During the Cold War, the US Navy expected that, if the war ever turned hot, it would have to escort cargo ships across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in order to sustain America’s resource-intensive fight against the Soviet Union.
That meant frigates, scores of them. These well-armed but inexpensive vessels were supposed to perform the tedious, unglamorous and often dangerous job of shepherding big, slow, vulnerable ships through waters teeming with Soviet submarines.
They would be busy – and they would take losses. But their crews’ hard work and sacrifice would keep war-winning supplies flowing.
When the Cold War ended, the frigates quickly disappeared – victims of peacetime cost-cutting and the rosy assumption that a global war was vanishingly likely. That assumption itself vanished, abruptly, in February 2014 as Russian troops invaded Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
The same month, the Navy announced a new frigate program for a new cold war. The current plan is to build 58 of the gun- and missile-armed ships, which also carry helicopters for tracking enemy submarines.
Ten years later, the Russians are in eastern Ukraine and tensions are rising in the western Pacific, yet not a single one of the new Constellation-class frigates is in the water. And the delays keep coming.
During a review of shipbuilding programs that US Navy secretary Carlos Del Toro ordered in January, inspectors discovered that the yard building the first four of the 496-foot, $1-billion vessels – Fincantieri in Wisconsin – is up to three years behind schedule. It’s possible the first ship won’t commission until 2029, a full 15 years after the Navy identified a need for a new frigate class.
This is … a problem. If the United States goes to war with Russia or China before 2029, it won’t have any frigates to escort ships across the two oceans. It will have to assign the task to 510-foot, $2-billion destroyers, only 73 of which are currently in the fleet – and which the Navy also depends on to accompany aircraft carriers, shoot down ballistic missiles and fire cruise missiles at enemy forces on land.
As recently as 2018, the Navy was warning sealift commanders that they shouldn’t count on any destroyers being available for escort duty during a major war. “The Navy has been candid enough with Military Sealift Command and me that they will probably not have enough ships to escort us,” Mark Buzby, a retired Navy rear admiral who then led the US Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration, told Defense News. “You’re on your own; go fast, stay quiet,” Buzby recalled Navy officials saying.
Frigates were supposed to solve that problem. And they still might – just not anytime soon.
To be clear, a shortage of middleweight escort ships isn’t a uniquely American problem. The Royal Navy is also desperately short of frigates, as are many European fleets.
But America, alone among the Western allies, has the resources to quickly build a big new escort force and protect shipping that benefits both Nato in the west and America’s Asian military alliances in the east.
In practice, however, the US naval shipbuilding industry is in the throes of a desperate labor crisis that began with the disruptions of the Covid pandemic and has grown worse as major industries compete for skilled workers in a thriving US economy.
Del Toro’s review found that several of the naval shipbuilding sector’s seven major shipyards – Bath Iron Works in Maine, Electric Boat in Connecticut, Newport News in Virginia, Austal in Alabama, Huntington Ingalls in Mississippi, NASSCO in California and Fincantieri – are years behind schedule on major ship programs. It’s not just the frigates.
But the frigate delays are among the worst. Frigate-builder Fincantieri is one of the newer shipyards and thus one of the least experienced. It has lost workers even faster than the other yards have. Rear Admiral James Downey, a special assistant to Navy leaders who co-led Del Toro’s review, told Defense News the Navy has been calling for a reorganization of program leadership at the frigate yard.
But a leadership reshuffling probably won’t remedy the yard’s basic problem: a labor shortage that’s so bad that the Navy is actually planning on ordering just six new warships in 2025 – half what it usually orders – in order to give the wider shipbuilding industry some breathing room.
While waiting, year after year, for new frigates it has needed for more than a decade, the Navy can only hope.
Hope that a major war doesn’t break out in the next five years. And hope that, if a major war does break out, vulnerable cargo ships can somehow safely cross submarine-infested waters on their own.
Hope isn’t much of a plan, however.
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