The former Navy acquisition chief this week admitted the Navy’s plan to modify a parent design for the Constellation-class frigate was more difficult than the service thought, leading to major ship design and production delays.
While the Navy usually made iterative changes to existing designs for years, “when we needed to make wholly new designs, we had a tendency to make additions or modifications to ship designs that were already in play somehow. Certainly, we saw that in the frigate acquisition,” Nickolas Guertin, former Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition, said during a Feb. 19 event at the Hudson Institute.
Under the frigate program the Navy did a runoff and competition predicated on going fast by picking another hull and modifying it with U.S. Navy mission systems and weapons.
The Navy thought this way they could “make a smaller, more affordable surface combatant that we’ll be able to make in a higher volume – It turns out that modifying someone else’s design is a lot harder than it sounds,” Guertin said.
He noted there is research on the “fallacy of mod repeat, whereas sometimes you’re just better off designing a new ship.”
However, Guertin said since both the government and the domestic shipbuilding industry don’t have a “bench depth” to design ships affordably and quickly, they went with the parent design path.
In 2020 the Navy ultimately awarded Fincantieri Marinette Marine the initial $795 million contract to design and build the first 10 frigates, expected to cost upward of $5.6 billion (Defense Daily, Oct. 8, 2020).
The frigate is based on the French and Italian FREMM frigate design, but the U.S.-based subsidiary had not designed or modified a ship design themselves before. Previously, the company produced the Lockheed Martin [LMT]-led Freedom-variant LCS.
Last year, the Navy admitted the frigate is running about three years behind schedule due to slow design completion as well as workforce issues (Defense Daily, April 3, 2024).
In December, Rear Adm. Kevin Smith, Program Executive Officer for Unmanned and Small Combatants (PEO USC), underscored this was the first time Marinette Marine worked as a prime shipbuilder in the U.S. dealing with design and workforce issues (Defense Daily, Dec. 12, 2024).
Guertin said this already-flawed parent design path was exacerbated by contract choices.
“Because that was the path we chose, we thought, well, we can do a detailed design construction contract – all at once. So we’re going to fix price the iteration of a design to suit our national and military needs, and then also fix price as a part of the same deal.”
He argued that given his design experience, in order to go fast and complete the design quickly, they needed to do enough upfront work like modeling, prototyping and risk reduction analysis.
“You have to be careful about how you go fast. Well, we weren’t particularly careful about that, because we did the detail design and construction contract all at once, fixed price the design and fixed price the outcome of that design into a constructed ship. That did not work out.”
Guertin also emphasized that in military construction the customer has major input to how things are built, but that was not considered in how the contract was put together.
He said he helped direct sending government engineers and naval architects to work with the industry design teams together in Wisconsin at the shipbuilder’s facility, which “arrested the decay of getting our design work done and then accelerated it.”
This sought to make it so all the players “could grind their way through that design process to get to the point where it would be a stable design, robust and ready, so that we could start cranking those ships out and even compete that design, which was always a part of the acquisition for that ship anyway.”
He also stipulated ship design does not need to be 100 percent done before any construction work can start, using the example of starting the keel if the bottom sections of the ship design are complete.
“There’s a valid reason to start some construction before all of the design is done. We’ve had a tendency to start that construction process too early and not have it all worked out before making that big commitment.”
In contrast, Guertin claimed the Navy did a much better job on risk reduction before construction started on the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, despite that program running over a year late.
“We did that marvelously with Columbia. We thought through the propulsion plant, we worked out how to build the missile tubes, we borrowed the defensive combat system from the Virginia-class, and the whole iterative and incremental, swiftest program that I helped put together years ago, so that we de-risked that ship.”
Even though the Columbia-class submarine is now running late, “it is the least late of all the new design construction projects that we have, because we did all that hard upfront risk mitigation before committing to production,” he added.