Could LCS lose its missile?
February 23rd, 2010 | ordnance Science and technology | Posted by Phil Ewing
The missile that the Freedom can carry in the multi-use top-deck spaces, now occupied by its 30mm guns, is in trouble, according to reports this week // Lt. Ed Early / Navy
Even though the Navy is very proud that the littoral combat ship Freedom is underway right now in the Caribbean patrolling for smugglers, there are many parts of the LCS concept still in the works. The wham-o-dyne, helicopter-mounted, super-gun that will blow up mines, for example, is still under development, as are the Non Line Of Sight “precision attack missiles,” which are planned to give LCS ships a quick, extended ability to hit surface targets.
However, as reported by our colleague Kate Brannen, all is not well in NLOS land. Not only are the missiles doing poorly in live-fire tests, but as Brannen writes in the print edition of this week’s Defense News (on newsstands now!) they are proving to be much more expensive than planned. NLOS, which the Navy is developing with the Army, will cost $466,000 per round in 2011, according to Army budget documents.
“This is what happens when you try to buy too much under [low-rate initial production] when the production line is not mature,” one congressional source told Brannen.
Elements within the Army are recommending the service’s top decision-makers back off NLOS, one of the survivors of the monster known as Future Combat Systems. What would that mean for the Navy? LCS planners are relying on NLOS as a way to defend against swarms of incoming small boats, which could mass and attack faster than the Freedom could handle with its 57mm main gun and twin 30-mm point-defense guns.
Stay tuned for more on the effect an Army NLOS scale-back would have on the Navy and LCS.
Update: We dug through the Scoop Deck Archive and came up with this classic computer-animated video of NLOS in action aboard an LCS.
Comments
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Layman guy Says:
February 23rd, 2010 at 1:55 pmQuestion to the team: Why not use CIWS “to defend against swarms of incoming small boats”? My reading shows the systems are being upgraded for ‘floaters.’ $466K per round sounds like nepotism in the procurement locker. What do the pros think?
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The Scoop Deck – See NLOS in action… kind of Says:
February 24th, 2010 at 6:16 pm[...] of the littoral combat ship’s Non Line Of Sight missile… have you ever wondered what it would look like if a U.S. warship used a surface-to-surface [...]
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Layman guy Says:
February 25th, 2010 at 8:16 amThanks, Phil. Did those three missiles in the sim total $1.3M?
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The Scoop Deck – The Army decision that could de-fang LCS Says:
April 23rd, 2010 at 1:26 pm[...] warned you about it — now it could be happening for real. Our compatriot Kate Brannen of Defense News reports [...]