Navy to Begin Large Surface Combatant Buys in 2025; Delayed From Original 2023 Start - USNI News

The Navy now plans to buy its first Large Surface Combatant ship in Fiscal Year 2025, pushed back two years from a planned 2023 start date.

Though the new warship is not meant to directly replace either the Ticonderoga-class cruisers or the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, the original timing would have allowed the Navy to stop its Arleigh Burke DDG production at the end of the current multiyear contract in 2022 and then move into the new Large Surface Combatant hull in 2023.

However, this week’s FY 2020 budget request – which projects out shipbuilding programs through FY 2024 – makes no mention of Large Surface Combatant acquisition and continues the DDG production line throughout the entire five-year period instead of stopping at the end of the current contract.

Ron O’Rourke, the Congressional Research Service’s naval affairs specialist, told USNI News that “my understanding from the Navy is that the lead ship of that (Large Surface Combatant) class is currently scheduled for FY25, which is why it doesn’t show in the FYDP; that the Navy is looking into whether that date can be accelerated; and that if it can, a future budget submission might show the ship in an earlier fiscal year. But for the time being—for the FY20 budget submission—it is an FY25 ship.”

Two other sources familiar with the Large Surface Combatant effort confirmed to USNI News that the Navy had pushed the program back from 2023 to 2025.