US Navy axes frigate program in another blow to efforts to keep up with China’s fleet
By Brad Lendon, CNN
(CNN) — The US Navy’s beleaguered shipbuilding program took a major hit on Tuesday as Navy Secretary John Phelan announced he was cancelling plans to buy Constellation-class frigates, once heralded as a key part of US strategy to keep up with China’s rapidly expanding naval fleet.
Phelan said the multibillion-dollar program for the surface combatants wasn’t delivering any bang for the buck.
“I won’t spend a dollar if it doesn’t strengthen readiness or our ability to win,” the Navy secretary said in a post on social media.
“To keep that promise, we’re reshaping how we build and field the Fleet – working with industry to deliver warfighting advantage, beginning with a strategic shift away from the Constellation-class frigate program,” he said.
The US needs to be growing its fleet faster “to meet tomorrow’s threats,” a senior US defense official told reporters, according to USNI News.
“This framework seeks to put the Navy on a path to more rapidly construct new classes of ships and deliver capabilities our war fighters need in greater numbers and faster,” the official said.
The service had already contracted with Fincantieri Marine Group for six of the warships, touted on the Navy’s website as its “next generation small surface combatant.” At one time it planned to build 20 of them, at about $1.1 billion each.
The Constellation class would be “an agile, multi-mission warship,” capable of operating in open ocean or coastal environments, “providing increased combat-credible forward presence that provides a military advantage at sea,” a Navy fact sheet says.
With a displacement of about 7,200 tons, the ships were seen as filling a gap between the 10,000-ton Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers – the backbone of the US fleet – and 3,500-ton littoral combat ships (from another Navy shipbuilding program widely considered a failure).
The Navy has not had a frigate in its fleet since the USS Simpson was decommissioned in 2015.
During that time, Chinese shipyards have been turning out warships at frenetic pace, the nation surpassing the US in fleet size several years ago.
China’s growing numbers
According to a Pentagon estimate, the People’s Liberation Army Navy is expected to have about 400 hulls in the water by the end of this year. Some 50 of those ships are frigates, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The US fleet is around 240 ships and submarines.
It’s a troubling statistic, experts say, with history showing in any confrontation the larger fleet usually wins.
At inception, the Constellation class was envisioned as a faster way to build US Navy warships. It was based on an in-service Italian design, which would be modified to meet US requirements.
But those modifications proved to be more extensive than planned. Costs ballooned, and construction soon fell behind schedule. Plans for the USS Constellation to be delivered in 2026 have already been pushed back to 2029, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service.
Many experts said it was time the Navy pulled the plug on the troubled program.
“The Constellation was a great waste of money” and would not meet the Navy’s mission requirements for even lower-level threats, let alone a modern navy like China’s, said analyst Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain.
The ship has poor defenses against drones, aircraft, missiles and even small boats, he said.
“It would not survive long in an action against a Houthi-level threat,” he said, referring to the rebel group in Yemen that has been threatening shipping around the Arabian Peninsula.
“Just another in the string of bad government shipbuilding programs,” said naval analyst Sal Mercogliano, a professor at Campbell University in North Carolina.
Other troubled programs
Those programs include the littoral combat ships (LCS), derisively referred to as “little crappy ships” in some circles.
A 2023 investigation from ProPublica called that shipbuilding program “one of the worst boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and underperforming weapons systems.”
Since 2008, the Navy has commissioned 35 of the LCS with two more still under construction. ProPublica reported the total price for that program could reach $100 billion.
But the LCS have seen frequent breakdowns and have not provided the flexibility in mission assignments like the Navy originally planned. The service is already retiring the vessels, some with as little as five years on active duty.
But the fate of the Constellation class, with two ships still in the works, may be more akin to the Zumwalt-class destroyers. A plan to acquire 32 of those 16,000-ton stealth warships, which the Navy calls “the largest and most technologically advanced surface combatant in the world,” was pared back to just three as costs soared.
Like the Zumwalts, the two Constellations could end up as black sheep in the US fleet.
Phelan said Tuesday that construction would continue on the Constellation and the second ship in the class, the USS Congress, but said their fates are yet to be determined.
“Those ships remain under review,” he said while indicating the Navy wanted to keep shipyards in business and their workforces employed while it implements a “strategic shift” in its construction program.
A statement from Fincantieri Marine Group said it would transition its workforce to other programs.
“This new arrangement guarantees continuity and workload visibility for Fincantieri’s personnel” and shipyards on the Great Lakes, it said, calling them “a vital pillar of the US maritime industrial base.”
Phelan said US shipbuilding ability must be preserved.
“Shipbuilding is a foremost concern. The Navy needs ships, and we look forward to building them in every shipyard that can,” Phelan said.
Last summer, Phelan explained the Navy’s shipbuilding problems to Congress.
“All of our programs are a mess,” he said during a US House hearing in June.
“I think our best one is six months late and 57% over budget … That is the best one,” he testified.
Washington has already begun to use overseas shipyards in South Korea and Japan to do maintenance on some naval vessels, and a South Korean shipyard official told CNN recently that it could be possible to build US Navy ships there. But US law would have to be changed to allow that.
Mercogliano said the Navy’s problems don’t lie with the shipyards.
“The issue is not shipbuilding but the Navy and their ability to design,” he said.
Schuster agreed.
“Have you noticed that the US Navy has neither designed nor built an effective, problems-free surface warship since the Navy started building the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers over 20 years ago?” he asked.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
