The $185 million first-of-class ship is coming in on budget, officials said. That the program appears to be running more smoothly than other shipbuilding efforts can be attributed in part to the vessel’s commercial-based design, said Jan van Tol, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
The program is leveraging technical aspects from Austal’s Hawaiian super ferry and its commercial high-speed vessel WestPac Express (see related article here). The ship’s deck is already strong enough to support the Marine Corps’ heaviest helicopters, which seems to attest to the robust design, van Tol said.