When you used to be real good at something but then find that you bumble from underperformance to failure, the professional thing to do is stop and look for someone who is doing it right and ask for help … or at least find out why they are getting better while you just can’t make contact with the ball.

Professional baseball players, golfers – and others – do this all the time. What you don’t see someone do who was one at the top of their game but now is at the bottom, is do nothing and keep with the same program they rode to the bottom.

Along those lines, let’s look around the maritime world to see what someone else is doing right while we have at two-decade long slump. They don’t have to be bigger … just better.

Let’s look at Italy.

Italy has 18% of the population of the USA and only 10% of our GDP. Their military budget is only 2% of America’s.

However, they seem to be able to envision, design, and build a modern and effective set of warships within their constrained and narrow budget while the United States Navy has produced little more than almost two generations of shipbuilding modernization failure through an almost bizarre miasma of bad ideas, poor program management, and wrong leadership vision.

We don’t need to go back over LCS, DDG-1000, CG(X), and other programs again. We’ve done that here already, and it speaks for itself.

What has little Italy done for its fleet while we played “reassign the guy with the hard questions?”

They’ve built 10 FREMM FFG (that we’re going to copy because we can’t do that ourselves), a rather handy 4,500 corvette/OPV beginning serial production, and a workmanlike 32,000 long ton LHD – all modern, evolutionary designs. While we have expended the equivalent of their defense budget for programs that never left the PPT slide, the Italians are displacing water.

What else do they have up their sleeve for us to make excuses about?

Here is our slice of humble pie; our cruiser force commissioned its last ship in 1994, before Bill Clinton had even had to face a mid-term election. The year I rotated to my first shore duty. For those doing the math; 26+ years ago.

For reference, a Ticonderoga Class cruiser is 173 meters long and displaces 9,800 long tons.

Now over to Tom Kington at DefenseNews;

Fresh from a burst of shipbuilding spurred by the retirement of old vessels, the Italian Navy is …due to start on two 10,000-ton destroyers dubbed DDX.
…
The Navy wants the 175-meter-long vessels to replace two aging destroyers, the ITS Durand de la Penne and ITS Mimbelli. Those two vessels entered service in the early 1990s and were joined in service by Italy’s two more recent Horizon-class ships, which the Navy classifies as destroyers.

That, my Italian friend, is no destroyer; that is a cruiser.

They’re not playing around with the timeline either;

… the Navy aims to have a final operational requirement by 2022, sign a construction contract in 2023 — funding permitting — complete the design in 2025, and receive the first ship by 2028.

Current plans envisage vessels that are 24 meters wide with a 9-meter draft and more than 300 crew, while offering a top speed of over 30 knots using the CODOGAL (COmbined Diesel Or Gas And eLectric) propulsion system, De Carolis said. The system allows the use of either gas or diesel turbines, plus electric propulsion for lower speeds.

How are they able to do this?

Simple … they are sticking with the evolutionary approach with building warships. Put the best kit you have now, with maybe 1 or 2 new ideas with acceptable technology/program mix, and enough flex in the design to allow future flights or upgrades to have other systems once available.

As you will see in the article, some of the mix of weapons – specifically VLS cells – are not in line with the numbers we would want – but that is a fixable problem. I do like the 127mm (5-in) and its three 76-mm friends. I would prefer a 2-and-2 mix, but we’ll allow it.

In any event, it is the process and the product that is important. This meets Italian needs, doesn’t rely on things PPT thick, and appears to build on proven technology and production methods that brought them their FREMM, PPA/OPV, and other ships of the last decade.

Some good words have made it on paper the last half decade or so stating we learned the hard lessons that gave us our lost decades … but will those words produce a different result from the same system?

Have we looked at our allies, Italy, Denmark, and others, who have successful programs that result in modern designs that actually work?

Is it people, process, or just bad luck that we find ourselves where we are?