Small boats mean big business for shipbuilders.

• Author: Parsons, Dan

* Big ships--aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines--get all the glory, but it is the Navy's smallest vessels that could prove pivotal in future conflicts.

Navy leaders have placed emphasis on launching smaller, inexpensive systems with multiple capabilities from larger ships. The service's enthusiastic support for the Littoral Combat Ship and the introduction of the Mobile Landing Platform underscore the reliance on the "secondary systems" they carry. Both vessels are designed as "platforms for platforms," from which unmanned systems and smaller vessels can be staged and launched, as former Undersecretary of the Navy Robert 0. Work has repeatedly stated.

While small-boat manufacturers are not immune to downturns in military spending, they are better insulated from it. Because they build non-military specific vessels--and ones that do not necessarily require complicated construction on the level of a large surface vessel--they can diversify more quickly. They also have access to foreign and commercial markets that manufacturers of warships are often barred from tapping.

"I wouldn't say that we're totally insulated from the budget crisis," Dean Jones, national sales manager for Metal Shark Aluminum Boats, told National Defense. "In any market, boats are inherently expensive because of what they have to do and the difficulty of building them to exact specifications. But we're cautiously optimistic that the small-boat Navy, at least, will not be as hard hit. We, and companies like us, offer a product that is unique in its purpose and capabilities, but that doesn't necessarily shelter us."

Metal Shark provides two of the Navy's small patrol craft. The 27-foot Defiant is used as a force-protection vessel in foreign and domestic waters. Jones likened the patrol craft's job to preventing attacks like the one in 2000 that ripped a hole in the USS Cole in Yemen and killed 17 sailors. There are about 20 of the small boats in service.

"Two guys in a johnboat with a bomb managed to nearly destroy the Cole," Jones said. "That is exactly what these boats are designed to do: protect the large, high-value ships when they are in port and unable to mount a defense of their own."

Like tactical trucks, small boats are also riding a wave of policy change that has swept special operations to the forefront of U.S. military strategy.

The Navy needs smaller, more affordable, "better" platforms, Work said at the National Defense Industrial Association's 2012...