(Another) U.S. Shipbuilding Disaster - The Constellation Class & U.S. Fleet Modernisation

Episode Overview

• The podcast explores the immense difficulty and expense of modern warship design, highlighting a series of critical procurement failures within the US Navy.
• It details the "three strikes" against the US Navy's surface combatant programs: the overly ambitious Zumwalt-class destroyer, the flawed Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), and the recently canceled Constellation-class frigate.
• The core of the discussion focuses on the Constellation-class, which began as a low-risk plan to adapt a proven European design but failed due to extensive "Americanization," massive redesign, and starting construction before the design was complete.
• This pattern of failure is contrasted with the rapid expansion and modernization of China's navy, raising significant questions about the US Navy's ability to maintain its strategic edge.

Key Concepts

• Modern Warship Procurement Challenges: Building advanced naval vessels is a universally difficult task, with nations like Canada, Germany, and Russia facing issues with cost, armament, and reliability.
• US Navy's "Three Strikes": A sequence of major procurement disasters has hampered fleet modernization.
  • Strike 1: Zumwalt-class Destroyer: An expensive and technologically ambitious program that resulted in only a few ships with a limited strategic role.
  • Strike 2: Littoral Combat Ship (LCS): Designed for speed over survivability, the LCS program was curtailed due to high costs, performance shortfalls, and the failure of its core "mission module" concept.
  • Strike 3: Constellation-class Frigate (FFG(X)): Intended as a safe, affordable solution, this program became a third major failure.
• The Parent Design Fallacy: The strategy to base the Constellation on the proven Italian/French FREMM frigate backfired when US Navy requirements for speed, survivability, and future growth led to a near-total redesign, dropping design commonality from a planned 85% to just 15%.
• Premature Construction: A critical error in the Constellation program was starting construction in 2022 before the heavily modified design was stable or complete, leading to cascading delays and cost overruns.
• Arleigh Burke-class as a Stopgap: In the face of new program failures, the Navy has repeatedly defaulted to building more of the reliable but aging Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, a design that has reached its physical limits for future upgrades.
• Systemic "Needs vs. Wants" Problem: A core issue identified within the US Navy is the inability to distinguish between essential "needs" and aspirational "wants," leading to requirements creep that makes new shipbuilding programs overly complex, expensive, and prone to failure.

Quotes

• At 0:12 - "Some German warships are so lightly armed they might struggle with the whole war part of the job description." - An example of nations struggling with warship procurement, focusing on armament.
• At 0:39 - "The point is when it comes to warships, shit happens." - A summary of the universal difficulty and unpredictability inherent in designing and building complex naval vessels.
• At 1:07 - "Well, the LCS program produced fewer ships than planned, at a higher per-unit cost than planned... and which weren't ideal for the modern Navy's needs. Strike one, strike two." - Comparing the failure of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program directly to the Zumwalt-class, marking it as a second major procurement disaster for the US Navy.
• At 1:22 - "The idea this time was to play it safe. Take an existing, internationally successful frigate design, adapt it a bit for United States service, and come up with something the US could crank out affordably and in huge numbers." - Describing the original, low-risk strategy behind the Constellation-class frigate program.
• At 2:34 - "...the People's Liberation Army Navy is cranking out modern warships, while the US seemingly hasn't hit a surface combatant design home run since last century." - Setting the strategic context by contrasting the US Navy's procurement struggles with the rapid expansion of the Chinese fleet.
• At 27:10 - "DDG-51... is highly capable, but after over 40 years in production and 30 years of upgrades, the hull form does not provide sufficient space and center-of-gravity margin to host future capabilities." - A Congressional Research Service report explaining why the Arleigh Burke-class design has reached its modernization limits.
• At 33:02 - "We don't want to have a repeat of some of the lessons of the LCS where we got going too fast." - A US Navy Rear Admiral's statement from 2021, expressing a desire for a cautious approach that the program ultimately failed to follow.
• At 38:58 - "I'll be brutally honest. I don't think people truly understood what it meant to adapt a parent design to Navy requirements." - A Navy official's blunt assessment of the fundamental miscalculation at the heart of the Constellation program's strategy.
• At 40:05 - "For example, the program's calculated functional design stability at construction start was based on a metric that scores design CDRL items as 50 to 75 percent complete merely because the shipbuilder had submitted them to the Navy..." - A GAO report exposing the flawed metrics that created a false sense of design readiness before construction began.
• At 42:47 - "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..." - The Secretary of the Navy's ironic justification for canceling the Constellation program, citing the very need for speed the program was meant to address.

Takeaways

• To prevent project failure, strictly differentiate between essential requirements ("needs") and desirable but non-critical features ("wants") to avoid scope creep.
• Adapting a "proven" international design is not a guaranteed shortcut; extensive modifications can introduce more risk, cost, and complexity than starting a new design from scratch.
• Never begin physical construction on a complex engineering project until the design is fully mature and stable, as this is a recipe for catastrophic delays and budget overruns.
• Employ honest and accurate metrics to track project progress; relying on misleading "paper progress" masks deep-seated problems until it's too late.
• Serial procurement failures have a cumulative effect, creating significant long-term capability gaps and ceding strategic advantage to competitors.
• Relying on aging but proven platforms as a fallback is a limited, short-term solution that cannot replace the need for successfully developing and fielding next-generation systems.