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In order to estimate
the cost of procuring the lead ship in the Sea TENTACLE class, our team began
with a basic construction cost of $600 million dollars. This figure is what the Congressional
Budget Office has determined that it would cost to procure a FFG-7 in today’s
dollars and it is the same figure that it used to start its cost estimation
for the FFG(X). Next, we added $200
million for detailed design costs associated with a platform of this
complexity. To this, $250 million is
added in order to upgrade existing shipbuilding facilities to support
catamaran construction of this size.
This infrastructure upgrade cost is included in estimating the
procurement cost for the first two ships in the class but can be eliminated
in follow-on ships. Finally, using the
same cost per unit that was used by the CBO for VLS cell procurement and
added displacement, $1 million per VLS cell and $400 million for the 3,000
tons more displacement over the FFG-7 are added to the estimate. This brings the total for the first copy of
the Sea TENTACLE to around $1.5 billion with the second at $1.3 billion and
an average over 10 ships of $900 million per ship.
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