Navy Cancels Constellation-class Frigate Program, Considering New Small Surface Combatants
The Navy is walking away from the Constellation-class frigate program to focus on new classes of warships the service can build faster, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan announced Tuesday on social media.
Under the terms negotiated with shipbuilder Fincantieri Marinette Marine, the Wisconsin shipyard will continue to build
Constellation (FFG-62) and
Congress (FFG-63) but will cancel the next four planned warships.
“We are reshaping how the Navy builds its fleet. Today, I can announce the first public action is a strategic shift away from the Constellation-class frigate program,” reads the statement from Phelan. “The Navy and our industry partners have reached a comprehensive framework that terminates, for the Navy’s convenience, the last four ships of the class, which have not begun construction.”
A senior defense official told reporters Tuesday that the cancellation of the ship program was part of the Navy’s latest effort to build and deliver new ship classes faster.
“A key factor in this decision is the need to grow the fleet faster to meet tomorrow’s threats. This framework seeks to put the Navy on a path to more rapidly construct new classes of ships and deliver capabilities our war fighters need in greater numbers and faster,” the official said.
In tandem, the wider Pentagon is retooling its acquisition system to emphasize speed.
“Speed to delivery is now our organizing principle,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in his Nov. 7 “Arsenal of Freedom” speech. “The sense of urgency has slipped too much, and when you look at what we face, we have to recapture it.”
According to Navy officials, the sea service is currently in the midst of a fleet design review that will shape how the service will develop new systems. The Navy has a requirement for 73 small surface combatants.
In terms of Marinette, the Navy will move ahead with the first two ships in the class to keep Marinette’s complex of three shipyards on the shores of Lake Michigan in operation. As of Tuesday,
Constellation was about 12 percent complete. Doing so will enable the shipbuilder, which employs about 3,000 people across the three yards, to compete for future government work.
“It gives us a bit more ability to be flexible and to work with the shipbuilder through this period of time as we make this transition into future work,” the official said. “Maintaining this shipyard and its skilled workforce is imperative to the Navy’s long-term industrial base.”
Following the cut to the Constellation program, Marinette’s current order book includes the last Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ship that is expected to deliver this year and four Multi-Mission Surface Combatants for the Royal Saudi Navy based on the Freedom LCS design.
The senior official did not specify what ship classes Marinette could accommodate, however the Navy is moving to accelerate the Landing Ship Medium program and larger unmanned surface vehicles both programs could be built at the yard.
“Fincantieri has been a committed partner, and the Navy values this partnership, our investment and together we want to rapidly deliver capabilities to warfighters, so we believe that the Navy will honor the agreed framework and channel work in sectors such as amphibious, icebreaking, and special missions into our system of shipyards, while they determine how we can support with new types of small surface combatants, both manned and unmanned, that they want to rapidly field,” reads the statement from Fincantieri Marine Group CEO George Moutafis. “The key is to maximize the commitment and capabilities our system of shipyards represents.”
Now with the Navy and Italian parent Fincantieri agreeing to cap the Constellation program at two hulls, the service will ask for some of the money obligated for the frigate program for new ships.
“The Navy will work with Congress in the coming weeks to seek the reappropriation of a portion of the unspent frigate funds on more readily producible ships in Marinette,” a senior Navy official told USNI News on Tuesday. “We do hope to retain the unspent frigate funds, as I mentioned, and have them reallocated to other ships that can be built in Marinette and delivered to the fleet faster.”
The service has spent about $2 billion on the program, and Congress has appropriated a total of $7.6 billion for contract options for the six ships in the class, according to Navy budget data. It’s unclear how the service will request Congress distribute the money into new programs.
The Navy awarded the contract to build what would become the Constellation to Marinette in 2020 following about six years of deliberation after the Navy determined it would truncate the two classes of Littoral Combat Ships. Marinette previously built the Freedoms as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin before competing for the frigate program on its own. The Navy decided that the competitors to base the warship on an existing parent design to speed up the design of the program. The Navy selected the FREMM multi-mission frigate, already operated by the French and Italian navies, as the parent via a Naval Sea Systems Command rapid requirements process.
However, once the complex design work commenced, the Navy and Marinette had to make vast changes to the design in order to meet stricter U.S. survivability standards. The delays resulted in an estimated three-year setback in the delivery of the first ship from 2026 to 2029 at a cost of about $1.5 billion.
“Sometimes, you’re just better off designing a new ship,” Navy’s former top acquisition executive Nickolas Guertin said at a conference in February. “Turns out modifying someone else’s design is a lot harder than it seems.”
please ( or have reputation points deducted if they don't ? ).
