Report to Congress on Navy Medium Landing Ship

July 26, 2024 12:40 PM

The following is the Navy Medium Landing Ship (LSM) (Previously Light Amphibious Warship [LAW]) Program: Background and Issues for Congress on July 23, 2024. 

From the report

Overview

As discussed above, the LSM program is to include 18 to 35 ships. LSMs would be much smaller and individually much less expensive to procure and operate than the Navy’s current amphibious ships.

Procurement Schedule

The Navy wants to procure the first LSM in FY2025, the second in FY2026, the third and fourth in FY2027, the fifth and sixth LSMs in FY2028, the seventh and eighth in FY2029, and at least 10 more in fiscal years beyond FY2029. On May 17, 2023, the Navy released a Request for Information (RFI) regarding the LSM program asking interested firms to reply to the following questions, among others:

Do you have the resources and production capacity available to be awarded four (4) [LSM] ships per fiscal year?… If so, how can your shipyard support production of 4 [LSM] hulls per year?… If not, what is the maximum number of [LSM] ships that can begin production each year?… If not, are there investment or shipyard improvements that can be done to enable increasing production capacity to 4 [LSM] hulls per year?

The Navy’s FY2025 budget submission states that the contract for the construction of the first LSM would be awarded in March 2025, and that the ship would be delivered in February 2029.

Procurement Cost

Under the Navy’s FY2025 budget submission, the first LSM would be procured in FY2025 at a cost of $268.1 million, the second LSM would be procured in FY2026 at a cost of $200.0 million, the third and fourth LSMs would be procured in FY2027 at a combined cost of $349.5 million (i.e., an average cost of about $174.7 million each), the fifth and sixth LSMs would be procured in FY2028 at a combined cost of $305.1 million (i.e., an average of about $152.5 million each), and the seventh and eighth LSMs would be procured in FY2029 at a combined cost of $311.5 million (i.e., an average of about $155.7 million each). The first LSM would cost more than subsequent ships in the program because the procurement cost of the first LSM would include much or all of the detailed design/nonrecurring engineering (DD/NRE) costs for the class. (It is a traditional Navy budgeting practice to include much of all of the DD/NRE costs for a class of ship in the procurement cost of the lead ship in the class.) By way of comparison, the Navy’s most recently procured LHA-type amphibious ship has an estimated unit procurement cost in the Navy’s FY2025 budget submission of about $3.8 billion, and LPD-17 Flight II amphibious ships have unit procurement costs of about $2.0 billion.

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