Contractors market LCS boats to Navy - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Contractors market LCS boats to Navy

The Navy’s first littoral combat ship, the Freedom, has only been in commission for a little more than three months, but contractors are already aspiring to add new boats and accessories to go with the “pickup truck” warship.

Defense giants Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman each used the mid-January Surface Navy Association symposium outside Washington to showcase designs for experimental, modular boats that could potentially deploy from an LCS close to shore and venture up shallow lakes and rivers. Although the Navy hasn’t asked for new LCS equipment beyond the three mission packages it has already designed — for mine countermeasures, surface and anti-submarine warfare — contractors believe someday there’ll be a need for the new boats they’re pitching.

“Truth in advertising: I can’t tell you there’s a market now, but we believe in time, it’ll happen,” said Ronald Harris, director of requirements and customer solutions for Lockheed Martin.

Navy Secretary Donald Winter and Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway have both mused about LCS becoming a “mini-gator,” a way to ferry ashore Marines or special operators. Plus, Navy planners have said they want LCS to take on diplomatic and military-to-military training missions, showing the flag in shallow-water ports where today’s deeper-draft ships can’t go.

Lockheed and Northrop have designed boats that, with a few modifications, could fit inside an LCS mission bay and accept their own sets of custom equipment. Lockheed’s boat, the Common Off-board Reconfigurable Asset, or COBRA, has a twin-hull design with a flat, truck-style bed. Northrop’s boat, the Joint Multi-mission Expeditionary Craft, or JMEC, looks like a miniature version of the landing craft utility familiar to Marines and amphibious ship sailors, with an aft pilothouse and a customizable forward section.

Both are novel designs. Both can carry about a dozen geared-up troops, plus crew members. Both are very fast, cruising at 30 knots or better.

Beyond that, however, the two boats differ. Lockheed calls the COBRA a “semi-SWATH” — or Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull — which combines the sea-keeping of a SWATH-style ship with the speed of a catamaran. The COBRA can handle a high sea state with no bow slamming, Harris said, unlike a rigid-hull inflatable boat that can punish riders’ backs in choppy seas. It can also be piloted remotely.

An LCS would need a different boat cradle to accept either one of the two designs, and the JMEC is about four feet longer than the rigid hull inflatable boat it was originally designed to carry. But in both LCS designs — the steel, Lockheed-built Freedom and the aluminum, General Dynamics-built Independence — an overhead crane in the mission bay could lift and change out the small boat’s modular equipment.