Northrop Grumman to Integrate Mission Package on LCS

The U.S. Navy has awarded Northrop Grumman a cost plus award fee/award term contract with a potential dollar value of $159 million to integrate mission packages and evaluate future mission systems technologies for the Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). The Fiscal Year 2006 portion of the contract award is approximately $4.5 million. As the Mission Package Integrator (LCS MPI), Northrop Grumman's Integrated Systems sector's Bethpage, New York organization will lead this effort. The LCS will be a networked, stealthy, surface combatant with capabilities optimized for responsiveness to threats in coastal regions. It will be the first ship designed with the Navy’s FORCEnet warfighting architecture as a requirement. Initially, the Littoral Combat Ship will have three missions -– mine warfare, antisubmarine warfare, and antisurface warfare, and a number of secondary missions. Each of the mission packages involves the integration of manned and unmanned systems operating across air, surface and subsurface domains. The mission package design will require that each capability set be modular in order to re-configure the Littoral Combat Ships relevant to the spectrum of conflict. Under this new contract, Northrop Grumman will apply its decades of naval battle management and command-and-control experience and understanding of open architecture systems to link the various mission modules on the ship with each other and with the ship's combat system. System design and development work will be performed in Bethpage and Washington D.C., as well as at the LCS sites. At the program's peak, approximately 90 people will be working with the LCS team on the program in various sites throughout the country.