Point of order: in the last 24 hours there has been a lot of reaction to the headline, but not more than that. This is only a couple of minutes, so listen to the whole thing.
Stop. Some of you did not listen to the whole thing. Scroll up and hit play. I’ll wait for you here.
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OK, I look forward to the plan to grow the fleet after nuking the program that was supposed to help grow the fleet. Excuse my cynicism, but I’ve played Charlie Brown to OPNAV/NAVSEA’s Lucy and the football way too many times to expect it to magically work this time. Perhaps it will, but we are just about out of time.
As we wait for the magic beans brief, we need to review how we got here. Ignoring how we got here is a sure way to almost guarantee that we will just circle around to repeat the errors of this century of declining sea power.
Regulars here don’t need a reminder about my long history with what became the Constellation Class FFG. It represented a response to the failed LCS program that I first advocated circa 2007.
In essence, Plan Salamander acknowledged two decades ago that we clearly needed a lot of frigates to balance fleet capabilities and enable a robust presence that a global naval power requires. LCS was a failure from concept to construction, consumed too much time and cost of a generation of warship development. Our system was incapable of designing a warship in time, so we should license-build a few dozen EuroFrigates until we could create a new design of our own.
A half-dozen proven designs were out there; we just had to pick one. If we had started three years after I put that marker down, 2010, then by 2025 we would have…something.
Now we have nothing, working on two.
It is not shocking that we are here. I was excited when we got to look at options back in 2019, but also cautious when they downselected to the proven Franco-Italian FREMM, as we had hints that the failed intellectual sink that was/is NAVSEA was going to poison the entire program.
The Constellation Class, even prior to downselect, gave us indications and warnings that the bureaucracy which was tasked with making it happen, hated it. It hated it because, by its very existence, it stood as a testimony to their failures with LCS, DDG-1000, and CG(X).
The clue that they intended to destroy the rescue that FFG-62/FREMM represented was first seen in the bizarre 57mm main gun requirement that was put there just so the builders who failed with LCS could bid. They were handed a proven design, and they ruined it. They went from 85% commonality with the existing FREMM already serving with our allies, down to 15%.
Our naval nomenklatura refused to see the larger picture because they had no desire to. They killed it not so much from incompetence, but from spite. Explain it another way. You can’t.
The whole system is worm-ridden with corruption and incompetence...and it is the Admiralty and SES cadre who are at fault. Should you fault SECNAV Phelan nine months into the job for this…or should you shift fire to the organization that created this monster and dumped it in his lap?
Executive Summary: the fault is our Navy.
For decades, we have promoted the wrong people for the wrong reasons inside a system of incentives and disincentives that rides on top of a culture that, from your first FITREP to your pre-retirement training, encourages untruth, half-truth, and self-dealing. That is what gave us the cadre of Admirals and SES that created this mess.
It does not matter except on the edges if (D) or (R) is in the Executive Branch—most who find themselves appointed to positions of authority are blissfully ignorant of the length and breadth of the rot or see it as a feature and not a bug. As such, you see little difference in the ultimate outcome—a growth and reinforcement of the incompetent permanent bureaucracy.
Since Bush-43-1, no civilian leadership of either party in either the Executive or Legislative Branch has seen it in their interest or ability to go to war with the instruments of failure.
And so, here we are.
It is amazing how our Navy can have such a long record of complete dysfunction, for decades, and not change the people, processes, incentives/disincentives…anything.
As such, the Constellation affair underlines this simply BLUF: while other, smaller and poorer nations have, the U.S.A. has not successfully designed a warship since the Cold War.
We simply move from failure to fiasco and then tell each other what a great job we are doing. Have another Legion of Merit and carry out the Plan of the Day.
It all needs to be broken down to parade rest. Clear all the decks of almost everyone who has had a RDML (Sel.) or higher, or SES, position of responsibility in NAVSEA or other organizations associated with shipbuilding and maintenance. Defenestrate them all. Baseline reset.
Speak to me no longer of your concerns about expertise or institutional knowledge. Both are fetid and bankrupt if you judge them by their fruits: travesty, outrage, and unspeakable incompetence.
Without that, the same Janissaries will go back to their clean-sheet, Tiffany, and exquisite designs that will soak up billions of dollars, waste any institutional capital that is left, and worst of all—consume time—just as they did before.
To kill the Constellation Class FFG and replace it with yet-to-be named magic beans—without ripping up the people, processes, and institutions root-and-branch—will be about as effective as trying to kill poison ivy by taking fingernail clippers to the leaves on the vine, while leaving the vine itself intact.
Short term vanity that shall beget nothing but a larger problem tomorrow.
So, what is there to do besides the above—as Shipmate, this is the reality we find ourselves in?
- The punchline will become the reality: we will be building Arleigh Burke Destroyers—a design started four decades ago— until the crack of doom. Flight III DDG are really light cruisers, so in addition to having no destroyers under production, we will have no frigates.
- Unbalanced is our natural state: We will have very few options with a very narrowly constructed fleet. Unmanned systems cannot fill all these requirements. I don’t care what the industry briefs have to say.
- Unready for reality: a narrow fleet is a fleet ill-prepared for future shock. You will have a lack of flexibility merged with a brittleness of fleet that cannot continue the fight through attrition.
- People’s Republic of China (PRC) serial production: while we falter at even the lowest tier ship of a blue-water Navy, the PRC has all the major classes of warships under serial production in shipyards designed for surge production. Meanwhile, we appreciate our problems.
- Industry adrift: it is hard to invest capital or develop a robust workforce when you cannot rely on steady work.
- Weak horse: as great as the American Navy’s story is, it cannot paper over the serial failures of the last quarter century. The failures are bad enough, but our enemies also see our inability to self-correct. That invites aggression.
- Pray for peace: the Long Game is now, and the Davidson Window is opening. The out years will be too late.
As for me and my headspace? Where does this leave me?
We are far overdue for some energy we should have had at the tail end of the Bush Administration. It was clear this was needed during the Obama Administration, but inertia and distraction were the coin of the realm during that time of the Great Green Fleet and Lean-in Circles. As the dysfunction was obvious to even the most optimistic or blinkered institutionalist, many thought we would see this during the first Trump Administration, but the wrong players were in place and most of those four years were concerned with survival and COVID.
The Biden Administration? A time of the lotus eaters.
And so, here we are, ten months into the second Trump Administration. Not enough time to fix things yet, but plenty of time to dig a deeper hole with little time on the clock. If the magic beans don’t sprout, that is exactly what this does.
I’ve been in this mood, as you all know, for a long time. In 1Q2025, it is this kind of energy I am looking for. It is too late for anything else.
Where will it come from? I don’t know.
At some pier soon there will be a quint of monuments of generational failure by those who led the Navy in the first quarter of the 21st Century. A full house of fail: three Zumwalts and two Constellations
The frigate announcement comes at an interesting time. This isn’t an isolated problem with just a gray hull mindset. Our white-hulled friends have the same issue. Up to speed with the goings-on at the Eastern Shipbuilding Group?
Via our friends at gCaptain;
A new Government Accountability Office report has exposed severe problems plaguing the U.S. Coast Guard’s Offshore Patrol Cutter program, with both shipbuilders failing to deliver any vessels despite years of construction and program costs ballooning to $17.6 billion.
The GAO investigation found that the Coast Guard’s strategy of building ships before completing their designs has proven disastrous. Eastern Shipbuilding Group, the stage 1 contractor, has made minimal progress since GAO’s last assessment, leading the Coast Guard to terminate half of its original four-ship contract in July 2025. The situation deteriorated further when Eastern announced this month that it had suspended work on the remaining two vessels due to “severe financial strain”.
The report states that “construction of OPCs 1-4 began without a stable design, contrary to shipbuilding leading practices,” which “led to rework, which delayed ship deliveries”. OPC 1’s delivery has been pushed back more than five years, from June 2023 to at least late 2026.
Again and again and again.
This has serious implications. No one owes us our position in the world.
Everyone needs to turn off the TV/pause the podcast/put down the phone and sit down at the table and have a serious discussion with each other. The point of order is simply this: the United States has lost the ability to build warships. We are no longer the largest navy, and with the PRC—the world’s largest navy—having workable frigates, destroyers, cruisers and amphibious assault ships in serial production, we will soon no longer be the most capable.
It is a near-run wargame to see if we can sustain any measurable fight inside the first island chain. The second island chain is a coin flip. We are inside a decade from having concerns for the approaches to the third island chain—a problem no one has had to seriously concern themselves with in a century.
The future of American sea power…and America as a seapower, is bleak. It has been at crisis for over a decade, and now is at a greater crisis.
Our Navy is much weaker than it looks on paper. Here’s the top-5 reasons why:
- Out battleforce number include LCS. These are marginal ships in even secondary theaters like the Red Sea. They cannot help in the fight west of the International Date Line. Due to the large number of relatively ineffective LCS in our battleforce, we are substantially weaker than it appears on the spreadsheet. Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky, RUS N, would recognize our problem immediately.
- We don’t have the capability to perform regular maintenance on our surface ships and submarines as it is at peace, much less have the capacity to sustain the fight at war on the other side of the Pacific.
- We can’t meet the modest warship production goals right now, and lack the capacity to surge production even if we had good, workable designs, which we don’t.
- Our closest traditional maritime allies are getting weaker with each passing year. Two exceptions are Japan and Australia, with the former the only one that has the industrial capacity and political will to grow to a operationally significant level.
- The fight in the Pacific is not possible without a robust and attritable logistics force to support the fight forward. We don’t have that for fuel, weapons, or supplies.
The U.S. Navy did this to ourselves, and we have held no one, nor any institution, accountable. CNO’s Clark, Mullen, Roughead, Greenert, Richardson, Gilday, and Franchetti—they midwived this mass onto the lap of Caudle. None of them—five surface and two submariners—did anything to address the clearly budding problems in full bloom. Caudle just got in the job.
The uber-political Mullen—who is going to have a DDG named after him for his troubles—holds most of the responsibility as he was very deft in shaping the Admiralty of the second decade of this century that let the decay set deep. Richardson’s greatest contribution to this drift was his coup going out the door against his appointed successor with some ideas, Moran, who wound up backing out. Gilday expended all his personal and institutional capital on regressive socio-political diversity initiatives. Franchetti, to be fair, just seemed to be overwhelmed with the nightmare she inherited.
The institutions you think will rise to the occasion and help fix this problem? As I warned you almost three and a half years ago, they will not meet the challenge. They exist, promote, and think they prosper in the status quo.
Who will step in? I have no idea. Will the magic beans give us hope? We don’t even know what they are.
Pray for peace. Your Navy will not be ready for a major war for quite a while.
