Warship shows why US Navy is falling behind China
A blizzard of design changes by the military have put production of USS Constellation years behind schedule and millions over budget. Labour shortages, old equipment and rising steel costs aren’t helping the industry.
When a Wisconsin shipyard won the contract to build a new class of navy frigate in 2020, the project was meant to address an embarrassing reality: the US is now the global laggard in building warships.
Stocked with hi-tech weaponry to protect against enemy submarines, missiles and drones, the USS Constellation was expected to be ready for the open water in 2026. That was because the US chose a proven design from Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri in an effort to speed the process.
Then the navy started tinkering.
The hull was lengthened by 24 feet (7.3m) to accommodate larger generators and reconfigured in part because the design was based on the relatively benign conditions in the Mediterranean, and the propeller changed for better acoustic performance, among other time-consuming adjustments.
The effect: Like almost all other US naval vessels, the Constellation is already years behind schedule and millions over budget.
Physical construction began in mid-2022, and after more than 2½ years, the project is only 10 per cent complete, according to a person familiar with the timeline.
At this pace, including the two years of design time before building began, the ship will be completed in a total of nine years – around twice as long as it took an Italian shipyard to build the vessels it is based on. The Constellation, the first in what is expected to be around 20 to be built, is projected to cost at least $US600 million ($956m) more than its original estimate of $US1.3 billion.
The Constellation’s slow production and extra costs help explain why almost nobody wants to buy new American warships – even as allies clamour for US fighter jets and other weapons.
A festering problem for the US has turned into an acute one, as the world order shifts rapidly and the Pentagon gears up for a potential conflict in Asia that experts believe would be fought in large part on the seas.
The issue is top of mind for President Donald Trump, who is racing to address the problem even as his tariffs on imports of steel and aluminium would likely increase the cost of the domestically produced metals shipbuilders use.
Trump said in his speech to Congress this month that his administration wants to create a new Office of Shipbuilding, with the goal of producing more of both commercial and military vessels. The administration is also preparing an executive order aimed at reviving US shipbuilding and cutting Chinese dominance in the industry.
China years ago leapfrogged America in making naval craft faster and for less money. From 2014 to 2023, China’s navy launched 157 ships while the US launched 67, according to independent defence analyst Tom Shugart.
The Chinese fleet is now the world’s largest, although the US navy says the quality of its ships are still better.
Most countries are faster at building. Of 20 different frigates made recently or set for completion soon in 10 different countries, all but one were or will be built in less time than the US’s Constellation, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.
Frigates are the medium-size warships used for submarine warfare and escorting larger ships, among other tasks. US construction of destroyers, the larger, heavily armed warships, is also slower than other countries.
“Every shipbuilding delay, every maintenance backlog and every inefficiency is an opening for our adversaries to challenge our [naval] dominance,” said John Phelan, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the navy, to the Senate Armed Services Committee last month during his confirmation process.
Fincantieri’s American subsidiary, which owns the Wisconsin shipyard, recently reshuffled several senior US positions, including its chief executive. The company said after winning the Constellation contract that it would invest more than $US350 million to upgrade equipment in its Wisconsin yards.
A spokeswoman for the Naval Sea Systems Command, the department that deals with shipbuilding, said nearly all the changes made to the Constellation happened during its design rather than construction.
“Any modifications made during the design phase have been to enhance the lethality, survivability, and fleet commonality of the frigate for US navy operations,” she said.
The department said the pace of the Constellation’s construction was intentionally managed to ensure smooth production and long-term quality.
Trump’s preference
The industry faces myriad challenges, including high steel costs that could rise further amid an ongoing trade war. The US also lacks a commercial shipbuilding industry, which means military vessels can’t share supply chains for many of the same or similar components, or for raw materials or workers.
Shipyards also struggle with ageing equipment – sometimes dating to before WWII – and labour shortages, especially in the skilled trades, aggravated by an almost complete ban on foreign workers for military shipbuilding that doesn’t exist in most other countries.
Making matters worse is the Pentagon’s proclivity for meddling in designs. The navy has made so many changes in the Constellation that a ship that was supposed to share 85 per cent of the design of its Italian parent now has just 15 per cent in common, according to Eric Labs, senior analyst for Naval Forces and Weapons at the Congressional Budget Office.
“We have an insatiable demand for capabilities at times … we struggle to say stop,” said Brett Seidle, civilian deputy to the Assistant Secretary of the navy for Research, Development and Acquisition, at a congressional hearing this month.
Trump himself has weighed in on what he wants in ships – especially regarding their appearance. During his first administration, he summoned the Secretary of the navy at the time, Richard Spencer, to the Oval Office. Spencer showed Trump several photo-boards of various navy ships, including carriers, frigates and destroyers.
Trump went through the photos, which ended up on the floor, lamenting the ugliness of the ships, according to people familiar with the episode. Spencer then showed him pictures of several other frigates, and Trump admired some of those belonging to Russia. But it was the long mothballed USS New Jersey, whose large guns, while impressive, are now obsolete, that caught his eye.
“There!” Trump said, and pointed to the picture of the ship, which was built during WWII and also served during the Vietnam War. “Why can’t we build ships that look like this?” A White House official said the description of the episode wasn’t accurate.
The navy’s most recent target is to increase combat ships from 295 today to 390 by 2054. Taking into account the ships that will be retired in that time, US shipyards would need to produce substantially more than they have over the past 10 years, according to a January report by the CBO. Some estimates suggest the US needs to roughly double its rate of production.
The CBO predicts shipbuilding will cost around $US40 billion a year over the next 30 years, or 17 per cent more than the navy estimates.
Fighter jets, missiles
US fighter jets and some missile systems – while also plagued with high costs and delays – don’t face the same type of international competition that US shipbuilders face. As a result, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 has become the world’s most sought after fighter jet and the Patriot missile defence system, among other US weaponry, has a multi-year foreign order book.
But newly built American ships very rarely beat European and South Korean rivals when selling abroad.
“American ships are fearsome weapons of war … but they are expensive to build and also expensive to run,” said Jeremy Kyd, a former vice admiral in Britain’s Royal navy who had US ships under his command in joint exercises.
Trump didn’t announce details of what efforts an Office of Shipbuilding would make, other than rolling out tax incentives for US makers. An early draft of the planned executive order, which hasn’t been issued, included 18 proposed measures ranging from raising fees on Chinese-built ships entering the US and investing that in domestic shipbuilding, to raising wages for nuclear-shipyard workers.
Seidle defended the navy and US shipbuilders, despite the delays.
“US shipbuilders continue to produce the highest quality, safest and most advanced warships on the globe,” he said.
Of the handful of nations able to make aircraft carriers, the US’s are much larger and powered by nuclear energy. Much of the weapons and technology are still world leading.
But US naval shipbuilding has fallen behind in some key metrics. In the 2000s, attack submarines that used to take six years to build now take nine, and aircraft carriers that used to take eight years now require 11, according to the CBO.
The delays have contributed substantially to massive cost overruns, only a third of which can be attributed to shipbuilding inflation, the CBO said.
The Pentagon spent around $US2.6 billion to build each nuclear powered submarine launched between 2010 and 2021.
At the same time, Britain, a notoriously expensive manufacturer, was building a similar version for under $US2 billion.
Among the reasons: the US subs were made in sections at two different companies’ shipyards and then towed on barges some 500 miles (about 800km) to be connected, while the British subs were produced in one location.
The US Navy has different standards from foreign navies, often more exacting as it seeks to make ships more “survivable” when hit by weapons or bad weather. That can result in major differences, such as the type of weaponry, or minor variations.
In one example, most naval ships have several generators spread around the vessel, so if one goes, equipment can still work.
But the US Navy typically wants the generator and its switchboard to sit together, according to a person familiar with the matter. The thinking goes that because one is useless without the other, separating them provides two targets, increasing the chance of one part taking a hit and rendering both useless.
So generators and bulky switchboards that are separated in Italy’s frigates were located together in the Constellation, causing a redesign of the engine rooms to accommodate the additional equipment, the person said.
The Naval Sea Systems Command said locating the generators and switchboards together isn’t a blanket requirement for all vessels but is based on operational requirements, among other factors.
Fincantieri and the navy began building the ship in August 2022 before its design had been finalised, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.
More changes came as the building progressed. Officials insisted that the computer systems that control communications, weapons and other functions needed more cooling. That meant greater ventilation and larger so-called chill pumps, and another reshuffling of space.
The overall changes caused the ship to gain weight, to 10 per cent above the initial plans. That means the Constellation will be slower than the original design for the ship, already in use in French and Italian navies.
The navy and Fincantieri are still finalising critical design documents that inform the 3-D modelling needed to build the ship, according to people familiar with the matter. The Secretary of the navy, however, certified to Congress in 2022 that the basic and functional design was complete, according to the Congressional Record.
Decision by committee
Some shipyards said the navy can be overly bureaucratic and that it makes too many decisions by committee. They complain that U.S. officials are slow to approve new equipment.
On the Constellation, multiple rounds of review by the navy to approve technical requirements led to extreme slowdowns in construction, said Shelby Oakley, a director in the GAO. In one example, Fincantieri had to respond to over 170 critical comments from the navy on one – out of hundreds – of supporting documents vetted by the military.
“The navy peeled back the onion and realised how far the design was from meeting the navy’s standards, and had to take a strategic pause to try and right the ship,” said Oakley.
The navy complains U.S. shipyards don’t invest enough in staff and equipment.
McKinsey analysts in a recent report on US shipyards found equipment, including metal casting machines, cranes and transport systems, that was decades old, some harking back to before WWII.
The report said equipment broke down, causing delays to contracts. In some cases, it was so old that replacement parts had to be fabricated from scratch because they were no longer commercially available.
Some shipbuilding executives said European naval yards typically have more modern equipment than those in America.
Some investments have made improvements. In the so-called panel-line at Fincantieri’s Wisconsin yard, where major ship sections are joined together, the addition of robotic welders means that there are now six workers as opposed to the 24 previously needed.
That is important because the US industry has a dearth of experienced older shipyard workers – with the skills necessary for the complex fabrications.
A third of workers in Fincantieri’s US shipyard are over 50, compared with almost 40 per cent in Italy. Last year, the navy blamed inexperienced new hands at a Huntington Ingalls Industries shipyard in Virginia for faulty welding on 26 vessels.
– Dow Jones Newswires
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