Want of Frigates: Why Is It So Hard For America to Buy Small Surface Combatants?

“The last Fleet was lost to me for want of Frigates; God forbid this should.”

The U.S. Navy is hitting the reset button on its next round of small surface combatants. In a surprise announcement on social media, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan revealed that the service is stepping back from its Constellation-class frigate program to pursue ships that can be built faster. Under a new deal with Fincantieri Marinette Marine, the Wisconsin shipyard will finish the first two frigates in the lineup, USS Constellation (FFG-62) and USS Congress (FFG-63). But the four ships that were supposed to follow? Those are getting cut before construction even begins. The Constellation class will follow in the footsteps of the Zumwalt class, cut mid-program and leaving a couple of orphan ships to sheepishly join the fleet.

The Constellation program has been sinking expensively for some time, so cancelling it is probably a good idea. However, the U.S. Navy still has a requirement for 73 small surface combatants. It is reportedly in the middle of a fleet design review to assess how the service will develop these—but given the problems with Constellation and the other recent small surface combatant program, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), one would be forgiven for thinking that whatever comes next will struggle to be much better.

What began as a promising leap forward for the U.S. Navy slowly took on the shape of yet another cautionary tale in American shipbuilding. The Constellation-class frigate was supposed to be a smart, streamlined answer to the U.S. Navy’s need for a reliable small surface combatant—fast to build, packed with modern systems, and rooted in a proven European design. Its name echoed that of the original USS Constellation, the first ship ever commissioned in the U.S. Navy, and the program carried a similar sense of optimism: a vessel built for the complex maritime threats of the 21st century, balancing adaptability, stealth, and cutting-edge technology. But somewhere between that elegant vision and the stacks of revised design documents now crowding shipyard floors, the program began to list heavily to one side.

The idea behind the Constellation class was deceptively simple. Rather than reinventing the wheel—a habit that had often cost the U.S. Navy dearly in time, money, and credibility—the service selected the FREMM, a highly regarded European frigate already in production. This was supposed to be the antidote to decades of acquisition headaches. Start with a proven design, add only what’s absolutely necessary to meet American requirements, and deliver the first ship in a reasonable timeframe. By tapping Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Wisconsin to build the ships, the U.S. Navy would also strengthen a domestic industrial base hungry for stable work. On paper, the plan was a model of restraint and common sense.

In reality, that restraint didn’t last long. The U.S. Navy began its modifications to the original design and the changes snowballed. Today, the number of alterations sits at more than 500. Commonality with the FREMM has dropped from the intended 85 percent to a mere 15 percent. The ship is now 23 feet longer, 500 tons heavier, and years behind its original schedule. A program designed to avoid the pitfalls of its predecessors had, instead, tripped headfirst into familiar ones.

The program’s turbulence has been driven less by technology or a lack of shipbuilding capacity than by chronic indecision, which is especially striking given the origins of the program. When the FFG(X) effort kicked off in 2017, the U.S. Navy was trying to learn from the bruising experience of the LCS, a much-hyped vessel whose two variants were plagued by mechanical issues, overruns, and unmet expectations. Eager to avoid that fate, the service adopted a “parent design strategy”—in this case, leaning heavily on the FREMM to sidestep expensive development cycles. But as design reviews unfolded, the service kept adding “just one more” improvement. Metrics meant to track progress failed to flag growing complexity. And with pressure mounting to begin construction, work on the lead ship started before the design was anywhere near stable, the shipbuilding equivalent of laying a house’s foundation while still rearranging the blueprints.

Predictably, the consequences spiralled outward: components didn’t fit, systems interfered with each other, and the ship’s weight crept upward in increments that eventually reached more than 10 percent, a particularly dangerous margin for a vessel that needs both speed and upgrade capacity over its lifetime. That weight increase forced the U.S. Navy to consider shedding propulsion capability just to keep the ship within survivable limits—a compromise that could reduce top speed and operational flexibility. The irony is painful: the U.S. Navy pursued additional capability only to risk undermining the ship’s performance in ways reminiscent of the very problems they tried to escape after the LCS era.

The Constellation class was supposed to be a triumph of disciplined design and pragmatic acquisition. Instead, it has become a lesson in how quickly good intentions can be swamped by shifting requirements and institutional habits. The FREMM was chosen because it worked. The Navy believed it could take that reliability, add a handful of American enhancements, and field a frigate suited for modern maritime competition. What it got instead was a ship that barely resembles its parent with a construction timeline drifting steadily into decades. And now, it will only have two of them.

The vision behind FFG(X) wasn’t wrong. The U.S. Navy genuinely needs a capable, cost-effective frigate to fill the widening gap between small patrol ships and large destroyers. It needs a vessel that can operate independently or as part of a larger group, armed with the sensors, weapons, and endurance demanded by a more contested and technologically sophisticated ocean. But visions require discipline to become reality, and discipline is what the Constellation-class program has lacked.

The question now is what next? The options depend on what Phelan and his team saw as the real problem with Constellation. If he disagrees with the concept of buying a design and wants an American-designed small surface combatant, that process will need to be completed swiftly and efficiently so that shipyards can start churning them out. However, given the U.S. Navy’s poor record on designing its own ships over the past couple of decades, the smart money would be on this path leading to another long-overdue design plagued by cost overruns and operational problems. More budget, more time, and more little crappy ships.

If Phelan wants a frigate that works, cheaply and quickly, then the best option is to buy off the shelf again, but to stop the U.S. Navy messing with the design beyond what is absolutely necessary for American requirements. Whether that involves going back to the 15 percent commonality version of the FREMM or picking another of the several decent frigates that exist (the British Type 26, the Spanish F110, or the South Korean FFX, to name only a few) as the parent design, the basic premise of the Constellation program can be resuscitated if design discipline can be held.

For once, the problem is not shipbuilding capacity. The core issue is whether the U.S. Navy can be prevented from shooting itself in the foot for a third time. America’s ability to get the small surface combatants it needs depends solely on the U.S. Navy’s willingness to pick a design and leave it alone long enough for a shipyard to actually build it. This should not be such a difficult task to accomplish.

Dr. Emma Salisbury is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s National Security Program, an Associate Fellow at the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre, and a Contributing Editor at War on the Rocks.

This article appeared originally at Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI).