The American Military Can’t Build a Military Anymore

Key Points and Summary – The Navy’s Constellation-class frigate was supposed to be the cheap, proven ship that fixed U.S. procurement dysfunction.

-Instead, delays and cost overruns gutted the program, leaving only two hulls limping toward completion.

An artist rendering of the U.S. Navy guided-missile frigate FFG(X). The new small surface combatant will have multi-mission capability to conduct air warfare, anti-submarine warfare, surface warfare, electronic warfare, and information operations. The design is based on the FREMM multipurpose frigate. A contract for ten ships was awarded to Marinette Marine Corporation, Wisconsin (USA), on 30 April 2020.

-That failure is not an outlier—it mirrors the Army’s M10 Booker, the KC-46 tanker, and the T-7A trainer, all trapped in the same slow, brittle, overcomplicated acquisition system.

-Meanwhile, adversaries like China and Russia are building and firing faster than Washington can define requirements.

-Unless the U.S. rebuilds industrial capacity, shortens timelines, and kills failing programs early, it risks entering the next war with yesterday’s force.

The U.S. Military Has a Procurement Crisis. The Constellation-Class Proves It

When the Navy’s Constellation-class frigate was first announced, it was heralded as the moment when the United States finally escaped the gravitational pull of its own procurement dysfunction.

A modest frigate, built on a proven European design, marketed as the ship America could actually build. Instead, the program has been effectively gutted—cancelled after massive delays and cost growth, with only the first two ships limping toward completion.

What was sold as a low-risk course correction has become one more monument to a system that has forgotten how to turn plans into hulls.

The Constellation’s failure is not an isolated embarrassment. It is a symptom of a deeper rot spreading across the armed forces—one that quietly threatens to hollow out American power at the moment the world is least forgiving of weakness.

Constellation-Class Frigate U.S. Navy. Image Credit: Industry Handout.

What the Navy is experiencing is not confined to the water. The same procurement pathologies now run through the Army, the Air Force, and the broader defense-industrial ecosystem.

The M10 Booker—a promising light tank in concept—has already been knocked off course, with the Army terminating low-rate production and shelving plans for full-rate fielding as budgets, priorities, and requirements lurch in new directions.

Other programs show the same pattern: long timelines, spiraling costs, and platforms conceived for threat environments that no longer exist. The disease is systemic. The consequence is strategic.

A Military Designed for Yesterday

For a generation, the United States grew accustomed to fighting the wars it had rather than preparing for the wars that were coming.

The counterinsurgency era lulled Washington into believing that technological superiority would always be available on demand, that industrial capacity would remain elastic, and that the arsenal of democracy could be switched back on when needed.

Those assumptions are now colliding with reality. The industrial base is thin. The acquisition system is baroque. The services do not speak to one another in ways that produce integrated, modern force design.

The Constellation-class sits at the intersection of these failures. It was meant to compensate for the Navy’s shrinking surface fleet, the retirement of aging cruisers, and the loss of Littoral Combat Ship hulls that never lived up to their billing. A functioning procurement system would have delivered these frigates on time, in numbers, with a clear role in distributed maritime operations. Instead, the Navy is watching the calendar and hoping the geopolitical clock does not run out first.

The Army faces its own version of this problem.

U.S. Soldiers assigned to 1st Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, sit ready to engage targets in an M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank during Combined Resolve XV live fire exercise at Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, Feb. 9, 2021. Combined Resolve XV is a Headquarters Department of the Army directed Multinational exercise designed to build 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Divisions’s readiness and enhance interoperability with allied forces to fight and win against any adversary. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Randis Monroe)

The 1st Battalion, 194th Armor Regiment,1st Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry Division, test fire their M1 Abrams Tank at Udairi Range, Kuwait, May 3, 2021. The main cannon of the M1 Abrams Tank shoots a 105mm round. (U.S. Army Photo by Spc. Juan Carlos Izquierdo, U.S. Army Central Public Affairs)

The M10 Booker was advertised as a nimble, survivable answer to the demand for mobile firepower in contested environments. But it has arrived in an era when the character of land warfare is being rewritten in real time.

Artillery has returned to primacy. Sensors and strike systems are compressing the battlespace. Uncrewed systems are eroding traditional concepts of maneuver. Yet the procurement system still behaves as though it has unlimited time to debate requirements rather than field urgently needed capability.

The Air Force offers its own cautionary tales. The KC-46 tanker—marketed as a low-risk, proven-airframe solution—has spent years hobbled by design flaws and repeated delays.

At the same time, the T-7A trainer has stumbled through escape-system failures and slipped timelines, mirroring the same procurement pathologies now crippling the Constellation-class and the M10 Booker.

The Industrial Base That Isn’t There

The deeper problem is no longer simply poor management—it is capacity.

The United States cannot build fast enough, cannot scale production rapidly, and cannot surge to meet strategic shocks. Shipyards struggle with workforce shortages and obsolete facilities.

Munitions manufacturing remains brittle. Key components depend on fragile supply chains that tighten whenever the world becomes dangerous.

This is why the Constellation program matters so much: it exposes the illusion that the United States can recover shipbuilding capacity through incrementalism. A similar mirage is projected over other programs.

The Army expects to modernize its formations even as the industrial base cannot sustain artillery production at the rates demanded by the war in Ukraine. The Air Force expects to maintain dominance in airpower while relying on procurement cycles that span decades rather than years.

Across the services, the gap between ambition and capacity continues to widen.

A Strategic Moment That Won’t Wait

All of this is happening at a time when the demands on American power are rising, not shrinking. The Western Pacific is becoming the decisive theater of the century.

Russia’s war in Europe has recalibrated assumptions about land warfare and industrial-age attrition.

Iran’s expanding network of proxies is pulling the Middle East into recurring crisis cycles. In each theater, the United States faces adversaries who are learning faster, building faster, and adapting faster than Washington’s procurement bureaucracy can process a change request.

A military built by committees will not survive the next war. A system that takes twenty years to field a platform in an era when the character of warfare evolves every three years will not deliver deterrence, let alone victory.

The Constellation-class debacle is a warning flare.

Reclaiming the Arsenal

Fixing this problem requires more than tinkering with contracting rules or scolding manufacturers.

It demands a return to strategic discipline. It requires clear choices about what the United States actually needs to fight and win in the coming decades, rather than what legacy constituencies insist on preserving.

It demands a radically new approach to industrial readiness: one that treats shipyards, munitions plants, and critical-component production as pillars of national security equal to alliances, basing, and force structure.

It also requires intellectual honesty.

The services must be willing to abandon programs that cannot deliver, compress procurement timelines, and embrace iterative development rather than chasing exquisite, once-in-a-generation platforms.

Warfare is now defined by adaptation cycles that reward speed, resilience, and redundancy. Those qualities are absent from the current system.

The Stakes of Inaction

The uncomfortable truth is that the United States is entering a period of global danger with a force designed for a bygone era and an industrial base that cannot replace losses fast enough.

The Constellation failure illustrates the problem. The Booker, KC-46, and T-7A cases show that it is not limited to the Navy.

The final SDD Test flight CF-2 Flt 596 was piloted by BAE Test pilot Peter Wilson, April 11, 2018, from the F-35 Pax River Integrated Test Force. The F-35C completed a mission to collect loads data while carrying external 2,000-pound GBU-31 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) and AIM-9X Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles. (Photo courtesy of Lockheed Martin)

The broader pattern reveals a military drifting toward strategic insolvency—not because talent is lacking or threats are misunderstood, but because the system responsible for transforming ideas into capability has become its own worst enemy.

A great power cannot deter, compete, or fight with paper strength. It needs real ships, real tanks, real munitions, and the ability to build more when the shooting starts.

Until Washington confronts the procurement system that no longer delivers these things, America will play a dangerous game: relying on the ghosts of past strength while its rivals arm for the future.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham. He writes a daily column for the National Security Journal.