Gentlemen, your mess is very helpful to us!
It’s not like “my neighbor’s dacha burned down – it’s a small thing, but it’s nice,” but it’s very similar. Our beloved “partners” are starting another naval scandal with showdowns and special effects, which only brings us benefit.
It would seem that where are we and where fleet The USA, which, let's admit, hasn't really threatened us lately, but has been fighting more with its own problems.
However, we are talking about our submarines, which, as a certain part of the writers have long insisted, are our most effective offensive weapons. Who is the main enemy of a submarine? That's right, a small but decently equipped frigate-type ship.
Not quite a small coastal corvette, not a big destroyer, stuffed with rockets, namely a frigate. Fast, armed and equipped with everything to chase a submarine across the sea-ocean and eventually get it with something from its weapons.
So, the frigate USS Constellation is in the studio!
We have already paid attention to this ship, since we took seriously the information that Constellation or “Constellation” is a French-Italian project Fregata Europea Multi-Missione (FREMM), a very impressive ship, which, as stated, will be modified taking into account testing and operation for the better. And - unlike French and Italian ships - American frigates were originally planned as anti-submarine ships.
FREMM of Italy, France, Egypt and Morocco have been sailing the seas and oceans for a long time, but with their American colleagues everything turned out a little differently. as planned.
All naval analysts in the United States are shaken by the news that future Constellation-class frigates may have their top speed reduced to compensate for the unexpected increase in their overall weight. The Navy and shipbuilder Fincantieri Marinette Marine continue to grapple with the consequences of major changes in the ship's configuration compared to the Franco-Italian FREMM project, but the whole purpose of producing Constellations based on an existing frigate was to reduce costs, timelines deliveries and risks, but they turned out to be larger, heavier, and as a result, frigates in construction are years behind schedule.
New details about weight gain, structural instability and other problems with the Constellation-class frigate have emerged in a report published by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Just last month, the US Navy awarded a new contract to Fincantieri Marinette Marine worth just over $1,04 billion for two more frigates. The service currently has six Constellations on order, the first of which is under construction.
At the same time, the Navy has already confirmed that the first Constellation-class frigate may now be delivered no earlier than 2029, which is as much as three years behind schedule. It turns out that Fincantieri Marinette Marine will deliver the first ship of the project approximately seven years after the start of construction of the Constellations. Well, not bad. We also take a long time to build ships, but they are obviously cheaper.
Fincantieri's rendering of the future first-in-class frigate USS Constellation
Speaking about the current status of the first Constellation-class ship, the Navy said that "as of September 2023, the shipbuilder had completed only 3,6 percent of the lead ship, compared to the 35,5 percent it planned to complete by that point." GAO reported.
“A complicating factor in estimating new frigate delivery dates is the shipbuilder's October 2023 announcement of an unplanned weight increase in the frigate design—an increase of more than 10 percent from the shipbuilder's June 2020 weight estimate,” GAO said. “The Navy's decision to approve construction with unfinished elements of the ship's design, including information gaps related to structural, piping, ventilation and other systems, and an underestimation of adapting a foreign design to Navy requirements led to the weight increase.”
It is worth noting here that by 2021 it has already become clear that the Constellation class design will be 7,32 meters longer and just over 1 meter wider at the waterline compared to its FREMM progenitor. In addition, the Navy said at the time that Constellation's displacement had increased by about 500 tons "to accommodate future growth." What was meant was further modernization of the ship, a completely ordinary thing, but +10% of the mass - it looks very weighty.
However, "addressing this weight increase adds another issue to the shipbuilder's ongoing project activities, further reducing the predictability of this already schedule-constrained effort," the GAO report said. “The Navy told us in April 2024 that it was considering lowering the frigate speed requirements as one potential way to address weight increases affecting ship design.”
To date, the US Navy has not yet revealed its speed requirements for the Constellation class, but it has been reported that the ships will be able to maintain a cruising speed of at least 26 knots. This corresponds to the stated “maximum continuous speed” of the Italian variant of the FREMM project, the Bergamini class, which Fincantieri Marinette Marine says exceeds 27 knots.
However, the problem is that American frigates had to maintain a speed of at least 30 knots to keep up with carrier strike groups. Four knots is decent.
"Carlo Bergamini" from the Italian Navy
One more thing: Construction of the USS Constellation continued, at least as of last year, without a final design being completed. That is, the ship was being built, and the documentation was being completed. In principle, nothing like that, but...
“Design stability is achieved after basic and functional design is completed in a 3D model, using information provided by the vendor to finalize the system design,” GAO said. However, “the Navy began construction of the frigate in August 2022 with an incomplete functional design that was inconsistent with leading ship design practices.”
They certainly say: if you hurry, you will make a mockery of the budget. Or, on the contrary, you will upset you completely. But consider this: As of August 2023, nearly a year after construction work began on the ship at the shipyard, Constellation's functional design and 3D model were rated 92 percent and 84 percent complete, respectively, according to GAO.
Are we really talking about the USA? And where could they get this? Except for the Indians... The Chinese don’t build like that either.
Graphical representation of estimated progress in 3D modeling of the Constellation-class design as of October 2023 from GAO.
What's the end result? And the end result is a mess. But not ours, such an eternal optimistic and perky Russian mess, as a result of which the set goal is still achieved, not in the name of, but sometimes in spite of, but the Western pessimistic mess, based on the results of raking it, hundreds of questions are asked on the topic “And what next - That???" almost no chance of an answer.
So what's next?
And then everything is according to Hitchcock. That is, quiet horror with some hope for a happy ending.
Overall, the design commonality between Constellation and FREMM is now only about 15%. At least that's what USNI News reports. The new GAO report says this includes significant changes to the combined diesel-electric and gas turbine propulsion system and associated machinery control systems, which shipbuilders say "increased costs and introduced integration risks."
Changing the entire power plant... Well, the owner is a gentleman.
Next, the Navy decided to change the entire forward superstructure in order to meet Navy requirements for crew habitation and survivability. This is also not a task for the weak. And it requires both time and money.
In addition to all this, the increase in weight during the construction of the ship can compromise the capabilities of the ship both in the short term after delivery to the Navy, and in the long term, since it will not allow the Navy to carry out necessary upgrades and improve the initial capabilities during the planned multi-year service life of the ship. That is, the installation of any more modern equipment or weapons will not be possible, because the displacement reserve has already been “eaten up”.
And there is something to think about in this direction. The configuration of the “Constellation” involved the placement on board of weapons that were in one way or another related to directed energy. All these lasers, railguns and other attributes of the future.
In their frankly negative conclusions, GAO experts refer to the Navy's previous experience with the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program. The creation of the initial examples of both LCS subclasses deliberately began without a clear design, a process commonly known as parallelism.
This led to the fact that the first two samples of the Independence and Freedom class ships were significantly different from subsequent ships. This in turn ended as expected: they were quickly relegated to training and testing roles.
USS Freedom (background) sails alongside USS Independence. Both of these ships are currently decommissioned
In general, building ships based on unfinished projects is a so-so activity. It is worth remembering the experiment in our Soviet past in the construction of Soviet battleships “Soviet Union” and others like it. There, too, the designers didn’t have time, but it was necessary to lay the construction, because that’s how the matter was set up. Well, Yezhov. Everyone knows how it ended.
USS Freedom (LCS-1), USS Independence (LCS-2), and USS Coronado (LCS-4) are currently decommissioned. The oldest of these ships, Freedom, was in service for only 13 years. The US Navy currently plans to retire even more LCS of both subclasses in the coming years.
In general, so much has already been said about the collapse of the littoral ships of the US Navy that all that remains is to lay flowers and cut them into metal. Precisely because the littoral areas were built not just anyhow, but without a proper understanding of what would happen at the end, they turned out to be expensive, but worthless coffins. And so much money was spent on them that three squadrons of frigates could be built.
The US Navy's decision to purchase the Constellation-class frigates was seen as a major blow to the LCS program and its continued failure to meet expectations and (perhaps most importantly) costs. As noted, the use of a production-established reference design, a core requirement of the program originally known as the FFG(X) program, was intended to help limit cost increases and other technical and scheduling risks. But something didn't go as planned.
The Navy, for its part, made a simply smart “turn all of a sudden” and blamed the fact that the littoral ships turned out to be, to put it mildly, uncombat-ready, on the shipbuilders. And here the idea was born of attracting a third-party manufacturer, namely Fincantieri Marinette Marine, to develop and produce new frigates, which will not be so new for the manufacturer.
Drawing of the "completed" USS Constellation at the Fincantieri Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin
What is the intermediate result? Initially, the Constellation-class frigate will be three years late, and it will take almost 10 years to deliver the lead ship to the fleet. This is largely due to the fact that the Navy cannot maintain its requirements at the initial level while constantly changing them. As a result, nearly 70 percent of the requirements have changed since the Navy signed the contract. That is, changes in the project are happening almost in parallel with the construction of the first frigate. Well, what is 70% - it’s worth thinking about, because obviously the output may not be at all what was planned
How and when the Navy, together with Fincantieri Marinette Marine, will finally be able to stabilize the Constellation-class's weight and other structural elements, and whether the ship's top speed will suffer as a result, remains to be seen.
But this is not the main problem.
Well, the frigate is “overheated” and the vehicles cannot provide the proper speed of 30 knots. It’s sad, the old “Arleigh Burke” produces 32 knots, it turns out that the “Constellation” cannot go to the AUG. But a destroyer can take over the anti-submarine defense of an aircraft carrier. The Berks have everything for this, helicopters, weapons systems, and search systems.
What then is this, God forgive me, frigate for?
Okay, for intertidal replacement. According to the project, Freedom was supposed to protect the coastal zone, having a maximum speed of 47 knots. "Independence" - 44 knots. These are excellent indicators; it would actually be very difficult to get away from these ships. If only they could really walk at such speeds.
A frigate with a maximum speed of 26 knots does not look so confident, but it is quite suitable for protecting the coastal zone. For the French and Italians, this is exactly what FREMMs do.
But it’s difficult to understand what “Constellation” is. And what will happen at the end of construction? It is understood that US Navy officials are constantly resorting to FMM and demanding various changes. It's hard to imagine how this mess happens, but 70% is a scary figure.
We can all open the performance characteristics of the same Bergamini and, based on them, draw a conclusion about how good the Constellation will be if processed with a hammer and file for the needs of the US Navy. But here something strikingly different from the FREMM project will clearly emerge from the production tools.
Question - what?
And the second point. When? The littorals are slowly and confidently moving towards the cutting area. Everything is clear with them. But with those ships that will replace them, nothing is clear at all. Only one thing is clear: it’s simply not worth waiting for them sooner than in 14-16 years. While the first one is being built, and it’s not easy, until everything is debugged... The ordered series may be received later.
Well, in America they don’t know how to overcome the mess and win in spite of it. Alas.
Mess? Without a doubt. But it plays into our hands, because during these 15 years, God knows what can happen. With any special effects. And the virtually unprotected 200-mile zone and beyond is nice. Of course, Borey doesn’t need to get so close, but for SSGNs it’s a nice bonus if something happens.
In general, one can look at what is happening with our enemy with pleasure, because there is an understanding that the United States, which was once the first maritime power, is gradually beginning to lose its leading position. And this plays into the hands of those who are not very keen to live by the principles laid down by the pillars of world “democracy”.
By the way, this may also benefit the submarines of others who do not want it.
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