The USS Constellation (FFG-62) frigate program is doing little to refurbish the U.S. Navy’s reputation for competence. Intended to deliver a flotilla of at least twenty small, hard-hitting surface combatants in reasonably short order at manageable cost, the program is 36 months—and counting—behind schedule. And over budget. And manufacturing the first hull without a complete design for it. This is not a good look—especially when compounded by the past two decades of shipbuilding travails.

And looks matter. Such self-inflicted troubles have direct diplomatic import, and not for the better. To gauge why, consider the frigate program through the eyes of antagonists, allies, and friendly powers the United States would like to woo. And look at it in relative terms. Relative to America’s rivals, chiefly China. In peacetime strategic competition, after all, influential audiences—allies, friends, prospective foes—judge which contestant would be the likely victor in wartime. Their subjective view prevails. The victor in the war for perceptions triumphs in peacetime competition.

People love a winner and scorn a loser.

If you were considering siding with the United States or China, which contender would you regard as the more impressive partner: the predominant seafaring state that seems unable to keep its fleet from dwindling in numbers, or the challenger with ten major surface combatants and three coastguard cutters under construction at a single shipyard and a fleet inventory on the upswing?

That thought experiment should give you pause.

Diplomatic historian extraordinaire Henry Kissinger portrayed deterrence as a product of our military capability, our willpower to use it, and the degree to which the opponent we aspire to deter believes in our capability and willpower—in our strength, in other words. If hostile leaders believe we can and will thwart their aims, they ought to desist from actions we forbid. If they scoff at our capability, our resolve, or both, they may fling the dice and defy our deterrent threat.

Kissinger reminds us that deterrence is a product of multiplying—not adding—the three constituent factors. If any one factor in a multiple is zero, deterrence is zero. Algebra I says so. If an opponent doubts our martial prowess, deterrence will suffer. That remains true even if its subjective judgments are wrong.

Kissinger didn’t repurpose his formula to describe other modes of armed persuasion, but he could and should have. That same combination of factors—capability, will, belief—could spur an adversary to do something we want that its leadership prefers not to do. That’s coercion. And those same factors could comfort allies and friends that the United States will be there for them when it says it will. That’s reassurance. Giving heart to friendly powers is critical to alliance building and upkeep.

Capability, then, is central to all modes of peacetime persuasion. Competence represents a major part of capability and how others perceive it. In fact, I am halfway tempted to break it out as a fourth freestanding factor and add it to Kissinger’s formula. After all, there is more to military and diplomatic effectiveness than mustering enough resolve to draw the sword. It also takes skill to forge and wield the blade. Foreign audiences will form their own impressions of how adeptly we construct and use naval and military forces compared to our competitors.

The verdict they reach determines whether they are deterred, or coerced, or reassured.

Which is why industrial projects like the Constellation are so important. Let’s review the FFG-62 effort with help from doughty analysts at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and Government Accountability Office (GAO), both of which have held forth in recent months. First, it’s worth pointing out that this is not a small frigate. Constellation will reportedly displace at least 78 percent more than its predecessor, the Oliver Hazard Perry (FFG-7) class. A FFG-62 will bulk some 7,291 tons once fully loaded, compared to 4,100 tons for a FFG-7. Moreover, it displaces 75 percent as much as a Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, a capital ship that weighs in at 9,648 tons.

(Final tonnage figures for Constellation remain blurry because the lead ship’s design remains in flux even as construction proceeds. GAO already cites “unplanned weight growth” of over 10 percent. The vessel’s girth could expand even more—perhaps at the expense of slowing down its maximum speed.)

The ship’s heft raises questions about whether it brandishes enough firepower for its size. Its primary armament consists of 32 vertical launch siloes compared to 96 for a DDG-51 and 122 for a CG-47 Ticonderoga-class cruiser. That’s one-third of a destroyer’s firepower coming from a warship 78 percent of the destroyer’s displacement. As an old gunnery officer, moreover, I am obliged to harumph that FFG-62 will feature only a 57mm pop gun rather than the brawnier 5-inch gun mount found on board destroyers and cruisers. In short, this weapons suite seems anemic for a heavy frigate.

CRS broaches the idea of upgunning the vessel to 48 cells, half the capacity of a destroyer, but it also observes that as currently configured the vessel will sport deck-mounted launchers capable of disgorging 16 naval strike missiles for antiship missions, along with a launcher packing 21 rolling airframe missiles for air defense. That partly offsets the modest complement of vertical launchers. CRS notes, moreover, that fleet designers may be counting on missile-toting uncrewed surface craft to supplement the firepower of traditional manned ships of war. I would add that the ability to reload missile launchers at sea—a development evidently poised to go to sea—will help alleviate concerns about magazine depth.

But the political question is how foreign audiences will appraise the frigate once it takes to the sea. Will they see it as a likely winner in combat? Can it help deter, coerce, or reassure? Now as always, their subjective judgment counts.

Second, mockery has greeted the process for designing and building the FFG-62 class. U.S. Navy leadership chose a mature design for the warship, the European multimission frigate (FREMM) currently in service with the French and Italian navies, in order to hold down the costs and danger of setbacks associated with fielding an entirely new hull. That was wise. But then the navy promptly started monkeying with the mature design. Rather than simply mount the Aegis combat system, associated sensors, and U.S. Navy weaponry on the basic hull form, naval architects have undertaken what can only be described as a wholesale redesign. The FFG-62 design reportedly has under 15 percent in common with the FREMM, the parent design on which it is supposedly modeled.

Or as GAO puts it: “Navy decisions to substantially modify the frigate design from the parent design have caused the two to now resemble nothing more than distant cousins.” Because of delays in finishing the design, the coauthors add, it is “uncertain when fleet operators will have the new frigates available for mission tasks.” Construction is proceeding on FFG-62 even though the design is just 80 percent complete. And it was 80 percent complete in 2022, when steel was first cut. “In other words, they’re altering the plans as they go along,” as one former Royal Navy frigate captain opines.

You get the uneasy sense that Constellation is the frigate of the future—and always will be. What will foreign audiences make of a process meant to be straightforward that has stagnated amid complexity and ballooning costs?

And third, fresh setbacks are far from unthinkable. GAO takes the navy’s acquisition plan to task for neglecting to test the propulsion plant and machinery control system on land before installing it in the Constellation’s hull. The plant is of a type new to the U.S. Navy, the control system a brand-new design, full stop. GAO classifies this scheme as entailing “high development and integration risk,” and recalls the engineering woes that plagued the navy’s littoral combat ships, whose propulsion systems also weren’t tested on dry earth. The more testing, the better with new hardware and software. The auditors cheekily suggest that construction delays allow time for shore testing to fend off similar embarrassments for the FFG-62 class.

Why wait till the ship is operational to unearth engineering faults?

None of this is to attack the frigate concept. The logic behind procuring a flotilla of small surface combatants is impeccable. For nigh on a decade now the U.S. Navy leadership has been talking about distributing capability among a more numerous fleet. At first the idea went by the label “distributed lethality” before being codified in navy doctrine as “distributed maritime operations.” Right now U.S. Navy capability is concentrated in a few multimission capital ships. Take one of those out and you subtract a major percentage of the fleet’s fighting power. That being the case, it makes perfect sense to scatter weaponry, sensors, and command-and-control arrangements among more hulls.

Spreading things around amplifies offensive striking power while imparting the resilience to absorb punishment.

All navies take battle losses. But a fighting force that reposes only a minor fraction of its aggregate combat power in any single platform loses only a minor fraction should that platform be put out of action. The fleet fights on—which is the point. Small surface combatants—frigates, littoral combat ships to the extent that they can contribute, and ultimately unmanned craft—are, or should be, inexpensive enough to purchase in bulk. Distributed lethality—and distributed resilience—manifests itself in this new flotilla.

What to do to restore the reputation of the U.S. Navy and the American shipbuilding complex? Start by reforming the institutional culture. Best practices lie downstream of culture. First of all, the sea service needs to rediscover its experimental ethos. A ship, or any other piece of military kit, is a hypothesis. It remains so until it proves out in the unsparing environment of the world’s oceans and seas. But again, the field trials can start small. I’m with GAO: the Constellation power plant and machinery controls should undergo testing ashore, exposing any major defects before the frigate puts to sea. Let the scientific method prevail.

Second, the service needs to rediscover an outlook that once prevailed: that good enough is good enough when fielding military hardware. The United States prevailed in World War II because industry turned out mountains of good-enough ships, planes, and tanks, whereas Axis foes were captive to a guild mindset. They built superb systems in limited numbers and were ultimately overwhelmed by Allied matériel. Give me the older way. The concept behind the Constellation class was a solid one. Namely to take a successful working vessel, install American sensors and weapons aboard it, mass-produce it, and venture out across the briny main. Instead it appears the navy leadership succumbed to the age-old human temptation to let the best be the enemy of the good.

And third, top uniformed and political leadership may need to take a heavier-handed approach to overseeing procurement. If a decision from on high directs the navy to make minor modifications to a foreign design and build a bunch of warships, senior leaders need to enforce that decision and the philosophy on which it rests. They must impose self-discipline, themselves resisting the lure of perfection. And they must impose discipline throughout the naval hierarchy.

Get the culture right, and watch U.S. maritime strategy prosper. And watch antagonists, allies, and friends take note.

About the Author: Dr. James Holmes, U.S. Naval War College  

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Nonresident Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. The views voiced here are his alone.