There are two new ship programs running in parallel attempting to do some kind of damage control from the disastrous Age of Transformation that begat LCS & DDG-1000, and the trainwreck of the aborted CG(X) program – and so we wait for FFG(X) and the unfortunately named Large Surface Combatant (LSC).

FFG(X) will fill the gap created by the now generally recognized sub-optimal LCS, LSC will give us an opportunity not to build DDG-51 Class ships until the crack of doom, as well as try to patch up the gap of the DDG-1000 balk and CG(X) … whatever that was.

Earlier this month, we were blessed with an update on the FFG(X) program everyone should reference when they get a chance, in there is a nice summary of the five contenders;

Austal USA
Shipyard: Austal USA in Mobile, Ala.
Parent Design: Independence-class [i.e., LCS-2 class] Littoral Combat Ship One of the two Littoral Combat Ship builders, Austal USA has pitched an upgunned variant of the Independence-class LCS as both a foreign military sales offering and as the answer to the Navy’s upgunned small surface combatant and then frigate programs. Based on the 3,000-ton aluminum trimaran design, the hull boasts a large flight deck and space for up to 16 Mk-41 Vertical Launching System (VLS) cells.

Fincantieri Marine Group
Shipyard: Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Marinette, Wisc.
Parent Design: Fincantieri Italian FREMM
As part of the stipulations of the FFG(X) programs, a contractor can offer just one design in the competition as a prime contractor but may also support a second bid as a subcontractor. Fincantieri elected to offer its 6,700-ton Italian Fregata europea multimissione (FREMM) design for construction in its Wisconsin Marinette Marine shipyard, as well as partner with Lockheed Martin on its Freedom-class pitch as a subcontractor. The Italian FREMM design features a 16-cell VLS as well as space for deck-launched anti-ship
missiles.

General Dynamics Bath Iron Works
Shipyard: Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine
Parent Design: Navantia Álvaro de Bazán-class F100 Frigate
The 6,000-ton air defense guided-missile frigates fitted with the Aegis Combat System have been in service for the Spanish Armada since 2002 and are the basis of the Australian Hobart-class air defense destroyers and the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen-class frigates. The Navantia partnership with Bath is built on a previous partnership from the turn of the century. The F100 frigates were a product of a teaming agreement between BIW, Lockheed Martin and Navantia predecessor Izar as part of the Advanced Frigate Consortium from 2000.

Huntington Ingalls Industries
Shipyard: Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Miss.
Parent Design: Unknown
Out of the competitors involved in the competition, HII was the only company that did not present a model or a rendering of its FFG(X) at the Surface Navy Association symposium in January. A spokeswoman for the company declined to elaborate on the offering when contacted by USNI News on Friday. In the past, HII has presented a naval version of its Legend-class National Security Cutter design as a model at trade shows labeled as a “Patrol Frigate.”

Lockheed Martin
Shipyard: Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Marinette, Wisc.
Parent Design: Freedom-class [i.e., LCS-1 class] Littoral Combat Ship Of the two LCS builders, Lockheed Martin is the first to have secured a foreign military sale with its design. The company’s FFG(X) bid will have much in common with its offering for the Royal Saudi Navy’s 4,000-ton multi-mission surface combatant. The new Saudi ships will be built around an eight-cell Mk-41 vertical launch system and a 4D air search radar. Lockheed has pitched several other variants of the hull that include more VLS cells.

“We are proud of our 15-year partnership with the U.S. Navy on the Freedom-variant Littoral Combat Ship and look forward to extending it to FFG(X),” said Joe DePietro, Lockheed Martin vice president of small combatants and ship systems in a Friday evening statement.

“Our frigate design offers an affordable, low-risk answer to meeting the Navy’s goals of a larger and more capable fleet.”21

As we found out yesterday afternoon, we have moved from five options to four;

Lockheed Martin won’t submit a bid to compete in the design of the Navy’s next-generation guided-missile (FFG(X)) frigate competition, company officials told USNI News on Tuesday.

The company elected to focus on its involvement developing the frigate combat system and other systems rather than forward its Freedom-class LCS design for the detailed design and construction contract Naval Sea Systems Command plans to issue this summer, Joe DePietro, Lockheed Martin vice president of small combatants and ship systems, told USNI News.

Those long time critics of both LCS classes, this brings mixed feelings. First, it brings joy as it removes from consideration one of two sub-optimal designs that, if either was chosen for FFG(X) would simply burden our Navy with a doubled-down bad bet. However, secondly it brings a bit of bitter sadness as it has been clear for a long time that the FFG(X) program was scoped in a way that intentionally kept both LCS hulls in play. The farcical 57mm gun on a FREMM designed for a 127mm gun being the most obvious manifestation of these force-moded compromises.

Little good can be spoken of a process that warped itself to include derivatives of a program that, as David Axe summarized,

Over the last 15 years the sailing branch has spent $30 billion on LCSs. In 2019 all it has to show for all that time and money is 10 combat-ready ships, only four of which the Navy actually intends to deploy over the next year, according to a May 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service.

Two of those deployments will be to the Caribbean, where the much-ballyhooed vessels will sail in big, slow circles, their crews hoping to intercept South American drug smugglers. A mere two LCSs will head to the Western Pacific, where the Navy is trying to contain an increasingly powerful Chinese fleet.

Sadly, those who made the decision, made the decision and the Fleet will have to find a way to make do with a compromised program – but hopefully only a fraction of a compromise that begat LCS.

Effectiveness and combat ability has never been the only driver and that is part of the challenge. In the background there has always been the considerations of our industrial base. This is threaded through all discussions of FFG(X). Again, from the report;

If a design proposed for construction at one of the LCS shipyards is chosen as the winner of the FFG(X) competition, then other things held equal (e.g., without the addition of new work other than building LCSs), workloads and employment levels at the other LCS shipyard (the one not chosen for the FFG(X) program), as well as supplier firms associated with that other LCS shipyard, would decline over time as the other LCS shipyard’s backlog of prior-year-funded LCSs is completed and not replaced with new FFG(X) work. If no design proposed for construction at an LCS shipyard is chosen as the FFG(X)—that is, if the winner of the FFG(X) competition is a design to be built at a shipyard other than the two LCS shipyards—then other things held equal, employment levels at both LCS shipyards and their supplier firms would decline over time as their backlogs of prior-year-funded LCSs are completed and not replaced with FFG(X) work.30

As mentioned earlier, the Navy’s current baseline plan for the FFG(X) program is to build FFG(X)s at a single shipyard. One possible alternative to this baseline plan would be to build FFG(X)s at two or three shipyards, including one or both of the LCS shipyards. This alternative is discussed further in the section below entitled “Number of FFG(X) Builders.”

Another possible alternative would be would be to shift Navy shipbuilding work at one of the LCS yards (if the other wins the FFG(X) competition) or at both of the LCS yards (if neither wins the FFG(X) competition) to the production of sections of larger Navy ships (such as DDG-51 destroyers or amphibious ships) that undergo final assembly at other shipyards. Under this option, in other words, one or both of the LCS yards would function as shipyards participating in the production of larger Navy ships that undergo final assembly at other shipyards. This option might help maintain workloads and employment levels at one or both of the LCS yards, and might alleviate capacity constraints at other shipyards, permitting certain parts of the Navy’s 355-ship force-level objective to be achieved sooner. The concept of shipyards producing sections of larger naval ships that undergo final assembly in other shipyards was examined at length in a 2011 RAND report.31

We are all suffering a bit of ongoing indigestion from Bill Perry’s last supper, it seems, but it wouldn’t be fair to blame him, or to think this is just a FFG(X) concern. The post-Cold War “peace dividend” and the strange requirements of two land wars in Asia that followed whip-sawed the defense industry.

The challenge and consequences of trying to have the ability to build anything and to maintain that capability for future requirements is hard without regular, steady orders.

There were two mentions of the challenge of managing a perishable and difficult to scale industrial base in the 20 May 19 issue of Defense News, both about submarine programs. The fundamentals apply to the surface force as well.

First in an interview with by David Larter with James Guerts, Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development & Acquisition;

We have a submarine industrial base — both government, supplier, and at Electric Boat and Newport News — that has done tremendous things rebuilding itself from a decade of hiatus in the ’90s. We’ve gotten up to two Virginias per year and done a very good job with that.

Submarines are very sensitive to cadence and sequence, and so the arc will be, as we add in Columbia and some of the other mods we want to do to Virginia, not to mess up that cadence and sequencing, and [thus] cause massive disruptions.

So we supremely focused on Columbia, making sure that design is solid. The biggest threat to Columbia is Virginia, and so if we don’t keep Virginia on track, then that can cause disruption to Columbia. The biggest threat to Virginia is the supplier base not being able to keep up. We have an integrated enterprise that looks at all the suppliers for all of our nuclear construction — in total it is about 329 suppliers — and making sure they are up to the task. And then, where we see challenges either getting it right or having kind of single source, proactively addressing those challenges.

Congress has been a great help with us. They provided funding to go after those, and so we will continue to manage that, but it’s a big enterprise, and we have got to keep focused on it.

You can’t just mothball artisan welders. You can’t block off valuable waterfront land for shipyards forever.

As The Netherlands is learning – once lost, some skills just can’t come back;

The Dutch government has postponed a supplier decision to replace its four Walrus submarines, telling parliament that further study of the issue is needed until the summer.

The development, announced in a letter late last month by State Secretary for Defence Barbara Visser, comes as some expected a decision this spring. Government officials now say they need more time to study the competitors’ latest offers related to domestic industry participation in their proposals.
…
a new Dutch defense industry strategy … prescribes that the production of maritime platforms remain mostly a national affair,

…

“The Netherlands has the ambition to design and produce certain military capabilities itself,” reads a summary of the strategy document. “In doing so, we will take into account the industries that are already present in the Netherlands as well as the country’s capacity and possible limitations. What does this mean in concrete terms? We want to preserve and strengthen our naval shipbuilding industry, for example.”

Construction of the exceptional, for their time, WALRUS Class SSK went from 1979 to 1992.

After 94 years in the business of building ships and submarines, the company that built the class, RDM, when out of business in 1996. With it went the Dutch ability to build its own submarines.

They can lean on partners, but have lost independence of action and ownership of their technology.

There is a lesson there that should apply to not just the compromises injected in to whoever wins the FFG(X) competition, but how we plan to build our future Navy. The Cult of Efficiency danced with the Cult of Transformation to get us in the bind we are in today.

How do we do better?