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Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Troubled Constellation Frigate Is Now At Least 759 Metric Tons Overweight
The U.S. Navy's future Constellation class frigates are set to be at least 759 metric tons (close to 867 U.S. tons) heavier than expected, a 13 percent increase over earlier estimates. Concerns have previously been raised about how weight growth with the Constellation class design, which was still being finalized as of April, could negatively impact the ships' top speed and other capabilities. Overall, the frigate program, the entire point of which was to leverage an existing in-production design to help reduce risk and speed up delivery, remains years behind schedule and at risk of ballooning costs. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional watchdog, included the new details about the Constellation class design's weight growth and other updates about the program in an annual assessment of major procurement efforts across the U.S. military released today. The U.S. Navy chose Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, a wholly owned subsidiary of Italy's Fincantieri, to build the new frigates in 2020. The ship's core design is derived from the Franco-Italian Fregata Europea Multi-Missione (FREMM). The Navy currently expects to take delivery of the first-in-class USS Constellation in 2029, three years behind schedule. The service has, to date, awarded Marinette Marine contracts to build six Constellation class frigates. 'In October 2024, the Navy reported 759 metric tons of weight growth from initial estimates – nearly a 13 percent increase – due in part to the underestimation of applying Navy technical requirements to a foreign ship design,' per GAO's new report. 'We previously reported that unplanned weight growth during ship construction can compromise ship capabilities, as the fleet seeks to alter and improve initial capabilities over the planned decades-long service life of the ship. Such alterations may leave frigates less combat capable, limit the ability to add capabilities to address evolving threats, and reduce planned service lives.' It is unclear from the GAO report whether this 759 metric ton increase is in terms of gross weight or displacement, and whether or not it is a total figure or additive on top of previous growth. By 2021, it had already emerged that the Constellation class' displacement was expected to be around 500 tons greater than that of the parent FREMM design, ostensibly to account 'for margins and future growth.' The targeted displacement of these vessels, at least originally, was 7,291 tons. The new Navy frigates will also be physically longer and wider. As it stands now, there is only some 15 percent commonality in the Constellation and FREMM designs, compared to the original goal of 85 percent. 'Navy personnel are working with the shipbuilder to reduce the ship's weight, but weight growth has only become more pronounced over the last year as the program further developed the frigate design,' the report also notes. This point speaks to further complications arising from the fact that, at least as of April of this year, the Constellation class design still had yet to be finalized. This is despite the construction of the future USS Constellation already being underway. As of April, construction of the ship was approximately 10 percent complete. 'In response to a recommendation we made in our May 2024 report, the program restructured its functional design metrics to more closely align with actual design progress. As a result, the program concluded that its functional design progress is significantly less than the 92 percent complete it reported in August 2023,' according to GAO's latest assessment. 'As of December 2024, the program reported that the functional design was 70 percent complete, as measured with the restructured design metrics. Although program officials expect to achieve a stable basic and functional design by late spring 2025, the program has yet to achieve its planned rate of design progress to meet this goal.' 'The Navy stated that it chartered an independent review team to perform a holistic assessment of the shipbuilder's production schedules, identify key issues, and recommend actions,' the report adds. 'Additionally, the Navy reported that it increased design and production efforts by bringing in both Navy and contracted engineering design support personnel at the shipbuilder's site to bolster and accelerate design stability completion and ramp-up of production.' GAO says the Navy declined to provide an estimated date for reaching initial operational capability with the Constellation class with this review still underway. In the past, the Navy has heavily blamed shipyard capacity and workforce issues – real and increasingly dire problems for the service in general that you can read more about here – for hampering work on the Constellation class. The service has also cited macroeconomic disruptions, such as inflation, stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic and other global crises, as being important factors. 'So I was at Fincantieri [Marinette] Marine two weeks ago. I was very impressed by the investments they've made in their shipyard and things they've done in an attempt to modernize,' Secretary of the Navy John Phelan told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday. 'And I think there's some things that some of the other shipyards can actually take and potentially adapt.' In November 2024, the Navy began formally seeking information about options for bringing in a second shipyard to help with Constellation class production, a possibility that had previously been raised. As of January, the service was still assessing the responses it had received, per GAO. At the same time, it is hard not to see the Constellation class' continued weight growth and persistent lack of a stable design as going beyond shipyard issues, and having undercut the central focus of the program. As noted, choosing an in-production parent design to serve as the basis for the new frigates was explicitly intended to avoid many of the problems the Navy is facing now. 'The Constellation class frigate will be three years late and will take nearly 10 years to deliver the lead ship. This is largely because the Navy cannot keep its requirements steady. Almost 70 percent of the requirements have changed since the Navy signed a contract,' Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, chided Navy officials at a hearing last year. 'So the outcome that we see today is no surprise. This is not an example of the industry underperforming. This is senior officials unable to manage a program. This is acquisition malpractice and a terrible waste of time and resources.' All of this has already contributed to questions about the future of the Constellation class, overall. 'The question is, are we at a point where we either quickly recover and get back on track with this, get back to schedule, get back to budget – I don't know that you could make up schedule – or do you say, maybe we're too far along with this, and we go in a different direction,' Rep. Rob Wittman, a Virginia Republican, said during a panel discussion at the Navy League's Sea Air Space 2025 in April. 'The Navy is going to have to ask that question now. It can't push it off in the future.' At the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing yesterday, Wicker noted that procurement of additional Constellation frigates was halted last year 'because of design instability' and that the Navy did not appear to be requesting funding for any of the ships in the 2026 Fiscal Year. A public version of the U.S. defense budget request for the upcoming fiscal cycle has not yet been released. 'As it relates to the [Constellation class] frigate and in the force, [we're] still evaluating that, we're still trying to understand how it fits, when we can get it fixed, [and] what the plans are for it,' Phelan said at yesterday's Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. 'And so I will come see you soon as we get a handle on that. But it is something we're looking at very hard. And I do think that the shipbuilder there has done a great job. And so we need to figure out how to keep that going and add to it and understand that.' More details about the Navy's exact plans for the future of the Constellation class are likely to come when a public version of the Navy's budget request for the 2026 Fiscal Year is finally released. In the meantime, the core design has already diverged significantly in terms of weight and other aspects from what was originally expected. Contact the author: joe@
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
First Constellation Frigate Only 10% Complete, Design Still Being Finalized
The first Constellation class frigate for the U.S. Navy is just 10 percent complete more than two years after construction began and nearly five years after the award of the initial contract for the ship. The work is also continuing despite the continued absence of a firm functional design for the vessel, which is still weeks or even months away from being finalized and approved. Major changes to the Constellation's configuration compared to its parent Franco-Italian Fregata Europea Multi-Missione (FREMM) have already led to serious delays and cost increases, and there are growing questions about the program's future. A key program goal had been to take an in-service design that would only need relatively minor modifications to make it ready for Navy use, which would help keep the work on schedule and budget. The opposite has now happened. Mark Vandroff, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs at Fincantieri Marine Group, confirmed the state of progress on the construction of the USS Constellation and otherwise provided an update on the program to TWZ's Howard Altman on the floor of the Navy League's Sea Air Space 2025 exhibition earlier this week. 19FortyFive had first reported that the lead ship in the Constellation class was only 10 percent complete last month, citing an anonymous source. 'First ship is under construction up in Marinette[, Wisconsin], roughly 10 percent done,' Vandroff said. We're 'working working to finalize the design with the Navy. That has been progressing. We've made a lot of progress in the last year, and we expect to have the functional design wrapped up here in late spring, early summer.' The Navy first announced in 2020 that it had picked Marinette Marine in Wisconsin, a wholly owned subsidiary of Italy's Fincantieri, to build the Constellation class. Construction of the USS Constellation began in August 2022. The Navy currently has a total of six of the ships on order, out of what is still expected to be an initial tranche of at least 10 of the frigates. The first example is currently slated to be delivered in 2029. 'What I would say is, with the Navy, we're converging the design,' Vandroff added when asked specifically for an update on changes to the Constellation class design from the parent FREMM. 'You know, we're responsible for producing the functional design. The Navy has to approve the functional design. So, as we go back and forth to get our design to be fully approved by the Navy, we're converging on that final design.' The Constellation class design has already grown significantly in physical size and total displacement over the baseline FREMM configuration, which has prompted concerns about expected performance. Substantial changes have also been made to the overall configuration, and there is understood to now only be some 15 percent commonality between the design for the Navy and its Franco-Italian parent. The original goal was 85 percent commonality. The design changes have also contributed to major delays and cost growth. The original plan was for USS Constellation to be delivered in 2026. The Navy had also been aiming for a unit cost of $1 billion, or potentially even less, as production of the frigates ramped up. More recent estimates have put the price tag for each of the ships at around $1.4 billion. It is important to stress here that the Navy ran the FFG(X) frigate competition that led to the Constellation class with an explicit focus on proven, in-production designs to help reduce the risk of cost growth and schedule delays. FREMM variants are in active service today with the Italian, French, Egyptian, and Moroccan navies. More are under construction, including for the Indonesian Navy. Other factors, including broad global economic disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and U.S. shipbuilding industry workforce issues, have also hampered work on the Constellation class. There has been talk in the past about hiring a second shipyard to help produce the frigates, as well as bringing allies and partners into the program, which could help further drive down unit costs through economies of scale. 'So, in the facility upgrades that we made in Marinette, we're very confident that we have enough space, the right space, the right technology, to build two frigates a year for the United States Navy workforce,' Fincantieri's Vandroff told TWZ. 'I think we have the same issues as pretty much everyone else in the American shipbuilding industry. We would certainly like more workers. We would certainly like more workers in the steel trades. There's a nationwide shortage on welders, shipfitters, [and] to a lesser degree, electricians.' 'We've been making progress on that, but that is one of the challenges that we're working through, just like any other shipyard.' The Constellation class is hardly the only Navy shipbuilding program contending with delays and cost growth. The U.S. shipbuilding industry, when it comes to producing military and commercial vessels, has also been steadily contracting for decades now. In recent years, naval shipyard capacity, or the lack thereof, in the United States, which also has impacts on maintaining and modernizing existing vessels, has become a cause celebre. This was underscored just yesterday by a new executive order from President Donald Trump. 'The commercial shipbuilding capacity and maritime workforce of the United States has been weakened by decades of Government neglect, leading to the decline of a once strong industrial base while simultaneously empowering our adversaries and eroding United States national security,' the executive order, titled 'Restoring America's Maritime Dominance,' declares in its opening. 'Both our allies and our strategic competitors produce ships for a fraction of the cost needed in the United States. Recent data shows that the United States constructs less than one percent of commercial ships globally, while the People's Republic of China (PRC) is responsible for producing approximately half.' TWZ has previously reported in great detail on the massive and worrying disparity between the United States and China when it comes to shipbuilding. The new executive order directs 'the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Transportation, and the Secretary of Homeland Security' to 'conduct a review of shipbuilding for United States Government use and submit a report to the President with recommendations to increase the number of participants and competitors within United States shipbuilding, and to reduce cost overruns and production delays for surface, subsurface, and unmanned programs' within 45 days. 'This report must include separate itemized and prioritized lists of recommendations for the United States Army, Navy, and Coast Guard.' Much of the rest of the executive order is in line with the proposed Shipbuilding and Harbor Infrastructure for Prosperity and Security for America Act, or SHIPS Act, that a bipartisan group of legislators put forward last year and that you can read more about here. 'We will set realistic, achievable schedules, and we will commit to them. We will eliminate the waste and inefficiencies that drain resources without delivering results. We will demand accountability from our shareholding enterprise, because every dollar, every day … counts,' recently confirmed Secretary of the Navy John Phelan also told a gathering at the Sea Air Space 2025 convention earlier this week. 'To avoid repeating mistakes of poorly executed programs, we will work closely with the shipbuilding industry to calculate risk more effectively, ensure that every dollar spent on defense leads to tangible, measurable results.' 'Change is coming, and my responsibility is to make sure that we have the right people in the right seats on the right platforms,' he added. How any of this may impact plans for the Constellation class, specifically, remains to be seen. 'We are at a tipping point with Constellation. It started out saying we're going to take the FREMM concept, 85 percent complete, we'll add our 15 percent to it, and then we'll go right to construction,' Rob Wittman, a Republican in the House of Representatives from Virginia who is currently Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said during a panel discussion at Sea Air Space 2025 yesterday. 'We look right now, [it is] over cost, over budget, because that is reversed. Now it's 15 percent the original design [and] 85 percent add-ons.' 'The question is, are we at a point where we either quickly recover and get back on track with this, get back to schedule, get back to budget – I don't know that you could make up schedule – or do you say, maybe we're too far along with this, and we go in a different direction,' Wittman continued. 'The Navy is going to have to ask that question now. It can't push it off in the future.' Members of Congress have already been ever-more outspoken about their displeasure with the state of the Navy's Constellation class program. Big decisions regarding the Navy's frigate plans look increasingly to be on the horizon with the USS Constellation just 10 percent complete and still years away from being delivered. Howard Altman contributed to this story. Contact the author: joe@
Yahoo
17-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Fincantieri, Edge nab $500M-plus maintenance deal for UAE Navy fleet
ROME — The United Arab Emirates has handed a five-year, €500 million ($524 million) contract to a joint venture between local group Edge and Italy's Fincantieri to carry out maintenance and upgrades for its naval fleet. The joint venture, known as Maestral, which was created in May 2024, will oversee 'comprehensive maintenance management of the UAE Navy to meet key operational and logistic needs' and support the UAE Navy's 'transformation journey to new levels of performance,' Fincantieri said in a statement. The deal reflects the move by Italian firms, including Fincantieri and Leonardo, to enter into long-term partnerships with Gulf firms to transfer skills and technologies. When it was launched, Fincantieri said the joint venture would be be 51% owned by EDGE but run by Fincantieri managers, and would aim to build and sell naval vessels to non-NATO countries, taking advantage of the UAE's relations with other states and the export credit financing it offers. State controlled Fincantieri is Italy's main naval contractor and is also building FREMM frigates for the US Navy at its U.S.-controlled yard. Founded in 2019, EDGE is a advanced technology group which groups 25 UAE firms and employs 8,000. At the time it was created, the firms said the joint venture would enhance's Edge's ship design skills, while the joint venture would also develop mid-size submarines. The new contract to maintain the UAE fleet was awarded by Tawazun Council, a government entity that works closely with the UAE Ministry of Defence and security agencies in the United Arab Emirates.
