The USN has
cancelled construction of Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) 3, which was being built by Lockheed Martin. The fate of LCS 1 remains in the balance.
LM are one of those companies who have expanded into nearly every market as a "Prime Systems Integrator". In the case of shipbuilding, even though they have no background in ship building, and own no shipyards.
As a result of this fiasco, Merrill Lynch analyst Ron Epstein uttered these sage words, which can be taken both as a statement of the bleeding obvious - and as sound advice to those awarding contracts blindly to companies such as BAe, Boeing etc because of their size...
"We believe the termination points to a potential weakness in the system integrator model and suggests that domain expertise is of vital importance,”
In the meantime construction of the
Northrop Grumman DDG-1000 class destroyer - at $3 billion each, continues, with
everyone hoping they don't tend to capsize in a following sea....
