clients — the foreign clients — what they need to maintain their U.S.-supplied equipment and indigenously
acquired equipment. In the first contract, the team was
very heavily HM&E, the second contract we worked in
team members such as Raytheon to address the combat
system components.
If you look at the future, as the Perry-class FFGs
[frigates] come out of active service, we believe there
will be a desire among many of the foreign clients for
those ships, and we want to be positioned to address
what the foreign clients might want
to do with those ships.
So, on the N*STAR team we’ve
got Raytheon, Finmeccanica’s DRS
component, we’ve got Thales, we’ve
got Lockheed Martin, BAE and the
BAE shipyard constellation, as well
as General Dynamics NASSCO, so
we are well positioned, we believe,
to address all the requirements for
the ships as they roll out.
We’ve transferred, over the
years, 46 ships to foreign clients
and, for many of them, they are
very interested in getting more. We
are in several countries helping
them sustain their ex-U.S. ships,
and we’re not seeing any lessening
in demand on that desire for assistance, technical assistance, materiel, that sort of thing.
What I think VSE’s job is, and a
job we’ve done very well in the
past, is to put together the best
offering for the needs of the foreign
client. What we’re interested in is
giving them best value, and all of
our teammates understand that
and they are more than eager to get
on the team to be able to help us
develop those systems that make
sense to the foreign client.
Every country is unique in their
needs. Of course, the ships and the
systems are all different, so every
time you come into a project there
are nuances that are different. You
never know what is going to be the
requirement for the next project.
It’s not stable, it’s not rote, it’s different in every aspect all the time.
The overarching thing that we
see time and time again is that these
are professional Mariners, they are
tremendously skilled. They do things differently, that’s
true, and our job is to make sure that we understand
what those differences are and that we provide them
ships and systems and everything they need to perform
their mission, not the U.S. mission.
