Navy awards Textron $230 million for two more Ship-to-Shore Connectors

The people who will live with this order are the crews and maintainers. A Ship-to-Shore Connector crew moves personnel and material off amphibious ships ^[4], often to remote shorelines where traditional port facilities may be unavailable ^[7].

Textron's pitch is written for those people. The company says that compared with legacy platforms, the design increases payload and speed and cuts the number of operators and the logistics load, including a longer stretch between overhauls ^[12]. "The SSCs are a critical enabler for our nation's amphibious operations, providing unmatched connector capability wherever mission demands arise," said Larry D. Randle Jr., senior vice president of Marine Systems ^[3].

Further into Interesting Engineering's report, the wording gets more careful. The design improvements are "intended to" raise payload and speed while "reducing operator and logistical requirements" ^[13]. The longer overhaul gap is described as "potentially reducing maintenance demands and improving fleet availability" ^[14].

The purchase itself is smaller and easier to price. The modification adds two craft to an ongoing procurement program ^[8]. Split evenly, $230 million comes to about $115 million a craft ^[9]. At the time of the report, 31 craft had been delivered or were in testing or production ^[10]. The report does not include a crew size, an overhaul interval, a legacy baseline, a split of the $230 million between hulls and support, or how far the order extends the yard's schedule.

Crews log hours, staff each run and find out how long a craft really goes between overhauls. Craft have already been delivered to the Navy ^[5], so we'd expect real crew and overhaul figures to exist in service records. In our view they belong in the next contract announcement.

Anyone buying equipment sold on lower running costs can sort the vendor's claims on two axes. The first is whether a claim is a number with a unit or an adjective. The second is whether it was measured on fielded units or stated as design intent. The SSC's payload figure is a number from the spec sheet ^[6]. Fewer operators and longer overhaul gaps are adjectives, stated as intent ^[13][14]. We think only measured numbers belong in an ownership-cost case. The adjectives remain the vendor's hypothesis until service records confirm or contradict them.