contenders must meet US requirements, especially for survivability; they must give the Navy technical data rights so it can “sustain and modernize” the ships; and they must be built in US shipyards.

Is there any preference for domestic vs. foreign, LCS derivatives vs. different designs? Stackley simply repeated the Navy’s promise that the competition would be “full and open.” [UPDATE ENDS]

No final decision has been made, but five knowledgeable sources from different backgrounds– Capitol Hill, the executive branch, industry, and academia — and with no evident connections to each other, all independently (and all anonymously except for Clark) told me that the Navy is seriously considering alternatives to an upgraded LCS. The service isn’t just doing due diligence or paying lip service with every intention of choosing the LCS frigate in the end. In 2020, when the Navy intends to award the frigate contract, it could well end up buying an up-gunned Coast Guard cutter or a foreign design — assuming Congress and a protectionist president permit.
(snip)

[JayhawkSD]

1. Interesting that America again is "the only nation that..."

All other nations use frigates as the mainstays of their navies, while we use the much larger and more expensive destroyer. Hyman G. Rickover is spinning in his grave.

Ships with aluminum hulls. In salt water. Ever see what happens to aluminum exposed to salt water? Any idea why the Navy thinks that will not happen to their aluminum ship hulls?

Ever watch the commercial where they dump a load of bricks into the beds of two pickup trucks, one with a steel bed liner and the other with aluminum? They then point out that the aluminum truck bed got punched full of holes. Any idea why the Navy thinks that the same thing won't happen to their aluminum ship hulls?

It actually is happening. One of them grazed a dock. Didn't hurt the dock, but tore a gash in the hull of the ship.

Not to worry, though, they are manning the ships with clowns anyway. The crew forgets to put lube oil in the main propulsion gears, and comedy piles upon comedy. No one catches the error because there are no basic performance checklists. Once under weigh no one notices the grinding noise coming from the dry gearbox, or the overheating of the unlubricated bearings, until the gearbox has seized up. Awesome. That's the kind of thing that happens when the captain of the ship is drinking in bars ashore with the crew, which seems to be common practice today.

Why bother giving decent ships to this caliber of sailors?