Navy’s New Frigate: A Constellation Of Problems

Gratuitous background:  as a native of North Dakota, I’ve always been fascinated by ships and the sea.  We North Dakotans are a maritime people; the salt water runs through our veins.  

So after seeing ship program after ship program go wildly over budget and slide into morasses of cloudy requirements and unplanned changes in mission over the past couple of decades, and aware of the critical need to rebuild the Navy’s ability to fight neer-peer wars, I was encouraged to see the Navy not only contemplating buying an “off the shelf” ship design for its new “frigate” requirement, but actually act on it. 

The Navy decommissioned the last of its Cold War-era “frigates” ten years ago.  Frigates are “small” by warship standards, in the 3,000-6000 ton range, designed to protect convoys of merchant ships, groups of Marine amphibious warfare vessels and other ships from submarines and less-intense air threats, leaving escorting the big targets like aircraft carriers to the 8,000 ton Arleigh Burke class destroyers and Ticonderoga class cruisers.  The US Navy used to have around 70.   Today, they none, at the precise moment the Navy is seeing the need for larger numbers of smaller, less (relatively) expensive ships to guard other ships.  

The Navy held a competition among five shipbuilders, and selected a Franco-Italian design, currently in successful service in several other countries, as the basis for the Constellation class frigates, greasing the literal and figurative skids for a new class of lighter, cheaper escort ships. 

And, as of five years ago, it had started out promisingly:

The U.S. Navy has chosen Marinette Marine, a Wisconsin-based U.S. subsidiary of Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri, to build up to 10 of its new guided-missile frigates, presently referred to as FFG(X). This follows reports just days ago that the service would award this contract soon, months ahead of its initial schedule.

The Pentagon announced the contract award, valued at $795,116,483, in its daily contracting announcement on Apr. 20, 2020. This is a fixed price deal with incentives that covers the costs of designing and constructing the initial ship, as well as various other ancillary costs, and also includes separate options for nine additional frigates. Fitting the first FFG(X) out with the required weapons, sensors, and other systems could raise the total purchase cost to $1.281 billion, which is in line with previous cost estimates, according to Navy budget documents. The Navy hopes to see the average unit price drop to around $781 million as over the course of the production run.

But, like so many Pentagon programs, the devil was in the details and, more importantly, the details that come out after wave after wave of design iterations and requirements updates.  

And today:

The first Constellation class frigate for the U.S. Navy is just 10 percent complete more than two years after construction began and nearly five years after the award of the initial contract for the ship. The work is also continuing despite the continued absence of a firm functional design for the vessel, which is still weeks or even months away from being finalized and approved. 

Major changes to the Constellation‘s configuration compared to its parent Franco-Italian Fregata Europea Multi-Missione (FREMM) have already led to serious delays and cost increases, and there are growing questions about the program’s future. A key program goal had been to take an in-service design that would only need relatively minor modifications to make it ready for Navy use, which would help keep the work on schedule and budget. The opposite has now happened.

Secratary of Defense Hegseth and the administration have a lot of work to do when it comes to the nation’s defense;  The procurement system could keep DOGE busy for another term.