Constellation frigate design will be ready in May
USNI News
Navy: Constellation frigate design will be ready in May, second yard could come in FY 2027
By Mallory Shelbourne and Sam LaGrone
13 December 2024
A Fincantieri Marinette Marine model of the proposed USS Constellation (FFG-62). USNI News Photo
ARLINGTON, Va. – The Constellation-class frigate’s design should be mature enough for the shipbuilder to enter continuous production by May, the Navy’s top acquisition executive said this week.
The assessment from the Navy comes after the service earlier this year disclosed delays in completing the design of the 6,700-ton guided-missile frigate. Shipbuilder Fincantieri Marinette Marine was set to deliver the first frigate – Constellation (FFG-62) – in 2026, but now the delivery could be three years later.
“In the meantime, we’ve awarded that company a handful of different ships, and we’re going to get them to the place where they could build them at speed, knowing that we’re significantly delayed in getting the first ship out,” Navy assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition Nickolas Guertin said Wednesday.
Navy leadership was surprised by the problems plaguing the Constellation-class when the service assessed the program as part of Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro’s 45-day shipbuilding review, Guertin said.
While the first ship may be up to three years late, the completion of the design clears the way for the Navy to tap a second yard to build more hulls before Connie delivers.
“This design will form the basis of a potential follow-on contract competition anticipated in [Fiscal Year] 27,” a spokesperson for Guertin told USNI News of the forthcoming mature design.
In addition to ongoing workforce challenges, design maturity is contributing to the delays. Originally based on the FREMM surface combatant in use by the Italian and French navies, the U.S. Navy had to significantly modify the design to meet U.S. survivability and growth margin standards.
Speaking at the Naval Institute’s Defense Forum Washington event, Fincantieri Marinette Marine CEO Mark Vandroff said the Navy and the shipyard underestimated the complexity of altering the design.
“With the frigate what you have is the contractor responsible for the functional design but the government has to approve every artifact,” he said.
“Then we wondered, after we set that up, why it took way longer than originally estimated. Because industry didn’t have the capability that we thought we had to do the design. But then on the Navy, they were bottlenecked in bandwidth [to make approvals].”
Meanwhile, a Government Accountability Report released in May found that the Navy’s design choices have caused “unplanned weight growth,” meaning the frigate might not have the margin for necessary modernization over the course of its planned service life.
Rear Adm. Kevin Smith, who leads the program executive office for unmanned and small combatants and previously served as the Navy’s frigate program manager, noted a distinction between the functional design and the detail design.
“If you ask some of the people that were involved in that process from industry, they would say that 85 percent functionally is the same, not the detail design,” Smith said Thursday at a symposium hosted by the American Society for Naval Engineers. “From a functional perspective, very similar to the FREMM.”
GAO Image
“The way Admiral Moton used to describe it is, it’s like your Italian grandfather, you have the same genes, but you look nothing alike from a detail perspective,’” he added, referring to Rear Adm. Casey Moton, who previously led PEO USC. “What I would expect is when you walk through the Constellation when it’s in the water, you’ll say, ‘this feels like a FREMM.’ Because it does. It feels like a FREMM, functionally. The bridge is here, the spaces as far as layout are very similar. Even the propulsion plant lineup is very similar.”
As for the follow-on shipyard, last month the Navy issued a request for information to industry to find out what companies could build additional frigates.
“PMS 515 invites all U.S. surface combatant shipbuilding sources who are interested in the FFG 62 Class ships, to submit written information sufficient to demonstrate their ability to fulfill the Government requirements,” reads the Nov. 15 government solicitation.
Six shipbuilders responded to the RFI, according to Guertin’s spokesperson. The Navy hosted an industry day on Wednesday with those companies and plans to update the RFI based on the information it received.
“We’re really in a market analysis phase,” Smith said of the ongoing process to pursue a follow-on yard. “We’re looking at, okay, from a 30-year shipbuilding plan, we need to have more capacity to build frigates. So we’re doing that market research now.”
Since the Navy awarded the initial contract in 2020, the service planned to have a follow-on yard eventually join the program. Fincantieri officials have made it clear the Wisconsin yard can only build two frigates per year.
This week, Del Toro said it would take some time to evaluate the yards that could work on a second production line for the frigate.
“I think it’s going to take industry some time to respond to the RFI, obviously, and it’s going to take some time to really assess the inputs that we get from industry as well before we actually move forward with potentially selecting a second shipyard,” Del Toro told USNI News on Wednesday.
“We’ll receive from industry which shipyards feel like they have the capacity, the capability of talent in order to be able to be a second shipyard [for the frigate].”
Smith specifically mentioned Austal USA, Bollinger, HII’s Ingalls Shipbuilding and General Dynamics Bath Iron Works as potential second yards. But he noted that all of the yards are facing challenges recruiting and retaining workers and many of the yards are full. He suggested a potential teaming arrangement where one yard assembles parts of the ships, as GD and HII do with submarines.