Team Ships

4/27/2011 - WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Navy has awarded General Dynamics National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO) a $744,129,956 fixed-price incentive fee type contract for the detail design and construction of two Mobile Landing Platform ships, MLP 1 and MLP 2.

MLP 1 will be the first-of-class ship, delivering a flexible platform to support the Maritime Prepositioning Ship Squadrons.

General Dynamics-NASSCO was previously awarded a $115 million contract for long-lead time material and advanced design efforts for the first MLP in August 2010. The Navy worked very closely with NASSCO to identify cost savings early in MLP design work while pursuing a concurrent design and production engineering approach. These efforts ensured a high degree of design and production-planning maturity prior to the start of construction to minimize cost and schedule risk and resulted in a in a very stable ship design that is ready to start production.

“This contract award culminates a substantial effort to drive down cost in our shipbuilding programs while delivering necessary capabilities,” said program manager Captain George Sutton. “As Assistant Secretary of the Navy [for Research, Development and Acquisition] Sean Stackley recently testified, actions by NASSCO, Congress and the Navy to accelerate the MLP program significantly improved affordability.”

MLP will provide the core capabilities to transfer vehicles and equipment at-sea and interface with surface connectors to deliver the vehicles and equipment ashore. The MLP will leverage float-on/ float-off technology and a reconfigurable mission deck to maximize capability.

The platform in its basic form possess add-on modules that support a vehicle staging area, sideport ramp, large mooring fenders and up to three Landing Craft Air Cushioned vessel (LCAC) lanes to support its two core requirements. Ship utility services support to the mission deck will enable the flexibility to incorporate potential future platform upgrades which could include additional capabilities such as berthing, medical, command and control, mission planning, vehicle transfer system, a connected replenishment, a container handling crane and an aviation operating spot.

The first ship is expected to deliver in fiscal year 2013 and be operational in fiscal year 2015.