Jury still out on future of littoral combat ship.

• Author: Jean, Grave V.
• Position: Shipbuilding

* The Navy's littoral combat ship is under fire by lawmakers who are threatening to pull the plug at a time when the Obama administration is prepared to commit long-term funding to the program.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently announced that the Pentagon will fund three LCSs in fiscal 2010. He characterized the ship as a "key capability for presence, stability, and counterinsurgency operations in coastal regions ... Our goal is to eventually acquire 55."

Once the darling of the Navy's shipbuilding plan, the LCS has had a rough ride. It costs far more than what the Navy originally estimated and the first two ships of the class are taking much longer to design and build than had been predicted.

It is too early to forecast whether LCS will survive the storm, analysts say. The Navy and the shipyards now need more time to work through technical and management issues, says Robert Work, vice president of strategic studies and a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Designed to ply near-shore waters, the littoral combat ship is the Navy's newest class of vessels. The contract was awarded to two teams, one led by Lockheed Martin Corp. and the other led by General Dynamics Corp. The Lockheed team is building a 374-foot steel monohull ship, while the General Dynamics team is constructing a 417-foot aluminum trimaran version.

It was originally estimated to cost $220 million per hull, but the price tag more than doubled during construction on both lead ships. The Navy in 2007 canceled its second ship contracts. Since then, lawmakers have viewed the program with a jaundiced eye and have placed a price cap of $460 million per ship on the program, beginning in the 2010 budget.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost per hull is $550 million. Each ship will have specialized "mission modules" that will cost approximately $60 million per unit.

Work believes that the cost of the ship will drop below $500 million.

Lockheed last year delivered its first-of-class ship, USS Freedom, (LCS-1) to the Navy. Delivery of General Dynamics' first-of-class, USS Independence (LCS-2), is expected in September.

As long as there is not an additional cost overrun oil LCS-2, then the program ought to be fine, Work says. But any unexpected cost escalation on either ship could potentially kill the program because Congress is extremely upset, and rightly so, he cautions.

"To call this program troubled would be an...