Navy cancels its Constellation-class frigates, fleet’s future remains uncertain

After eight years of development, billions of dollars invested, and five years since a production contract was awarded the U.S. Navy is cancelling its Constellation-class frigate program. The effort was meant to produce potentially as many as 58 warships in the coming decades, easing the burden on America’s large surface combatants like the Arleigh Burke class of guided missile destroyers, and helping to offset China’s significant numerical advantage in the Pacific.

According to Navy Secretary John Phelan, the Navy will now pivot toward what he called “new classes of ships” that can be delivered in greater numbers and on a more urgent timeline.

The U.S. Navy divides its surface combatants into two categories of warships. The first category are Large Surface Combattants, or LSCs, like the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer and the larger Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser. The second category are Small Surface Combattants, or SSCs, which include ships like America’s Independence and Freedom Class Littoral Combat Ships, Avenger-class mine countermeasure ships, and various patrol boats. And, up until the 2010s, that second category also included some 51 Oliver Hazard Perry-Class Frigates, which, despite being Small Surface Combattants, weren’t really that small.

The largest of these ships were 454 feet long, 45 feet across, and displaced some 4,200 tons. And while these ships offered little in the way of air defense, they gained a reputation for being tough, dependable, and when necessary, able to swing well above their weight class. Not only were these Perry-class vessels well-suited for maritime interdiction and presence operations on the open ocean, their towed sonar arrays and embarked helicopters made them excellent sub-hunters, and their Mk 13 missile launchers made them capable escorts.

These frigates proved so handy that when America retired the last of its 51 in-service Perry’s in 2015, more than 30 of them were purchased by allied nations who still have them in service today.

Of course, the Navy’s plan wasn’t simply to retire these ships without any viable replacements. Long before the final Perry’s retirement, work had already begun on the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ships, or LCSs, meant to absorb the frigate’s coastal combat role. But after 28 out of a planned 52 of these vessels were built, the Navy canceled the effort due to rampant cost-overruns, program delays, and mechanical issues.

The U.S. Navy guided missile frigates USS Oliver Hazard Perry (FFG-7), USS Antrim (FFG-20) and USS Jack Williams (FFG-24) underway, July 1982. (U.S. Navy)

By the time the final axe came down on the LCS program in 2023, the Navy had already awarded a production contract to Wisconsin-based Fincantieri Marinette Marine to build an entirely new type of advanced frigate: the Constellation class. In order to expedite production and keep costs down, the Navy opted to base this new frigate on an existing design: the Italian-French FREMM multi-mission frigate that was already being built in two variants, one for Italy and one for France. The plan was to retain roughly 85% of the original FREMM design, while changing roughly 15% to better suit the U.S. Navy’s needs and regulations.

This new Constellation-class would be packed to the gills with enough 21st-century hardware and weapons to conduct many of the same missions assigned to destroyers today. The Constellation would pack 32 Mark 41 vertical launch system cells (around a third as many as an Arleigh Burke destroyer) each capable of employing the same surface-to-air interceptors and surface-to-surface missiles carried by larger warships. These cells would be bolstered by 16 canister-launched Naval Strike Missiles, a 21-cell Mk 49 launcher carrying RIM-116 rolling airframe surface-to-air missiles, and a 57mm Naval autocannon capable of unleashing 220 5.2-pound high-explosive projectiles per minute at targets more than nine miles out.

All of this firepower would be cued using the newest Baseline 10 architecture for the same battle-proven AEGIS combat system already found in American and allied warships, pulling data from the new AN/SPY-6(V)3 active electronically scanned air surveillance radar and the AN/SPS-73(V)18 surface-search radar. Further, a low-frequency, variable depth sonar, multi-function towed array, and AN/SQQ-89(V)16 anti-submarine warfare combat system, along with an embarked MH-60R Seahawk helicopter, would make the Constellation a terrifying adversary for enemy submarines, while it’s unique combination of diesel-electric and gas turbine propulsion would make its acoustic signature exceedingly difficult to pick up and target by those same subs.

Put simply, the Constellation-class frigate was meant to serve as something of an Arleigh Burke-class junior, carrying many of the same systems and weapons as the Navy’s top-tier destroyers, just in a much smaller package that would, at least in theory, be cheaper to produce and operate.

The Navy aimed to buy 20 of these new highly-capable frigates at around a billion dollars a piece, which, when combined with development costs, would place the entire program at around $22 billion. But hopes were so high for the Constellation that the Navy also intended to purchase anywhere from 28 to maybe 38 more ships after that, in a more modernized Flight II configuration.

Graphic presenting planned, in 2022, Constellation-class frigate systems. (Naval Sea Systems Command)

However, it wasn’t long before the Navy decided to depart from the FREMM design to better accommodate all of the necessary hardware. Italy and France’s FREMM frigates measure between 434 and nearly 466 feet long, but America’s new Constellation would add another 30 feet to the largest FREMM iterations, reaching 496 feet. This also came with a substantial increase in weigh from around 6,000 tons to 7,291.

Yet, making the ship bigger and heavier quickly became a problem, especially as the frigate’s requirements continued to change too. For instance, in 2022, the Navy decided to cancel plans to install a new anti-submarine warfare module into its troubled LCS ships and instead, shoehorn it into the new Constellation-class as well, citing its ability to integrate with the ship’s existing SQQ-89 ASW combat system.

In 2020, when the production contract was awarded, the Navy projected the first new Constellation-class frigates would be delivered in 2026. But by 2022, with construction underway on the first new ship, the design was still not finalized. With design elements of the ship’s structure, piping, ventilation, and other systems still incomplete, production was forced to stall, driving up costs. By the following year, the weight growth issue was becoming too big to ignore, with the ship’s displacement growing by 10% and already exceeding its maximum weight margin, calling into question whether the ship could even carry any future upgrades. The Navy even considered reducing its requirements for the ship’s speed as a result, which also called into question its ability to keep pace with fast-moving carrier strike groups.

By 2024, the first ship of the class was 36 months behind schedule, with the second already considered two years behind before its keel was even laid. The plan, as I mentioned before, was to retain roughly 85% of the FREMM frigate design to expedite production, but by that point, the Constellation design retained only about 15% of its parent design. This caused a cascade of other issues, like the need to write new code for a reported 95% of the ship’s control system software due to deviations from the FREMM design it came from, and the incorporation of new equipment and systems.

The Constellation-class frigate seemed to suffer from a classic case of scope-creep, a term used to describe a program that keeps seeing new requirements tacked onto it as it develops, resulting in cost overruns and delays. As one lawmaker put it, the Navy kept chasing a 100% solution to the point where they ended up with 0% of the ship being delivered.

So, with all this in mind, it’s pretty easy to see where the rationale came from to cancel this bloated and delayed frigate effort… The only problem with that rationale, however, is that it effectively means the Navy will have to start from scratch to fill the void left in 2015 by the Perry-class after not one, but now two failed efforts to do so.

Related: Big tech is trying to hack shipbuilding for the Navy. Will it succeed?

China’s shipyard on Mazhou island, March 2013. (Photo by Tonytanzh/Wikimedia Commons)

And while America’s struggling shipbuilding industry works to crack that nut, China’s absolutely massive shipbuilding efforts are still moving ahead at full steam.

While the U.S. Navy does still outweigh China’s in terms of gross tonnage, China’s massive shipbuilding industry has allowed the People’s Liberation Army-Navy, or PLA-N, to field an ever-growing number of large-hulled combat-capable vessels, many of which are said to match the combat prowess of some of the U.S. Navy’s most modern ships.

Today, China’s combined Navy, Maritime Militia, and militarized Coast Guard, all of which fall directly under the command structure of the People’s Liberation Army itself, have more than 750 ships in total, outnumbering the American Navy by a factor of better than two to one. And while China’s Navy continues to grow, America’s numbers are now beginning to decline, with current projections showing America’s fleet strength shrinking by about a dozen ships between now and 2027. Meanwhile, in 2023 alone, China reportedly added 30 ships to its fleet, 15 of which were large surface combatants.

Chinese shipyards now account for more than 53% of the global commercial shipbuilding market, versus America’s 0.1%. In fact, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation, alone, built more commercial ships by tonnage in 2024 than the entire U.S. shipbuilding apparatus, collectively has since World War II, and the expanded shipbuilding infrastructure funded through these commercial efforts allows for more naval ships to be built for less cost and on shorter timelines.

According to the Senate testimony of Navy Vice Adm. James P. Downey, commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, the U.S. Navy currently has 92 ships under contract to be built (this number includes four Constellation-class ships that were just canceled) with 56 vessels at some stage of active construction. Across the board, actual ship deliveries are now at an average of one to three years behind schedule. Further, production costs themselves are consistently rising at higher rates than inflation, meaning it’s getting more expensive to build the same ships over time.

Related: China’s new Fujian carrier reignites the Great Aircraft Carrier debate

The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) transits the James River during the ship’s launch and transit to Newport News Shipyard pier three for the final stages of construction and testing. Ford was christened on 9 November 2013, and was under construction at Huntington Ingalls Industries Newport News Shipyard, Virginia (USA). (U.S.Navy)

The same sorts of issues that effected the Constellation class also plague the construction of America’s new Ford-class super carriers, with supply chain issues and complications related to new technologies like electromagnetic aircraft launch and recovery systems pushing delivery of the second ship of the class, the USS John F. Kennedy, from this year to next. The next carrier after Kennedy, the USS Enterprise, is already said to be roughly 28 months behind schedule, with its new delivery date pushed back to 2030. The Navy’s new ballistic missile submarine, the forthcoming Columbia-class, is suffering from similar delays, with the first ship of the class, the USS District of Columbia, now expected to be delivered 12-18 months behind schedule, sometime in 2029. And in keeping with cost trends, the first Columbia-class sub is now expected to come in hundreds of millions of dollars over budget, outpacing even the shipbuilder’s own projections, according to a September 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that getting Navy shipbuilding back on track would require an investment of some $40.1 billion dollars per year for the next 30 years, totalling more than a trillion dollars. That would mean increasing the Navy’s budget by about 46%, but doing so would fund expanding American shipyards beyond the seven most commonly used today, staffing these shipyards with highly-trained personnel, and expanding competition within the industrial base.

All told, the U.S. Navy is now in a very tough position. Cancelling the Constellation-class may have saved it as much as $20 billion over the next 10 to 15 years, and Navy officials have been clear that they hope to reallocate that money to other shipbuilding efforts.

But even if canceling the Constellation class was the right thing to do, it’s still hard to imagine how starting over again will result in a lower price tag, or a faster delivery date for a new ship’s design, while all the other overarching issues with American shipbuilding remain.

Overcoming the growing numerical warship gap in the Pacific and getting American shipbuilding back on track are complex problems, and their solutions are likely to be equally complex.

Feature Image: A graphic rendering of the planned guided-missile Constellation-class frigate USS Lafayette. The frigate has now been cancelled. (U.S. Navy graphic)

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