The U.S. Navy’s Big Constellation-Class Frigate Mistake Still Stings

Key Points and Summary – The Constellation-class (FFG-62) sprang from a simple need: a real escort to free destroyers for harder jobs and spread combat power across more hulls.

-By “Americanizing” a proven FREMM design, the Navy aimed to cut risk and deliver fast.

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.

-Instead, integration changes, design churn, weight growth, and an overloaded industrial base pushed the lead ship three years late and drove costs up.

-None of that dooms the class. With a frozen baseline, ruthless weight control, shore-based prototyping, supplier growth, and a measured second-yard plan, the Navy can still field a capable, affordable frigate—just later than advertised.

Constellation-Class Frigates: Promise, Problems, And The Path To A Useful Fleet

The U.S. Navy didn’t wake up one day and rediscover frigates. It arrived here the hard way.

After two decades of trying to make the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) be all things to all missions, the fleet still needed a tough, affordable escort that could do real blue-water work: protect logistics ships and amphibious groups, hunt submarines, contribute to air defense, and sling credible anti-ship and land-attack weapons—without tying down an Arleigh Burke destroyer to every convoy or strait transit.

Strategically, Distributed Maritime Operations also pushes combat power across more hulls, complicating an adversary’s targeting and preserving combat credibility if a few ships are knocked out. The Navy wanted a “Tier 2” surface combatant that was survivable, networked, and interoperable with allies, but cheaper and simpler to crew than a Flight III Burke. That’s the niche the Constellation-class (FFG-62) is meant to fill.

Littoral Combat Ship. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

However, that concept hasn’t been easy to put into practice.

The Core Idea: Low Risk By Starting With A Proven Parent

After LCS, the Navy made a vow: no clean-sheet dazzlers. The plan was to pick a parent design that had actually been built and sailed, then Americanize it with U.S. sensors, weapons, and survivability standards.

Fincantieri’s bid, based on the Italian FREMM frigate, won in 2020. On paper, this was the safest path: a modern, quiet anti-submarine hull with room for U.S. equipment and growth. The result would be a 7,000-plus-ton multi-mission frigate with a 32-cell Mk 41 VLS, AN/SPY-6 EASR radar, Aegis-derived combat system, Mk 110 57mm gun, RAM, NSM canister anti-ship missiles, and a proper ASW suite backed by an MH-60R and MQ-8C.

The promise wasn’t just capability; it was schedule discipline. By avoiding a from-scratch design, the Navy expected to compress timelines, lock key interfaces early, and start delivering ships in the mid-to-late 2020s.

What Actually Happened: Concurrency Came Back In The Side Door

“Use a parent design” is not the same as “copy and paste.” Once the Navy started grafting in U.S. radars, combat systems, standards, shock and survivability rules, electrical plant differences, and growth margins for decades of upgrades, the frigate moved away from its parent in meaningful ways. Each “small” change cascaded into new weight, new power, new cooling, and re-routing.

At the same time, the Navy—chastened by past mistakes—insisted that the builder finish far more of the 3-D functional design before cutting large volumes of steel. That’s sensible, but it collided with workforce shortfalls, supplier learning curves, and a digital model whose maturity turned out to be less than internal metrics initially suggested. The net effect: the program became trapped between design churn and schedule promises. When the dust settled, the lead ship’s delivery slid three years, and the Navy publicly acknowledged a 2029 arrival instead of the original mid-decade target.

In other words, the parent-design hedge reduced risk—but couldn’t eliminate it once “Americanization” piled up.

Weight Growth: Death By A Thousand Paper Cuts

Frigates live and die on weight, margins, and metacentric height. The Constellation-Class design has experienced unplanned weight growth, the classic symptom of “just one more” change repeated many times. Extra armor here, cableways there, heavier foundations for a radar face, a thicker bulkhead for shock standards—each justified, all cumulative. Added weight threatens range, speed, seakeeping, and service life (if you burn margins now, you have less left for future upgrades).

The solution isn’t magical; it’s engineering discipline: shave pounds everywhere, re-balance loads, and lock the design so trades don’t creep back in. The good news is that these are solvable problems when a program enforces configuration control. The bad news is they consume time—and time is the one thing this program already spent.

Design Maturity And The “85 Percent Before Build” Lesson

Shipbuilders and auditors tend to agree on one hard truth: if you finish the functional design before you flood the dock, you’ll save years and billions downstream. The frigate program set higher design-completion thresholds precisely for this reason. But measuring design maturity isn’t trivial; counting drawings isn’t the same as proving systems will fit, route, cool, and maintain in the real hull form. As the Navy tightened metrics to reflect actual progress, it found that the design was less mature than headline percentages implied. Construction slowed while teams chased down interferences and rerouted systems in the model.

Delays and pauses in work are frustrating now, but it’s the right pain to take: fixing design in the computer beats cutting steel, discovering interferences, and then re-working a warship at sea trial prices.

Industrial Base: Two Yards, Too Much Work, Too Few People

Only a handful of U.S. yards build complex warships. Those yards are already loaded with Columbia-class SSBNs, Virginia-class SSNs, Burke destroyers, and amphibs, while also digging out from maintenance backlogs. The Constellation-Class line shares that ecosystem—steel mills, castings, switchboards, cables, chillers, gearboxes, and the skilled trades to assemble them. You can appropriate money; you cannot appropriate experience. Even with hiring surges, it takes years to train nuclear welders and marine electricians who hit first-time quality on warship standards.

That’s why the Navy has flirted with the idea of on-ramping a second frigate yard once the design stabilizes. It’s also why near-term cadence will lag plans until suppliers and workers climb a tough learning curve.

Cost Growth: Constellation-Class Lead-Ship Reality Versus PowerPoint Hope

Lead ships are always liars—they lie optimistically. The Navy’s early should-cost targets assumed the parent-design shortcut would keep the first hull close to the bid. Reality says otherwise. Redesign, rework, longer spans in the yard, and supplier delays have pushed the lead-ship price up, and follow-on ships won’t hit steady-state unit costs until the design stops moving and the workforce repeats the same tasks on the same drawings.

None of this makes the frigate a “bad buy.” It does make it a predictable one: the famous rule of first-of-class warships (pay more now than you promised, then earn it back with volume and stability) still applies.

What The Navy Still Gets Right With Constellation-Class

Even bruised, the class remains a useful design if finished well:

A Real Escort, Not A Science Project. A 32-cell VLS, a credible radar, and a modern combat system let the ship contribute to air defense instead of hiding behind destroyers.

Serious ASW. FREMM lineage plus U.S. acoustics and aviation det give the class the quieting and sensors to matter in the undersea fight.

Strike And Sea Control. NSM brings modern anti-ship reach; VLS can host SM-2/ESSM for air defense and VL-ASROC for ASW kills.

Interoperability. A U.S. frigate that looks and talks like U.S. ships—but resembles allied FREMMs—slots naturally into coalitions.

If the yard locks the design, trims weight, and finds rhythm, the Navy gets a frigate that frees up destroyers, thickens escort lines, and fits the DMO logic of spreading risk across more shooters.

What Must Be Fixed—And How

1) Freeze The Design, Then Protect It. A firm baseline is oxygen. Every “one-off improvement” late in the game should trigger a near-automatic no, or a funded change with a measured impact on weight, power, cooling, and schedule.

2) Run A Ruthless Weight-War. Stand up a red-team empowered to pull mass: lighter foundations, smarter routing, composite substitutions where prudent, and relentless part-by-part shaving. Weight is money and service life; treat it like both.

3) Prototype The Pain Points Ashore. Build and beat up land-based test sites for the radar foundations, cooling loops, power conversion, and combat-system integration. Dock-time discoveries are the most expensive ones you can make.

4) Grow Suppliers—For Real. Fund second sources for fragile single-supplier items and buy long-lead parts early. If a $30 valve can hold up a $1.2B ship, buy three now and sleep better.

5) Train For Repetition. The cheapest efficiency gain is muscle memory. Keep the same teams on the same modules for Ships 2–4 so they capture learning instead of starting over.

6) Decide On A Second Yard—But Not Too Soon. A second builder makes sense after design maturity and stable production at the lead yard. Clone chaos early, and you just get two late, heavy ships.

The Timeline Reality: A Painful Slide, Not A Death Sentence

Sliding the lead ship’s delivery into 2029 hurts. It delays the escort capacity the fleet needs as Burkes juggle ballistic-missile defense, carrier screening, and presence patrols. It also compresses the window to retire older cruisers and Flight I destroyers without leaving gaps in air defense coverage.

But schedule slips are not destiny if the program uses the time to finish the model, trim the weight, and stabilize suppliers. A bad 2025 can still become a decent 2028 if discipline replaces hope.

What Success Looks Like In 2030

A successful Constellation-Class program by the turn of the decade would mean:

Lead ship delivered and working up without months of yard re-visits for basic defects.

Ship 2 and Ship 3 on tighter intervals, with measurable labor-hour reductions and fewer trial cards.

Weight back in the box, preserving range and growth margins.

Combat system upgrades flowing by software more than by ship-alts, keeping life-cycle costs tolerable.

A decision on second-yard induction made with a stable design in hand, so competition accelerates delivery instead of doubling the chaos.

That trajectory delivers not just ships, but a repeatable product the Navy can buy in numbers without blowing holes in the rest of the shipbuilding plan.

The Case For Staying The Course—With Teeth

There’s a temptation to declare the program “broken” and pivot to something else. That would be a mistake. The mission need—credible escorts in numbers—has only grown. What’s required is not a new science project; it’s hard-nosed program management: tie funding to design milestones, reward weight reduction, penalize avoidable rework, and publish honest metrics so Congress understands what’s improving and what isn’t.

Constellation-Class still offers the best near-term path to a balanced surface force: destroyers for the heaviest air-missile jobs, frigates for escort and ASW backbone, and smaller unmanned craft to extend the fleet’s sensors and magazines. But the Navy only gets that mix if the frigate program stops moving the goalposts and starts shipping ships.

Verdict

The Constellation-class is exactly what the Navy asked for after LCS: a real frigate with serious sensors, weapons, and ASW chops, built off a proven parent to control risk. It has also become exactly what the Navy feared: a program where Americanization, design churn, and an overstretched industrial base turned a conservative bet into a late, heavier, and pricier boat. Both truths can be true at once.

This program still has promise—the hull form, radar, VLS, and ASW suite will matter in real fights. To get there, the Navy and its partners must finish the design, win the weight war, and lock the yard into repeatable work.

Do that, and Constellation-Class will free destroyers for the hardest jobs, thicken the screen around carriers and logistics ships, and give Distributed Maritime Operations the affordable mass it needs. Fail, and we will have built a great set of briefing charts instead of the frigate fleet the era demands.

About the Author: Harry J. Kazianis

Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula) is Editor-In-Chief and President of National Security Journal. He was the former Senior Director of National Security Affairs at the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI), a foreign policy think tank founded by Richard Nixon based in Washington, DC. Harry has over a decade of experience in think tanks and national security publishing. His ideas have been published in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and many other outlets worldwide. He has held positions at CSIS, the Heritage Foundation, the University of Nottingham, and several other institutions related to national security research and studies. He is the former Executive Editor of the National Interest and the Diplomat. He holds a Master’s degree focusing on international affairs from Harvard University.

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