LCS OTH Missile Procurement

An LCS recently sailed with the Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile (NSM)(see, "Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile") and launcher aboard (see, "LCS Giffords Naval Strike Missile").  While that, alone, will not turn the LCS from a useless debacle to a mighty warship, it is, nevertheless, a step in a more useful direction.  The plan appears to be to mount 8x NSM on each LCS.  There are 32 LCS built or shortly due to enter the fleet.  Thus, the minimum total missile inventory would be 8x32 = 256.  Presumably, the Navy would want several reloads available in inventory for each ship, in the event of war, thus bringing the total inventory requirement to around 1800 NSM or so.

LCS Giffords and Naval Strike Missile

Of course, the Navy considers several of the LCS to be non-deployable, training vessels so that might affect the missile inventory requirements somewhat, depending on whether the Navy considers these vessels non-combat capable in the event of war.  Setting that aspect aside …

From the Navy’s 2020 Budget Highlights we see a procurement plan for NSM of 101 missiles from 2020-24 inclusive.(1)  That’s an average acquisition of 20 missiles per year.  That’s significantly short of the 256/1800 requirement!  Of course, there’s no reason to believe that the acquisition will stop after 2024 but even continuing at the average of 20 missiles per year – or even the max budgeted rate of 26 missiles per year – it would require 65+ years to reach the required inventory level.

On a related note, the FY19 weapons budget document lists the cost of 8 NSM as $18,156,000 for an average of $2.3M per missile.(2)  Not cheap!

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*Update* - 

Here's projected quantities, costs, and unit costs from the FY20 weapons budget document: (3)

2020  18  $38,137,000    $2.1M
2021  15  $32,975,000    $2.2M
2022  16  $33,585,000    $2.1M
2023  26  $49,371,000    $1.9M
2024  26  $50,451,000    $1.9M

Still not cheap!
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As with most of the LCS program, one is left wondering what's going on?  Is the Navy serious about arming the LCS for war or just making a token buy of missiles so that a handful of deployed ships can have photo ops that the Navy can use to deflect criticism of the LCS program?

Another possibility is that twenty or so missiles is the limit of the manufacturer's production capacity.  If so, this would be very disturbing when one considers the numbers of missiles we would need to quickly acquire in a war.

I'm at a loss to explain what's going on here.

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(1)“Highlights of the Department of the Navy FY 2020 Budget”, Office of Budget – Mar 2019, Fig. 4-4, p. 4-8

(2)Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2019 Budget Estimates, Navy Justification Book Volume 1 of 1 Weapons Procurement, Navy, Volume 1 - xxii

(3)Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 Budget Estimates, Navy Justification Book Volume 1 of 1 Weapons Procurement, Navy, Volume 1 - xvii

LRASM Drops Out of OTH Competition

Well, the Navy’s over the horizon (OTH) anti-ship missile (ASM) selection process just gets more baffling by the day!  As you recall, the Navy is looking for an OTH ASM to arm its LCS ships and, possibly, Burkes and other ships.  The OTH ASM is intended both to give the toothless LCS a bit of bite and to make the LCS and every other ship in the Navy components in the much-hyped distributed lethality concept that the Navy seems committed to.  You’ll further recall that distributed lethality is one of the outgrowths of the Third Offset Strategy which is predicated on networks and UAVs.  The Third Offset and Distributed Lethality envision a vast regional (world wide?!) network of all-seeing sensors completely interconnected with every platform and weapon.  Every ship in the Navy thus becomes an offensive threat – or so the fairy tale goes.  The key to all of this is, of course, networking.  Remember that - we’ll come back to it in a moment.

You’ll also recall that Boeing just recently dropped out of the OTH competition, stating that its missile, the Harpoon, was overqualified (see, "Harpoon Drops Out of OTH Competition").

Now, in a fairly surprising bit of news, Lockheed has announced that it, too, is dropping the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) out of the competition.

“After long and careful consideration, Lockheed Martin has decided to withdraw from the U.S. Navy Over-the-Horizon Weapon System (OTH-WS) competition. As the current OTH-WS request for proposal process refined over time, it became clear that our offering would not be fully valued,” read a statement from the company provided to USNI News.” (1)

“Lockheed Martin, frustrated by changing requirements the company feels are skewed to a particular competitor [Kongsberg’s NSM], is dropping out of the U.S. Navy’s over-the-horizon missile program … “ (2)

Their offering would not be fully valued????  What does that mean?  Apparently, it means that certain features of the missile would not be considered as benefits in the eyes of the Navy selectors.

“Both companies expressed concern that the Navy was giving little consideration to the networked capability of the weapons, USNI News understands.” (1)

“…Boeing and Lockheed felt that key attributes of their systems, particularly networking capabilities and in-flight targeting updates, were being discounted, robbing Lockheed’s Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, or LRASM, and Boeing’s extended-range Harpoon Block II Plus of key competitive advantages.

“There was no value for being able to go after radiating or emitting targets,” an industry source said, discounting an LRASM capability that can detect emitting and moving targets.  “Through responses it became clear there would be no credit for attacking emitting targets, and no requirement to be on a network.” 

The absence of a networking requirement was “surprising,” the industry source said, “given the needs of the distributed lethality concept,” which envisions netting together weapons, sensors and command facilities on a variety of platforms.   

Additionally, the industry source said, there was “no plan to do a cost-per-kill analysis. They made that clear. So no extra credit for improved survivability.” (2)

So, if you believe Lockheed and Boeing, the OTH ASM selection competition is a sham and the Navy has a pre-determined winner, the Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile (NSM) already selected.  Now, do I believe Lockheed and Boeing?  Do they have any credibility?  Emphatically, no!  However, they have both dropped out of a potentially lucrative competition so that means that there is something seriously wrong.  With that in mind, yes, I am inclined to believe that the Navy has already, unofficially selected the NSM for the OTH ASM.

The only alternative explanation is that the Navy is conducting a fair and open competition but that the real requirements are for a vastly dumbed down missile with no networking capability and that just doesn’t seem believable.  The entire foundation of the Third Offset Strategy and the Navy’s distributed lethality concept is networking – the very feature that they don’t want in the OTH ASM?  Does that seem believable?

The Navy, and the military in general, loves to trumpet tests wherein a Boy Scout in Montana controls a Standard missile fired by a cruiser in the Pacific until the missile is re-targeted, mid flight, by a Marine private marching out of his boot camp graduation ceremony while he relays the new targeting data via a handheld quadcopter.  Given the Navy’s love of this kind of nonsensical networking capability, the dependence of distributed lethality on networking, the Navy’s pursuit of NIFC-CA (Naval Integrated Fire Control – Counter Air) and CEC (Cooperative Engagement Capability), again I ask, does not requiring networking in the OTH ASM sound believable?

Now, understand, I have no sympathy for Lockheed or Boeing and I have no problem with the Navy tailoring their industry requests (RFP) to give them exactly the product they want.  Their requests should be specific and tailored.  Why pay for capabilities you don’t want or need? 

However, if the stories and claims are to be believed, what the Navy appears to want doesn’t match their desired warfighting concepts, as questionable as those may be in my mind.  This is inconsistent.  I’m missing something here.

What is it about the NSM that makes the Navy want it so bad?  You’ll recall that we recently looked at the NSM (see, "Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile") and concluded that it was a nice weapon with some advantages and disadvantages.  Curiously, we also noted that it was claimed to be capable of in-flight re-targeting which suggests at least a degree of networking which is at odds with Lockheed and Boeing’s claims.  Be that as it may, nothing about the NSM jumped out as a world-beater capability that would make it the automatic choice of the Navy for an OTH ASM.  The NSM’s completely passive nature was an unusual feature but that did not strike me as an overwhelming advantage.

Kongsberg NSM - Where's the Magic?

I can’t answer my own question.  I don’t know what makes the NSM so desirable to the Navy that they would write RFPs that “force” the Harpoon and LRASM out of the competition. 

Further, forcing the LRASM out is doubly puzzling because the LRASM is being developed as the air-launched ASM of the Navy and most observers, myself included, assumed the ship-launched version would quickly follow and that the LRASM would become the standard Navy OTH ASM.  Now, it’s possible that the NSM could become the LCS OTH missile and the LRASM could be selected, separately, for Burkes but I would have thought the Navy would have been driven to standardize on a single OTH ASM.

Finally, forcing Lockheed and Boeing out leaves only a single competitor.  Is that single competitor, knowing that the Navy has no other option, likely to offer their cheapest bid?  Of course not!  The single source competitor is going to greatly increase their bid to the highest point that they think they can get without triggering a reopening of the competition.  Instead of getting everyone's cheapest bids the Navy will get a single source's highest bid!  That's one of the reasons why monopolies are bad.  I would have thought the Navy would leave the requirements loose enough to at least have a few companies offer a bid so that all the bids are cheaper.  In the end, the Navy can always select the one they want, anyway, so there's no harm in having multiple bidders even if the Navy already knows which one they want. There's no harm, and a lot of good, in having multiple bidders.  The Navy seems to have no business sense about how to play competitors against each other.

In summary, I have no idea what’s going on here. 

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(1)USNI News website, “Lockheed Martin Drops LRASM Out of Littoral Combat Ship/Frigate Missile Competition”, Sam LaGrone, 24-May-2017,

https://news.usni.org/2017/05/24/lockheed-martin-drops-lrasm-frigate-missile-competition

(2)Defense News website, “Lockheed Martin Drops Out of US Navy Missile Competition”, Christopher Cavas, 24-May-2017,

http://www.defensenews.com/articles/lockheed-drops-out-of-us-navy-missile-competition

Harpoon Drops Out of OTH Competition

Defense New website reports that Boeing is pulling its Harpoon missile out of the running for the Navy’s over-the-horizon (OTH) weapon system intended for the LCS and, possibly, other Navy ships (1).  The bizarre aspect of this is that Boeing’s stated reason for doing so is that the Navy has dumbed down the requirements to the point that Boeing believes the Harpoon is overqualified and that the opportunity is, therefore, not worth pursuing.

Digest that, for a moment.

Here are the relevant quotes.

“Troy Rutherford, director of cruise missile systems at Boeing Defense, said the company had long planned to adapt the Block II Plus Extended Range Harpoon being developed for Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) to support the needs of Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA).

“We felt we were well-positioned when the RFP dropped” in February, Rutherford said, but subsequent Navy changes -- in Boeing’s opinion – devalued a lot of what the company felt it could offer.”

“But, he said, “in every iteration of the RFP amendments we see a decrease in the top-level requirements document and changes in the top-level requirements document. We’ve taken a hard look at that and said that at this point it doesn’t make sense for the Boeing Company to bid on this.” 

We just recently reviewed the Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile (NSM) (see, "Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile") and we’ve previously looked at the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) (see, for example, "LRASM Update").  Both of those appear to have many more features and capabilities than the Harpoon and yet they're not dropping out of the competition.

Harpoon Test Launch From LCS

Something is not right about this.  Is Boeing pulling out because they’ve realized or been told that their Harpoon is technologically non-competitive and they just want to put a positive spin on it – a spin intended to support and reassure less demanding foreign sales?  Is Boeing nervous about having a unilateral – and non-profitable – cost imposed on them by the government, as was done to Lockheed?  Has Boeing concluded that their ship version of the Harpoon would be too expensive to compete?  Something else?

By all accounts, the ship launched version of Harpoon essentially already exists.  If the Navy has dumbed down requirements, Boeing could simply omit the various affected bits and pieces and price the missile accordingly.  What would they have to lose by placing a bid for a dumbed down version?

Here’s a puzzling and potentially disturbing statement from the article.

“Among the differences between the NAVAIR and NAVSEA requirements, Rutherford noted, are all-weather and net-enabled capabilities for the air-launched weapon – capabilities deleted or not given in the surface ship requirements.”

This is saying that the ship launched OTH missile will not be all-weather capable?!  So, we’re only going to fight during good weather?  Nothing about that sounds right, does it? 

Also, the OTH missile won’t be network enabled?  The entire premise of the Navy’s much ballyhooed distributed lethality is that every sensor, every platform, and every weapon ARE networked.  Again, this does not sound right.

You don’t need me to tell you that something is fishy about this.  Something is not right about this story but I don’t know what.  I’ll keep an eye on this.

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(1)Defense News website, “Boeing Pulls Harpoon From US Navy Missile Competition”, Christopher Cavas, 2-May-2017,

http://www.defensenews.com/articles/boeing-pulls-harpoon-from-us-navy-missile-competition

LCS OTH RFI

No, that post title is not a random assortment of letters.  The Navy has issued a Request For Information (RFI) to industry to solicit ideas for an over-the-horizon (OTH) missile system for the LCS.  The two obvious candidates are an upgraded Harpoon and Kongsberg’s Naval Strike Missile (NSM) was “test fired” from an LCS in an absolutely worthless test in which the missile launcher was simple placed on the deck of the LCS-4, USS Coronado, last year and launched with absolutely no tie in to the ship’s weapon systems.  The same test could have been equally well performed from a dock or a parking lot in a shopping mall. 

In any event, the assumption was that the test was paving the public relations way for selection of the NSM as the OTH weapon for the LCS.  It is unclear why the Navy is taking a step that could be construed as a step back by issuing this RFI.  Presumably, something has come to light regarding the NSM that renders it less than ideal for use with the LCS.  Aside from mundane issues like cost or production capacity, the only technical issue I can imagine is an inability to smoothly integrate into the fire control system.  Supporting this thought is the RFI’s language calling for industry information regarding complete weapon systems for the OTH role.

ComNavOps will continue to keep an eye on this.