US Navy Requests RFI for LCS Replacement

: John D. Burrow is in a hurry – and if you think you know what the Navy needs as an alternative to its controversial Littoral Combat Ship, you will be too. Minutes ago, the Navy released a pair of Requests For Information (RFIs) on LCS alternatives – one RFI for concepts for the ship as a whole and the other for specific shipboard technologies. The deadline for responses: 22 May. As Burrow told reporters this morning, “the RFIs will give them 21 days to provide that information.”

“We’re not going to have time for them to go through and do a design,” said Burrow, head of the Small Surface Combatant Task Force. “[We want] mature ship designs that are in production today and/or mature ship designs that have a high degree of fidelity [so] that we can understand the degree of technical risk.”

Meanwhile, in parallel to industry’s rush effort, Burrow and his staff will consult Navy personnel at Norfolk, Pearl Harbor, and elsewhere during May to get real sailors’ takes on what a small warship needs. Then Burrow and his SSCTF staff will have a month to mate up what the fleet says it needs with what industry says is it can do, analyze the information and narrow it all down to a set of options – not a single ship, but a range of different designs, Burrow emphasizes – to offer to Navy and Defense Department leadership.

“It’s a quick turnaround,” Burrow acknowledged to reporters. “Remember I’ve got to 31 July to wrap this thing up.”

That said, the Navy’s done plenty of prior work for Burrow to build upon, one Congressional staffer told me: “It’s more feasible than you might otherwise think when you consider that in fact they’ve been studying this stuff without telling people since early last year, since early 2013.” Likewise, industry has been touting LCS alternatives for a while — such as Lockheed Martin’s modification of its Independence-class LCS for foreign markets, or Huntington-Ingalls’ upgunned version of the National Security Cutter it builds for the US Coast Guard

The Small Surface Combatant Task Force itself, however, was set up just months ago by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to review whether the existing LCS variants, a modified Littoral Combat Ship, or an entirely new design – even a foreign ship – would best meet the Navy’s needs against increasingly lethal future threats. Whatever ship gets picked, it needs to be ready to enter production in 2019 when the existing LCS contract ends, so production can continue uninterrupted. To do that, the Navy needs to award a new contract for something in fiscal year 2016, for which the services are already building their budgets.

Burrow emphasized repeatedly that he and his team are not holding a competition, not conducting a formal analysis of alternatives – though their work could certainly be the basis of one – and don’t even have formal requirements yet.

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hmmm.  Arm Chair Marine Engineering here.

Take the Independence class.  Stretch it 23m (big stretch).  Drop in 6 to 8 mk 57 VLS modules (24 to 32 cells: 8 cells of ESSM, the remainder for mission, such as VL ASROC  (or successor) or even standard missiles).  Slap on either a AMDR (unlikely) or an SPY-1F or SPY-1K.  I'd guess this would be a 4k ton vessel vs 2300 for the LCS version.