THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 18, 1996 TAG: 9607180357
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHRISTOPHER DINSMORE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 96 lines
Winning the contract would be a coup for the Norfolk-based firm, helping to secure area jobs and strengthening its future.
Metro Machine operates shipyards in Norfolk and Chester, Pa. It employs about 900 workers, mostly in Norfolk.
Metro has long specialized in overhauls and upgrades of Navy ships, but it has never built one.
Metro Machine is leading a team of four other companies trying to win the arsenal ship contract.
Research and development of the ship, essentially a floating missile battery, is valued at $520 million.
Metro's team is one of five that last week each won $1 million basic design contracts from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and the Navy for the arsenal ship.
The ultimate winner will build up to six of the warships.
Other teams include one led by Lockheed Martin Corp. that includes Newport News Shipbuilding, which builds Navy aircraft carriers and submarines, and one led by General Dynamics Corp.'s Bath Iron Works, which builds Navy destroyers. Lockheed's team includes Ingalls Shipbuilding, which also makes destroyers for the Navy.
Hughes Aircraft Co. is leading a team with Avondale Industries Inc., a New Orleans shipyard that builds Navy amphibious warships.
Those three teams include all of the builders of Navy warships.
The last team, led by Northrop Grumman Corp., features San Diego's National Steel and Shipbuilding Co., which builds military cargo ships.
``It's significant competition that we face and we're the smallest of the competitors,'' said Richard Goldbach, Metro Machine's president.
The five teams have six months to develop initial plans detailing proposed capabilities and costs.
The Navy will choose two teams' designs for further development. After a year, a winner will be selected to build a demonstration ship and up to five more arsenal ships.
The entire package could be worth several billion dollars, including life-cycle maintenance and modernization to the ships.
Goldbach thinks innovation and the ship's overall simplicity at least evens the odds between Metro Machine and the big shipbuilders.
``That's why I decided to try to overcome the odds, the odds of competing against the existing builders of Navy ships,'' he said.
Naval shipbuilding analysts say Metro Machine has a chance, though it certainly isn't a favorite.
``They came out of the blue, but they have a chance,'' said James R. McCaul, president of IMA Associates, a Washington shipyard consulting firm.
The arsenal ship will be one of the Navy's principal platforms to project force ashore. The service wants a cheap, simple ship with 500 missile tubes operated by a crew of no more than 50.
``We view the ship as being less complex than virtually all the Navy ships that are being built today,'' Goldbach said.
Increasingly, both the capability and cost of a warship are factors of the combat and communications systems that go into it rather than the steel, said a congressional staff source familiar with Navy shipbuilding programs.
``Building the platform is relatively simple,'' said the source, who asked not to be identified. ``As long as they can build a hull of this size, they might have a shot.''
The Navy also wants the arsenal ship to have a low profile and incorporate stealth technology, making it more difficult to find and track by enemies.
That's where Metro Machine's partners come in.
Rockwell International/Collins International brings its experience in complex combat systems integration, which will be important to the arsenal ship, Goldbach said. It also adds some stealth technology to the Metro team.
Arlington-based Composite Ships has been doing research with the Defense Department on the use of advanced composite materials in ships, Goldbach said.
Metro's other partners are Trinity Marine Group, which owns several shipyards along the Gulf of Mexico coast, and Marinex International Inc., the ship design firm that developed the tanker that Metro has been trying to sell.
Metro's most difficult hurdle may be the concerns about the Navy shipbuilding industrial base. There's too much capacity to build warships in the nation already.
The Navy considers the program an opportunity to supplement the workloads of its leading shipbuilders at a time when it is not ordering many ships, the congressional source said.
Goldbach didn't want to discuss what advantages the Metro team thinks it has, but it may have a few.
For several years, the company has been trying to break into shipbuilding by marketing a tanker design that involved innovative curved hull plates. The double-hull design is supposed to be extremely strong and resistant to damage.
The Navy is looking for an innovative hull design with combat survivability for its arsenal ships, McCaul said.
Metro plans to assemble the ships in the closed Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, which would help preserve that facility. Some work would also take place at Metro's Norfolk yard and Trinity's Gulf Coast yards. ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT D. VOROS
The Virginian-Pilot
Five ship-building teams have six months to develop initial plans
detailing proposed capabilities and costs of the Navy's planned
"arsenal ship." by CNB