US Navy awards TOTE Services $2.2 bln contract for new Medium Landing Ships

Key Points

• The Navy awarded TOTE Services a $2.2 billion contract on July 13, 2026, to manage construction of up to eight Medium Landing Ships.
• Ships will be built at Bollinger Shipyards and Fincantieri Marinette Marine, supporting the planned 35-ship LSM fleet for the Navy and Marine Corps.

Contract Overview

The U.S. Navy has selected TOTE Services, a Florida-based shipping company, to manage the construction of a new fleet of landing ships critical to the Marine Corps' strategy for potential conflict with China. The $2.2 billion contract, announced July 13, appoints TOTE Services as the Vessel Construction Manager (VCM) for the Navy's Medium Landing Ship (LSM) program.

Under this arrangement, TOTE Services—headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida—will directly coordinate shipyards, suppliers, and designers, rather than the Navy managing each contractor separately as it traditionally does for major shipbuilding programs. As VCM, TOTE holds the prime contract with the Navy's Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Maritime and will award and manage its own subcontracts with the shipyards building the vessels. This marks the first time the Navy has used this structure, which commercial shipping companies have relied on for decades to keep multi-vessel construction programs on schedule and on budget.

Industry Reaction

"This is a tremendous responsibility and a defining moment for American shipbuilding, the VCM model, and TOTE Services."

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— Jeff Dixon, President of TOTE Services

Dixon added: "We are grateful to PAE Maritime, the Marine Corps, Congress, and the many government leaders who have championed this important program and helped bring the VCM model to a mission of national importance. We look forward to collaborating with and supporting PAE Maritime as we work together on LSM. The U.S. is counting on this program to succeed, and our job is clear: steward the work responsibly, cultivate the best talent and expertise, move with urgency, and deliver for the American people."

The Medium Landing Ship Design

The Medium Landing Ship is a deliberately unglamorous vessel by Navy standards, built around a Dutch-designed hull called the LST-100 from shipbuilder Damen. This design already serves in Nigeria's navy and is on order for Australia.

Key specifications:

• Displacement: Approximately 4,000 tonnes (4,409 tons)
• Troop capacity: Around 250 Marines
• Range: Roughly 7,408 kilometers (4,000 nautical miles)

These figures place the LSM well below the size and cost of the Navy's traditional amphibious warships, but squarely within the gap the Marine Corps says it desperately needs filled—between small ship-to-shore landing craft and the massive, expensive amphibious ships that make up the current fleet.

This gap is critical because of how the Marine Corps now plans to fight in the Pacific under a concept called Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) . This strategy calls for small units of Marines to hop between islands, set up temporary firing positions armed with anti-ship missiles, and relocate before an adversary can target them. Such a style of warfare depends entirely on having enough smaller, less exquisite vessels to keep those units mobile, rather than concentrating everyone aboard a handful of large ships that make tempting targets.

Shipyard Assignments and Industrial Base Strategy

For the first eight ships under this contract, the Navy has already selected the shipyards that will perform the actual welding and assembly:

• Bollinger Shipyards (Gulf Coast) — lead vessel
• Fincantieri Marinette Marine (Wisconsin) — four additional ships
• Remaining three ships — TOTE has flexibility to decide how best to award these

Splitting the work across yards on opposite ends of the country reflects the Navy's stated goal of using the LSM program to strengthen the broader American shipbuilding industrial base, which has struggled for years with limited capacity and a shrinking skilled workforce, even as the service tries to grow its overall fleet size.

Congress built the requirement for a construction manager directly into law, inserting a provision into the fiscal year 2026 defense authorization act that specifically directed the Navy to select a VCM. This was intended to help stabilize a program that had already been through one troubled procurement attempt, including a canceled 2024 request for proposals after the Navy concluded the bids it received cost far more than the service could justify.

TOTE Services' Track Record

TOTE Services is not new to this kind of arrangement. The company pioneered the VCM model in U.S. government shipbuilding through its work managing construction of the National Security Multi-Mission Vessel program for the Maritime Administration—a five-ship effort supplying training vessels to the nation's maritime academies. Three of those ships have already been delivered, with the remaining two under construction.