If you were to delete every capability the Royal Navy has starting from the least important and working your way up, frigates would be the last capability to go. They are totemic and define navies. They are fast, lethal, flexible, survivable and often cheaper than their destroyer siblings. They are the backbone of the ability to project power and deter potential adversaries that extends far beyond their core ability to ‘just’ hunt submarines.
You can’t – or shouldn’t, anyway – have aircraft carriers, supply or amphibious ships without frigates. You can’t escort merchant vessels or protect shipping lanes or underwater infrastructure without them. My nuclear submariner friends will challenge for the top spot but their tasking is much narrower and we can afford far fewer of them.
Admiral Lord Nelson agrees with me: ‘Were I to die at this moment, “want of frigates” would be stamped upon my heart’.
It was therefore an interesting decision when the largest navy in the world (then) called time on building frigates by electing not to replace the Oliver Hazard Perry class (OHP) frigate, decommissioning the last of 51 hulls in 2015. The US Navy had clearly decided that anti-submarine warfare could be done instead by their fleet of nuclear attack submarines (correct but an expensive way to do it) an array of aircraft (correct but reduced persistence) and the mighty Arleigh Burke class destroyer (not correct) – and that Arleigh Burkes could do all the other surface combatant warship-type things very well (correct).
But this USN posture has clearly changed. This could be due to the rate at which China is building nuclear submarines, or because the demand for US attack submarines continues to outstrip supply, or the failure of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) to provide credible alternative surface presence.
Or it could be what we smugly knew all along in the Royal Navy, that anti-submarine warfare is not a part-time sport – your ship either does it with 100 per cent focus or you become an easy target. Destroyers with a bow sonar tacked on, noisy gas turbines and inevitable air defence focus fall into this category, no matter how capable.
It was not long after the last OHP paid off that the US Navy decided it needed to get back into the frigate business and began looking for suitable options. The last two US surface warship designs – the Zumwalt class destroyer and the Littoral Combat Ships – had been disasters. Understandably the USN picked a successful overseas design, the Franco-Italian Frégate Européenne Multi-Mission (FREMM) – a multi purpose frigate already in service with the French and Italian navies. At just over 6000 tons with a decent variable depth sonar, quiet propulsion and lean crew of 130, this made perfect sense.
On 30 April 2020 the US Navy announced that Fincantieri had been awarded the contract for the first American frigate to be built in Marinette, Wisconsin, the yard previously best known for building the ill-fated Freedom class variant of the Littoral Combat Ship. The contract included an option to build ten ships totalling $5.5 billion – cheap by modern warship standards. By October 2020 it was announced that the first frigate would be named USS Constellation.
Then the problems started. Initially, the US version of the FREMM required replacing or improving about 15 per cent of the original design, predominantly to satisfy the USN’s more stringent survivability criteria. However this has crept up to a total of 511 alterations, changing fully 85 per cent of the original FREMM design. Constellation is now 23 feet longer than a FREMM, has the bow dome removed (an interesting decision in a frigate as this is where the hull-mounted sonar normally lives), more power generation, a quieter propellor design and a larger superstructure to take US systems. All of this has added about 500 tons to the displacement.
It is basically a different ship and would probably have been cheaper if it had been. A combination of this project creep and workforce retention problems in the Marinette yard means that the first of class will be 36 months late and significantly over budget, particularly for the hulls beyond the initial ten. Twenty are expected.
When steel started being cut in August 2022, official statements said that the design was 80 per cent mature. This April, when it was announced that Constellation would be ready in 2029 and not 2026, that figure was still at 80 per cent. In other words, they’re altering the plans as they go along. Personally I’m a fan of building things without reading the instructions, but they are nice to have by you.
Another big issue with the project creep is that the weight of the ship and the spare space within it are going up and down respectively. One of the clearest lessons from the Royal Navy Type 23 frigates is that if you make a ship just the right size for the start of its life, it will be too small by the end – as more and more equipment is fitted you run out of space and the ship gets too heavy. It’s one of the reasons the Type 23 life extension programme is so expensive – there is no room left.
We were luckier with the Type 45 destroyer because there was a requirement from the start to have the heavy Sampson fire-control radar at the top of the mast: this meant that the ship had to be big so that it would not roll over. At 7,500 tons the Type 45s have plenty of weight and space for upgrades – if there was any money to get them.
Meanwhile back in Wisconsin, Constellation is not even built yet and the design is almost full up.
The US Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) report this month called “Navy Frigate – Unstable Design Has Stalled Construction and Compromised Delivery Schedules” has proposals in it to “reduce its propulsion capability which would free up space but also make the ship slower”. In a ship like this with diesel-electric as a vital part of its propulsion system, there is also the issue of having enough electrical power for all the various new things which may be added later – this is more important than taking a few knots off the top speed.
There are five recommendations in there as to how to take this forward but it seems that no amount of cash to keep the workers on in the yard, or even a second building facility will see Constellation in service before 2029. The project is in trouble.
It’s by no means a problem unique to the USN, this tendency to take a successful foreign design, decide to build it domestically and maybe tweak it a bit, and mess it up in the process. We Brits did this with the American Apache helicopter: we have just had our Apaches rebuilt in America at vast expense because the special British-meddled-with version (which wound up costing several times the price of a US-made Apache) had no viable pathway forward. Similarly we took the successful ASCOD 2 armoured vehicle design, messed it up and attempted to assemble it in a former forklift factory in Wales and – hey presto – it is now the disastrous Ajax.
Getting back to the Constellation, America’s problem is a problem for us all because we Western allies need the US Navy back in the underwater warfare business with the sort of numbers only they can bring, and sooner rather than later.
Nato recognises the importance of this – on Tuesday the alliance launched a new Maritime Centre for Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure, headquartered in Northwood, London. The launch announcement says: ‘Like other aspects of maritime security, securing CUI goes beyond posturing to deter future aggression; it includes robust coordination, to actively monitor and counter malign or hybrid threats, denying any aggressor the cover of “plausible deniability.”’
Deterring Russian undersea grey zone activity – and shaping operations to defeat the Chinese submarine threat should the worst happen – will require more ships than we currently have. The more frigates we can add therefore the better: British Type 26, European FREMM or American Franken-FREMM – it doesn’t matter, numbers do. Nelson would agree.
More generally, we need the US Navy and its shipbuilding industry back making excellent warships like they used to. The Nimitz class carriers and Arleigh Burke destroyers are two of the best warship classes ever built. The Zumwalt and the Littoral Combat Ships are two (technically three) of the worst.
Constellation has the potential to become the new OHP – light, well-armed, capable and everywhere – but only if America’s shipbuilders and the US Navy can get their mojo back.
Tom Sharpe is a former Royal Navy officer and frigate captain
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