LRASM Drops Out of OTH Competition

Well, the Navy’s over the horizon (OTH) anti-ship missile (ASM) selection process just gets more baffling by the day!  As you recall, the Navy is looking for an OTH ASM to arm its LCS ships and, possibly, Burkes and other ships.  The OTH ASM is intended both to give the toothless LCS a bit of bite and to make the LCS and every other ship in the Navy components in the much-hyped distributed lethality concept that the Navy seems committed to.  You’ll further recall that distributed lethality is one of the outgrowths of the Third Offset Strategy which is predicated on networks and UAVs.  The Third Offset and Distributed Lethality envision a vast regional (world wide?!) network of all-seeing sensors completely interconnected with every platform and weapon.  Every ship in the Navy thus becomes an offensive threat – or so the fairy tale goes.  The key to all of this is, of course, networking.  Remember that - we’ll come back to it in a moment.

You’ll also recall that Boeing just recently dropped out of the OTH competition, stating that its missile, the Harpoon, was overqualified (see, "Harpoon Drops Out of OTH Competition").

Now, in a fairly surprising bit of news, Lockheed has announced that it, too, is dropping the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) out of the competition.

“After long and careful consideration, Lockheed Martin has decided to withdraw from the U.S. Navy Over-the-Horizon Weapon System (OTH-WS) competition. As the current OTH-WS request for proposal process refined over time, it became clear that our offering would not be fully valued,” read a statement from the company provided to USNI News.” (1)

“Lockheed Martin, frustrated by changing requirements the company feels are skewed to a particular competitor [Kongsberg’s NSM], is dropping out of the U.S. Navy’s over-the-horizon missile program … “ (2)

Their offering would not be fully valued????  What does that mean?  Apparently, it means that certain features of the missile would not be considered as benefits in the eyes of the Navy selectors.

“Both companies expressed concern that the Navy was giving little consideration to the networked capability of the weapons, USNI News understands.” (1)

“…Boeing and Lockheed felt that key attributes of their systems, particularly networking capabilities and in-flight targeting updates, were being discounted, robbing Lockheed’s Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, or LRASM, and Boeing’s extended-range Harpoon Block II Plus of key competitive advantages.

“There was no value for being able to go after radiating or emitting targets,” an industry source said, discounting an LRASM capability that can detect emitting and moving targets.  “Through responses it became clear there would be no credit for attacking emitting targets, and no requirement to be on a network.” 

The absence of a networking requirement was “surprising,” the industry source said, “given the needs of the distributed lethality concept,” which envisions netting together weapons, sensors and command facilities on a variety of platforms.   

Additionally, the industry source said, there was “no plan to do a cost-per-kill analysis. They made that clear. So no extra credit for improved survivability.” (2)

So, if you believe Lockheed and Boeing, the OTH ASM selection competition is a sham and the Navy has a pre-determined winner, the Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile (NSM) already selected.  Now, do I believe Lockheed and Boeing?  Do they have any credibility?  Emphatically, no!  However, they have both dropped out of a potentially lucrative competition so that means that there is something seriously wrong.  With that in mind, yes, I am inclined to believe that the Navy has already, unofficially selected the NSM for the OTH ASM.

The only alternative explanation is that the Navy is conducting a fair and open competition but that the real requirements are for a vastly dumbed down missile with no networking capability and that just doesn’t seem believable.  The entire foundation of the Third Offset Strategy and the Navy’s distributed lethality concept is networking – the very feature that they don’t want in the OTH ASM?  Does that seem believable?

The Navy, and the military in general, loves to trumpet tests wherein a Boy Scout in Montana controls a Standard missile fired by a cruiser in the Pacific until the missile is re-targeted, mid flight, by a Marine private marching out of his boot camp graduation ceremony while he relays the new targeting data via a handheld quadcopter.  Given the Navy’s love of this kind of nonsensical networking capability, the dependence of distributed lethality on networking, the Navy’s pursuit of NIFC-CA (Naval Integrated Fire Control – Counter Air) and CEC (Cooperative Engagement Capability), again I ask, does not requiring networking in the OTH ASM sound believable?

Now, understand, I have no sympathy for Lockheed or Boeing and I have no problem with the Navy tailoring their industry requests (RFP) to give them exactly the product they want.  Their requests should be specific and tailored.  Why pay for capabilities you don’t want or need? 

However, if the stories and claims are to be believed, what the Navy appears to want doesn’t match their desired warfighting concepts, as questionable as those may be in my mind.  This is inconsistent.  I’m missing something here.

What is it about the NSM that makes the Navy want it so bad?  You’ll recall that we recently looked at the NSM (see, "Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile") and concluded that it was a nice weapon with some advantages and disadvantages.  Curiously, we also noted that it was claimed to be capable of in-flight re-targeting which suggests at least a degree of networking which is at odds with Lockheed and Boeing’s claims.  Be that as it may, nothing about the NSM jumped out as a world-beater capability that would make it the automatic choice of the Navy for an OTH ASM.  The NSM’s completely passive nature was an unusual feature but that did not strike me as an overwhelming advantage.

Kongsberg NSM - Where's the Magic?

I can’t answer my own question.  I don’t know what makes the NSM so desirable to the Navy that they would write RFPs that “force” the Harpoon and LRASM out of the competition. 

Further, forcing the LRASM out is doubly puzzling because the LRASM is being developed as the air-launched ASM of the Navy and most observers, myself included, assumed the ship-launched version would quickly follow and that the LRASM would become the standard Navy OTH ASM.  Now, it’s possible that the NSM could become the LCS OTH missile and the LRASM could be selected, separately, for Burkes but I would have thought the Navy would have been driven to standardize on a single OTH ASM.

Finally, forcing Lockheed and Boeing out leaves only a single competitor.  Is that single competitor, knowing that the Navy has no other option, likely to offer their cheapest bid?  Of course not!  The single source competitor is going to greatly increase their bid to the highest point that they think they can get without triggering a reopening of the competition.  Instead of getting everyone's cheapest bids the Navy will get a single source's highest bid!  That's one of the reasons why monopolies are bad.  I would have thought the Navy would leave the requirements loose enough to at least have a few companies offer a bid so that all the bids are cheaper.  In the end, the Navy can always select the one they want, anyway, so there's no harm in having multiple bidders even if the Navy already knows which one they want. There's no harm, and a lot of good, in having multiple bidders.  The Navy seems to have no business sense about how to play competitors against each other.

In summary, I have no idea what’s going on here. 

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(1)USNI News website, “Lockheed Martin Drops LRASM Out of Littoral Combat Ship/Frigate Missile Competition”, Sam LaGrone, 24-May-2017,

https://news.usni.org/2017/05/24/lockheed-martin-drops-lrasm-frigate-missile-competition

(2)Defense News website, “Lockheed Martin Drops Out of US Navy Missile Competition”, Christopher Cavas, 24-May-2017,

http://www.defensenews.com/articles/lockheed-drops-out-of-us-navy-missile-competition

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