POS Rinky Dink, over priced, no legs, Tinker Toy Boats. We already have a "Littoral Combat Ship" with more capability. Its called a FFG-7.

WASHINGTON (NNS) -- The Navy has awarded Lockheed Martin Corp. and Austal USA each a fixed-price incentive contract for the design and construction of a 10 ship block-buy, for a total of 20 littoral combat ships from fiscal 2010 through fiscal 2015.

The amount awarded to Lockheed Martin Corp. for fiscal 2010 littoral combat ships is $436,852,639. The amount awarded to Austal USA for the fiscal 2010 littoral combat ships is $432,069,883.

Both contracts also include line items for nine additional ships, subject to Congressional appropriation of each year's Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Program requirements. When all 10 ships of each block buy are awarded, the value of the ship construction portion of the two contracts would be $3,620,625,192 for Lockheed Martin Corp., and $3,518,156,851 for Austal USA. The average cost of both variants including government-furnished equipment and margin for potential cost growth across the five year period is $440 million per ship. The pricing for these ships falls well below the escalated average Congressional cost cap of $538 million.

"The awards represent a unique and valuable opportunity to lock in the benefits of competition and provide needed ships to our fleet in a timely and extraordinarily cost effective manner," said Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus.

http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=57917

Came from Ray Mabus, so don't trust it. He's a typical liberal.

(01-03-2011 08:59 PM)Rebel Wrote:  Came from Ray Mabus, so don't trust it. He's a typical liberal.

The "scam" is that each ship is basically an 'open hull' with various interchangeable "mission modules" (one for surface warfare, one for AAW, one for ASW and one for MCM) that can be switched in and out. The only mission module deployed so far is surface warfare, and the rest are still in testing and far from being operational. The cost over runs are significant.

In the meantime you have some perfectly good Perry class FFG's sitting in storage on which you could mount some VLS mounted Evolved Sea Sparrows. Its not as long range as the old Standards, but its some SAM

This is an absurd waste of money.

(01-03-2011 09:23 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  This is an absurd waste of money.

This.

All of this is money going there when we're still using cutters from the early 60's that are underway the longest?