Summary and Key Points You Need to Know: The U.S. Navy faces challenges in building and designing warships, exemplified by past failures like the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and Zumwalt-class destroyers. Now, the new Constellation-class frigates risk encountering similar issues, mainly due to the Navy's habit of altering ship designs mid-development.

-This "urge to tinker" leads to design instability, increased costs, and project delays.

-In the context of a massive national debt and rising global threats, the U.S. cannot afford these inefficiencies.

-The Navy needs to adopt consistent, disciplined spending and adhere strictly to design plans to avoid costly overruns and strategic vulnerabilities.

U.S. Navy's Warship Woes: Can the Constellation-Class Frigate Avoid Disaster?

The United States Navy, supposedly the world’s strongest navy, cannot build warships anymore. That’s been a problem for decades, ever since the Americans allowed for their manufacturing capabilities to wither on the vine (or be shipped over to China). Now, it seems the next shoe to drop is the fact that the Navy cannot even design proper warships any longer. This isn’t a surprise, though. 

A country that no longer builds the things it needs and wants will eventually no longer be able to even conceptualize them. 

America’s Navy experienced this painful reality already with the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) fiasco (and the Zumwalt-class destroyer disaster). Now that the same Navy (and industrial base) behind those two epic failures is charged with procuring new frigates for the Navy, it seems that the Navy is about to be humiliated yet again. 

Making the Constellation as Bad as the Littoral Combat Ship

According to Shelby Oakley, the director of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) Shelby Oakley warned that the Navy’s new Constellation-class frigates “could suffer similar difficulties as the early [Littoral Combat Ships] Freedom and Independence variants.” 

Of course, the United States is nowhere near the level of economic strength or relative security that it enjoyed when the Navy wasted so much time, money, and finite resources to building the LCS program. 

Just now, the country’s interest repayments on the national debt have officially surpassed $1 trillion. That’s just interest. According to official estimates, the United States’ national debt is around $35 trillion. The Libertarian CATO Institute, however, assesses that if one included unfunded liabilities in the national debt talk, that number would creep up to $73 trillion! Our overall economy, in GDP terms, is around $23 trillion. In other words, we literally cannot afford to behave in such decadent ways as we did in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. 

Plus, the United States is threatened by multiple near-peer rivals in ways that it hasn’t been probably since the Second World War. This, combined with the economic failures of our current moment, means that the United States can’t build warships. And the Navy has assessed that it needs a reliable frigate force to dominate the maritime commons. 

The biggest issue has been what Mark Cancian of the CSIS International Security Program describes as “the urge to tinker” with a fixed design. You see, the Pentagon has become obsessed with making their new platforms able to evolve—while it still in development—with the most up-to-date technologies. 

This sounds like a good practice in theory. But what it does is lead to what’s known as “design instability.” For a warship of a new class, that becomes especially risky. It could potentially explode costs and it will likely cause massive delays in the ultimate deployment of the platform. If those delays are significant enough, it will create strategic gaps in America’s Navy that enemies can—and will—exploit.

Big Problems

There have already been significant issues with the way in which the Navy has been tinkering with the design of the Constellation-class. In recent months, I have reported at this site about the various issues that have arisen because the Navy has been adding requirements onto the design of the ship after the Italian manufacturer, FREMM, already cut the steel for the first models of the Constellation-class.

The Navy’s additions caused the ship to become heavier and longer, meaning that the costly steel that was cut for the warships cannot be used. This will not only increase the amount of time it takes to get the first units of this new warship to sea, but it will also explode the costs—something that the US government literally cannot afford right now.

What the Navy needs is to be consistent and disciplined in its spending. When it does decide to spend money, the Navy must ensure that the program does not overrun the allotted budget. One way to do this would be stop engaging in design practices that destabilize the project at the outset. Come to a decision on the design thenaccept a bid from a defense contractor—and stick with the design, regardless of whatever new technologies are coming online. 

America used to build reliable warships. Now we can’t even conceptualize them. This does not bode well for the United States as it enters an era of what is likely to be increasing challenges at sea.

Author Experience and Expertise: Brandon J. Weichert

Brandon J. Weichert, a National Interest national security analyst, is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, the Asia Times, and The-Pipeline. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His next book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine, is due October 22 from Encounter Books. Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.

All images are Creative Commons or Shutterstock. 

From the Vault

Russia Freaked Out: Why the U.S. Navy 'Unretired' the Iowa-Class Battleships

Battleship vs. Battlecruiser: Iowa-Class vs. Russia's Kirov-Class (Who Wins?)