The US Navy has selected Lockheed Martin’s COMBATSS-21 as the combat management system for the Navy’s frigate ship program.
COMBATSS-21 is the combat management system in operation on the Freedom variant Littoral Combat Ship (LCS).
The five-year contract, which is worth up to US$79.5 million, covers fiscal years 2016-2021.
COMBATSS-21 (COMponent-BAsed Total-Ship System—21st Century) is built from the Aegis Common Source Library (CSL), and shares a pedigree with the Aegis Baseline 9 software developed for the Aegis cruiser and destroyer fleet, as well as international ships, the Aegis Ashore system, LCS and the Coast Guard National Security Cutters.
In many respects the system is ‘Aegis light’, scaled down for a smaller vessel.
“Using the CSL enhances life-cycle affordability by reducing costs for integration, test and certification—and delivers an open combat system architecture in line with the Navy’s objective architecture, driving affordability and increasing interoperability across the entire fleet,” Rich Calabrese, director of Mission Systems at Lockheed Martin said.
The CSL allows surface combatants to rapidly and affordably integrate new capabilities across the fleet.
This means that ships using a CSL-derived combat system can incorporate new sensors, weapons and capability upgrades to keep pace with evolving threats.
The benefit of the surface combatant CSL is that these updates become available for rollout across other ship classes.
“We can build capability, get it into the CSL and then deploy it in a ship class when the Navy determines the need,” Calabrese said.
In this way, capability developed on a forward fit program may be applied to ships already in service.
Aegis and Aegis-derived systems are in service in US Navy cruisers, destroyers, Littoral Combat Ships, Coast Guard National Security Cutters and Aegis Ashore sites.
The navies of Japan, Spain, Norway, the Republic of Korea, and Australia have also chosen Aegis aboard a number of their ships.