Army Landing Craft Contract Out to Bid in the Next Few Weeks

Competition to supply a new landing craft for the U.S. Army was supposed to begin last year to replace the 40-year old LCM-8, or “Mike boat,” a Vietnam War-era watercraft that the Army has used for a variety of jobs since the United States pulled out of Vietnam in 1975. A request for proposals (RFP) is expected to be issued within the next few weeks, according to a report in Defense News.

The new boat, called a Maneuver Support Vessel (Light), aka MSV(L), is intended for sustainment missions and as a maneuver option to conduct rivering operations, or to get into a denied area, where there is a degraded port or none at all.

The MSV(L) is expected to be have double the capacity of the existing Mike boats and be faster and have a longer range. The new boat would be about 100 feet long, draw less than four feet of water, have a top speed of 18 knots and have enough capacity to carry an Abrams tank, two Strykers with bar armor, or four of the new Joint Light Tactical Vehicles.

The Army’s project manager for the MSV(L) told Defense News that the service has “really realized we haven’t used watercraft in an operational maneuver construct for some time and we are starting to do that again.” The RFP is expected to call for 37 vessels at a cost of about $450 million.
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The previous schedule called for bidding in late 2015 and a contract award later this year. A prototype was planned for 2017 and testing was scheduled to follow in 2018 and 2019. How that schedule will change is not known yet.

Defense News said potential bidders include French firm Constructions Industrielles de la Mediterranee (CNIM), builders of the L-CAT landing catamaran, and a British-led team that includes BMT Defence Services, BMT Nigel Gee and U.S.-based firms Kvichak Marine Industries and Gladding-Hearn Shipbuilding.