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As I announced last week, we are fundamentally reshaping how the Navy builds and fields its fleet. Today, I'm taking the second major step in that effort, selecting the design for our medium landing ship. An operationally driven, fiscally disciplined choice that puts capability in the fleet on a responsible timeline. For the Marine Corps, the medium landing ship will provide us with an organic littoral mobility capability in the Indo-Pacific and around the world. It provides us with a critical intra-theater maneuver asset that is able to embark, transport, and land Marines, weapons, and supplies and equipment around the theater without requiring access to a pier.
A year ago, the Navy canceled the LSM request for proposals when the conceptual design produced bids that were simply unaffordable. We applied common sense, went back to basics, and reassessed the program. We identified proven in-service designs that meet the Commandant's requirements, and then scrutinized them for producibility, performance, and trade-offs. Last month, with the concurrence of the Commandant and the Chief of Naval Operations, I approved the LSM design selection, the LST 100 landing ship transport. A roughly 4,000-ton ship with a range of more than 3,400 nautical miles that gives us the right balance of capability, affordability, and speed to field.
The LST 100's cargo capacity, helicopter capacity, birthing, and crane make it an excellent choice for the Marine Corps's requirement of no less than 35 medium landing ships to support naval expeditionary forces. The medium landing ships will enable our Marines to be more agile and flexible in austere environments where there are no ports, providing the joint force the needed operational mobility within the adversary's weapons engagement zone. We are also changing how we do business in shipbuilding, starting from a complete 3D design and working hand-in-hand with the designer. The Navy is incorporating a disciplined set of class standard equipment so that this ship is maintainable, repairable, and
able to meet its operational availability targets in the real world, not just on paper. Once those standards are baked in, the design will be truly production-ready, needing only to be tailored to each shipbuilder's specific production process. This non-developmental, built-to-print approach drives down cost, schedule, and technical risk for both the Navy and industry. Working with Congress, we're embracing commercial practices and speed. We will competitively award a vessel construction manager to oversee the LSM program, drive execution, and facilitate genuine competition among multiple shipyards.
The Marine Corps is fully committed to investing in the medium landing ship program. This platform is critical to ensuring Marines have the mobility required to fight and win in the littorals. Serving side-by-side with our Marine Corps brothers and sisters, the Navy is also on board with the LSM program, ensuring that when called upon, we're ready to fight and win today. The Department will continue to innovate and reform our shipbuilding approach, integrating hard-learned lessons from prior Navy shipbuilding efforts, proven commercial best practices, and streamlined acquisition. President
Trump's one big, beautiful bill and his executive order on restoring America's maritime dominance are cornerstones of our national effort to revitalize and rebuild the American maritime industrial base. It is the dawn of a new age for Navy shipbuilding.
