The Navy today awarded Ingalls Shipbuilding and General Dynamics Bath Iron Works one Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer each under existing multiyear procurement contracts.
The multiyear contracts span Fiscal Years 2013 to 2017, and these ships are the seventh and eighth of 10 planned destroyers covered by the contracts.
“By successfully leveraging competition throughout the DDG-51 shipbuilding program, the Navy continues to generate cost savings while delivering vital warfighting capability,” DDG-51 program manager Capt. Mark Vandroff said in a Navy statement. The multiyear procurement strategy stabilizes the industrial base and leads to lower cost per ship.
Since 1996 the Navy has used a competitive allocation strategy called Profit Related to Offers to use fixed price incentive firm target contracts to ensure reasonable prices while maintaining the industrial base, according to the Navy statement. The program has saved more than $2.2 billion through this pair of multiyear procurement contracts.
These two ships will continue the Flight IIA configuration that has been in the fleet since 2000, bringing additional capabilities through upgrades to the ships’ weapons and sensor suites. The program intends to introduce the Flight III design, which features the new SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar, in a third Fiscal Year 2016 ship that Congress inserted into the program last year.
“The continued support of Congress for the DDG-51 program, including the appropriation of funding for an additional DDG-51 class ship in Fiscal Year 2016, enables the Navy to continue advancing the superior technologies and warfighting capabilities of the Navy’s fleet,” Vandroff said.
