Pentagon plan good news for Marinette shipbuilding
The news that Marinette has been bracing for came late Thursday afternoon as outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced that the Navy will upgrade, rather than totally abandon, its Littoral Combat Ship program.
The result will be a new, larger, more versatile ship but still based on littoral ship upgrades, rather than being a whole new design. That, according to legislative representatives, makes it good news for Wisconsin shipbuilding.
"This is great news for Wisconsin's shipbuilding industry because there will be no production break and this action will prevent disruption to the Marinette Marine-Lockheed Martin workforce," said U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison. "I fought hard to sustain the original production plan for a 52 ship class, and I applaud Secretary Hagel's announcement to do just that."
Rep. Reid Ribble, R-Sherwood, said Hagel's announcement is good on both the short term and long term for Marinette Marine, one of two facilities in the country producing the Littoral Combat Ships for the U.S. Navy.
Marinette Marine, which employs about 2,000 people, has six littoral ships under production now and will continue to produce them through 2019 even as the new Small Surface Combatant (SSC) ship is introduced.
"Clearly, the Secretary of the Navy would like to see the new combatant built on the LCS platform, which puts Marinette Marine in kind of a lead competitive spot to get the contract for these new, larger ships," Ribble said. "They'll have the inside track. They will still have to be competitive … but surely because they're involved in production of the LCSs, they should be in a good position to be very competitive" when it comes time to seek contracts for the new SSC, Ribble said.
Hagel said he directed the Navy to buy 52 Littoral and SSC ships, with the final number and mix dependent on future fleet requirements, final costs and overall Navy resources. The new ship will be based on upgraded variants of the littoral combat ship, under Hagel's directive.
He wants the production of the SSC ships to begin no later than fiscal 2019, and with no gap between the production of the last LCS and first SSC ship. He called for the Navy to come up with an acquisition strategy on the new design by May and to continue to identify ways of enhancing the new ship's features. Also by May, the Navy must provide a detailed assessment of the cost of back-fitting some of the new ship features onto LCS's already under contract.
The decision followed consultations with the Department of Defense's senior leadership and careful review of Navy recommendations, which included 192 design concepts.
In late November, a Marinette Marine-produced vessel, the USS Fort Worth, left port in California for a 16-month deployment in the Far East. The USS Freedom, also built at Marinette, completed a similar deployment in 2013.
