Amazing, the Alabama Senators with their CBO report request cinched the decision away from LCS-2 in favor of LCS-1...
From: http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4603087&c=AME&s=SEA
"Report: Fuel Factors Less Than Price For LCS"
By CHRISTOPHER P. CAVAS Defense News
Published: Apr. 28, 2010
Fuel costs for the U.S. Navy's new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) are calculated by a new Congressional report to be about 11 percent of total life-cycle costs - far less than the 64 percent figure represented by the price to buy the ship.
The relative insignificance of the fuel figure to the purchase price is at odds with claims by Alabama's Senate delegation that the Navy should give more weight to fuel efficiency in its pending choice of which LCS to buy. Navy officials have repeatedly said that the selection, expected sometime this summer, will be based largely on purchase price rather than lifecycle costs.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., asked the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to study the effect of fuel costs and other factors on lifecycle costs. Sessions is supporting the aluminum-hulled trimaran LCS design built by Austal USA in Mobile, Ala. That ship is competing with a Lockheed Martin LCS built in Wisconsin.
Sessions and his Senate colleague, Richard Shelby, R-Ala., have repeatedly said the Austal USA ship is more fuel-efficient than the Lockheed ship, particularly at higher speeds...
The study, sent to Sessions on April 28...
CBO concluded that, as a percentage of life-cycle costs, fuel costs made up 8 percent of the low-fuel ship, 11 percent for the moderate-fuel ship, and 18 percent of the high-fuel ship.
Comparatively, procurement cost for the low-fuel ship made up 66 percent of the life-cycle cost, 64 percent for the moderate-fuel ship and 58 percent of the high-fuel ship...
>>>Rest of Article>>>
Austal can forget about LCS. They're lucky to get any JHSV's. Tough bloody luck, blokes.
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1 comment:
A little something I just posted elsewhere:
Commenting on "Littoral combat ships: Analysts unable to compare fuel costs" at al.com on May 02, 2010
You missed the point of that CBO report. Basically what it determined is that the fuel expense of LCS-1, even at moderately higher speeds, was not high enough even for the ship's lifetime to offset the higher construction cost of LCS-2 (+$100 million more than LCS-1) to justify choosing LCS-2 over LCS-1 regardless of what LCS-2's average fuel expenses will be. That CBO report was significant in that it was the Alabama Senators who asked for it, and it showed that LCS-1's lifetime costs would likely be less than LCS-2's even considering fuel expense. For anybody who has been objectively watching this, it should be clear the competition is over. LCS-1 wins. Only poor losers used to having their way with governments would think they'd accomplish anything by appealing to the GAO. That's a waste of time. The GAO won't change what the contractor spent too much money building.
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