Key Points and Summary – The U.S. Navy’s abrupt decision to effectively kill the Constellation-class frigate program after just two ships is more than another acquisition failure—it’s an indictment of America’s naval industrial system.
-A design sold as “low risk” collapsed under requirements creep, workforce shortages, fragile suppliers, and unrealistic timelines.
Zumwalt-class Guided Missile Destroyer USS Michael Monsoor (DDG 1001) transits the Pacific Ocean, June 25, 2022. Twenty-six nations, 38 ships, four submarines, more than 170 aircraft and 25,000 personnel are participating in RIMPAC from June 29 to Aug 4 in and around Hawaiian Islands and Southern California. The world’s largest international maritime exercise, RIMPAC provides a unique training opportunity while fostering and sustaining cooperative relationships among participants critical to ensuring the safety of sea lanes and security on the world’s oceans. RIMPAC 2022 is the 28th exercise in the series that began in 1971.
-The result is a growing gap between U.S. maritime strategy and the fleet needed to execute it, even as China better aligns shipbuilding with its ambitions.
-This piece argues that unless Washington rebuilds industrial depth and discipline, American sea power will slowly give way—not in wargame slides, but on the slips and drydocks that matter.
-America once built warships with industrial confidence. Its shipbuilding prowess intimidated rivals and reassured allies.
The U.S. Navy’s Warship Crisis
That era feels distant now. The abrupt decision to effectively terminate the Constellation-class frigate program—marketed for years as the Navy’s return to disciplined, low-risk design—after two ships exposes a deeper truth that can no longer be brushed aside. The Navy is struggling not with one failed ship class, but with a procurement system that cannot reliably deliver even the ships it claims are essential to its future force.
PACIFIC OCEAN (Oct. 1, 2024) The Independence-class littoral combat ship USS Mobile (LCS 26) comes alongside the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) for a fueling-at-sea, Oct. 1, 2024. Theodore Roosevelt, flagship of Carrier Strike Group 9, is underway conducting routine operations in the U.S. 3rd Fleet area of operations. An integral part of U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. 3rd Fleet operates naval forces in the Indo-Pacific and provides he realistic, relevant training necessary to execute the U.S. Navy’s role across the full spectrum of military operations – from combat operations to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. U.S. 3rd Fleet works together with our allies and partners to advance freedom of navigation, the rule of law, and other principles that underpin security for the Indo-Pacific region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Richard Tinker)
The Constellation-class was supposed to be a corrective after the Littoral Combat Ship debacle and the Zumwalt-class’ slow-motion collapse. By grounding the design in a proven European frigate already serving NATO allies, the Navy signaled it had learned its lesson: It would simply build a modern combatant based on a stable, mature foundation. Instead, the program stalled, slipped, and finally imploded. A supposedly low-risk platform ended up showing that even seemingly straightforward programs now buckle under the weight of U.S. naval procurement.
A System That Produces Failure on Schedule
The Constellation’s undoing does not mean the U.S. industrial base has collapsed wholesale. Submarines continue to be delivered, the Arleigh Burke line still turns out destroyers, and several yards retain real capability.
But these successes now coexist with unmistakable signs of a systemic doom loop: workforce shortages that delay schedules, fragile suppliers unable to handle demand spikes, capacity limits that pile up backlogs, and a procurement bureaucracy that repeatedly asks industry to do more—and to do it faster—than its current condition allows.
The Navy’s surface fleet has not brought a major new combatant class online in years without significant controversy, delay, or redesign. Promising designs are weighed down by requirements creep, integration challenges, and unrealistic timelines that almost guarantee disappointment. The Constellation’s parent design works. What failed was the U.S. system. No amount of optimistic briefing-room rhetoric can disguise that fact.
Strategy That Floats Free of Machinery
Washington continues to speak as if the United States commands a maritime industrial base capable of sustaining Indo-Pacific deterrence, forward presence, and distributed maritime operations. But the fleet charged with carrying out those missions is aging, overstretched, and overwhelmingly dependent on ships conceived before the turn of the century.
The gap between strategy and machinery is widening.
The Navy’s confused messaging on fleet size reflects this reality. The once untouchable 355-ship goal has dissolved into ambiguity, replaced by shifting, non-committal force structures that bear little relationship to what the industrial base can build.
Instead of grounding strategy in industrial capacity, Washington continues to backfill capacity into a strategy it cannot credibly implement.
The effective termination of the Constellation-class frigate blows a hole in a structure that was already shaky. It widens the gap between destroyers and small combatants, extends reliance on aging Arleigh Burkes, and forces an already overextended fleet to stretch further—and the demands on it were already rising.
The Industrial Base We Pretend Exists
The United States says it intends to compete with China for control of the world’s oceans. But competition requires physical machinery: ships launched on schedule, in sufficient numbers, and sustained at scale.
U.S. shipyards face persistent backlogs and maintenance delays, and its workforce cannot keep pace with demand. None of these issues is new, but all of them are getting worse.
(April 21, 2021) The Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyer USS Michael Monsoor (DDG 1001) leads a formation including the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62), USS Spruance (DDG 111), USS Pinckney (91), and USS Kidd (DDG 100), and the Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Coronado (LCS 4) during U.S. Pacific Fleet’s Unmanned Systems Integrated Battle Problem (UxS IBP) 21, April 21. UxS IBP 21 integrates manned and unmanned capabilities into challenging operational scenarios to generate warfighting advantages. (U.S. Navy photo by Chief Mass Communication Specialist Shannon Renfroe)
This does not mean U.S. shipbuilding is dead. But the system is fragile, and that fragility is now the central risk for U.S. naval power. The Navy must align its ambitions with the industrial base it actually possesses, not the one imagined in strategy documents.
Public data on Chinese shipbuilding is incomplete, but the trend is clear. Beijing is tightening the coherence between strategy and industrial output, while the U.S. system drifts.
The Constellation program should have demonstrated that a mature, modestly adapted design could be delivered predictably. Instead, it proved that even simple programs are vulnerable to the unrealistic expectations and institutional strain that have plagued American naval construction for two decades.
Rebuild or Retreat
Washington can continue pretending that failures such as the Constellation are isolated misfortunes, or it can recognize what this latest collapse reveals. This frigate was not a moonshot. It was precisely the kind of grounded, sensible program the Navy claims it wants—and the system still could not deliver it.
That is not a technical mishap. It is glaring evidence of a procurement and industrial ecosystem that has lost the predictability on which maritime power depends.
Either the United States restores industrial depth—through stable funding, disciplined requirements, integrated supplier networks, and a revitalized workforce—or it quietly accepts that its ability to project and sustain naval power will diminish.
A maritime power that cannot align its ambitions with its industrial reality becomes a maritime power in name only. Until Washington confronts that fact, the Navy’s plans will continue to contract, rivals will continue to build, and American sea power will continue to drift toward a future shaped by others.
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.
