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Mabus: LCS cost goal may not be realistic

The question asked of the U.S. Navy’s top leadership sounded as if the needs of the war in Afghanistan were reaching deep into the management of the Littoral Combat Ship program.

“I hear that the SUPSHIP [supervisor of shipbuilding] that was monitoring the LCS program was pulled off to be an individual augmentee,” Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., said Thursday during a Navy budget hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee that he chairs. “Is that true?”

Adm. Gary Roughead, the Navy’s chief of naval operations, told Levin he is proud of the sailors serving in individual assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he “didn’t have any specifics” on a shipbuilding official being taken from their job.

“Would you just check that one issue out?” the senator grumpily asked.

Levin had just finished remarking about the LCS program’s cost growth. Although he did not mention that one of the first two ships had passed the $700 million mark, he questioned if the service can meet the $460 million cost cap imposed by Congress on the ships the Navy is asking for in 2010.

“Is there a realistic prospect that you’ll be able to do it?” Levin asked.

“I think there’s a realistic prospect we can strive toward that goal,” replied Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who cited the lack of a cost escalation provision in the congressional spending limit on LCS, despite rising labor costs and inflation, which “have frankly made that less realistic.”

Because of those concerns, Mabus said that “my best guess is we will know by early fall” whether the cost cap can be met.

After the hearing, a spokeswoman for the Naval Sea Systems Command said that while an officer overseeing on-scene construction of one of the LCS ships was headed for Afghanistan, the move was part of a regular rotation.

The project officer for SUPSHIP at the Mobile, Ala., shipyard building the General Dynamics LCS is leaving that post in June and will report for an individual augmentee assignment in Afghanistan, said Pat Dolan. The officer, a lieutenant commander, has been in the SUPSHIP On-Site Office job for more than three years, and she is not the senior SUPSHIP official overseeing LCS construction.

Neither of the senior SUPSHIP officials is being pulled for an IA assignment, Dolan said. Both of those officers are captains, based in Pascagoula, Miss., and Bath, Maine.

The situation regarding which of NavSea’s two SUPSHIP offices oversees the LCS is somewhat confusing. The Lockheed Martin team is building its ships at Marinette Marine, in Marinette, Wis., while the General Dynamics ships are built at Mobile, Ala. But the territorial demarcation lines are drawn on a rough north-south axis: the SUPSHIP office in Bath oversees the Mobile operations, while the SUPSHIP operation based in Pascagoula — about 40 miles from Mobile — is responsible for the Marinette operations.