US Navy shipbuilding has been a shitshow ever since NAVSEA stopped doing the design work in house. The last new major ship class designed the old way was the DDG-51 class.

Not to mention the last set of Iranian navy assets were primarily sunk using air-delivered ordinance. (Operation Praying Mantis - 18 April 1988)

https://youtu.be/5ihmIxZtMBQ?si=elq5rG6z2hKo4PaE

Not invented here.

Nine years and only two frigates built.

Also highly customized so they don't share the same supply chain with the FREMMs which they were based off of. If any ship program was going to be a success, this was one of the best candidates but spitefulness is just being put in all forms of US institutions apparently.

Not so much spitefulness by the sound of it, more like the old inability of manglers everywhere to start demanding changes after a design is agreed. Just go back to the original plan and then fire every official who demands a change. In fact, be pre-emptive and fire all those who demanded the changes last time around.

In 1940, the UK got 50 old USN destroyers in return for basing rights for the US in British-owned territory.

Maybe we could offer them our old Type 23's, as we replace them with the new Type 26's, in some similar sort of deal?

Though after today, I don't think we want bases, just hard cash...

Wouldn't work. The tariffs would put the prices up too much.

We scrapped the last Type 23 that went into Life-Extension, after inspecting it and finding that the cost was up around £100m! Type 23 were excellent ships, but the idea at the time was to build them relatively cheaply, for a hull life of only twenty years, because that way we could just keep producing them to keep the industrial base in working order, until we got a new design, then start building that. Rather than just not buying any new ASW ships for twenty years, and then wondering why we were running out of ships!

This generation of British politicians (from both major parties) have actually understood that mistake and made some quite good decisions to fix it, in the last ten years. Not sure if the next generation will manage to live up to the same standard though. People are actually quite good at learning lessons, but also sadly very good at forgetting them again.

... modularity!

Have one hull with loads of swappable containerised components that they can quickly swap out. Use untested advanced propulsion units and untested hull designs.

Then lay down billions of dollars for a shit load of these before even the first sea trials.

Maybe call them the Littoral Combat Ships.

Sure they'll be a roaring success.

For x value of roaring.

So, Twitter is now the official communication arm of the US Government. Musk must be creaming his pants.

Whatever happened to official channels ? Like an announcement from the White House Spokesperson ?

Oh yeah, silly me, she's just there to defend whatever bullshit the orange shitgibbon has just flung out. This is actual technical news. Not in her job description.

Of course they got cancelled, they didn't have a USS Stargazer scheduled.

Whatever this decision is actually for, it's not about speeding up deliveries of greatly needed ships to the fleet. If that were the case, they'd have an alternative ready and would be able to say exactly what that alternative is, and at least roughly what the timeline would be.

They've fucked this program up, but that doesn't mean that it's unfixably fucked up, just that it's over time and over budget. So the question is not , what should we have done to get this right 6 years ago when we agreed this process. The question is, what should we do now ? First ship is due by 2030. Can they get anything built faster, by any other means? That seems incredibly unlikely - to actually impossible. Therefore the only viable choice was to go with what they've got, and finish it off.

It is amazing on how many levels everyone has fucked up though.

Fincantieri appear to have promised that they could meet US damage control and ship-survivability requirements with relative ease. That was clearly something between wishful thinking and a massive lie. And it does make you wonder exactly how safe Italian designs are? The Italian Navy aren't losing ships every day, but there's been incredibly little serious naval conflict since WWII - and so very few people have got actual experience. The Royal Navy learnt some painful lessons in the Falklands - and so have much tougher rules for ship design nowadays. We bought the Iver Huitfeld design off the Danes, in order to turn it into Type 31, and apparently much of the work was bringing the design up to acceptable safety standards for the RN (although it was also an experimental modular ship design that turned out to be too ambitious and was removed). After the failure of the Iver Huitfeld in combat in the Red Sea - the Danes are now looking at downgrading them to long-range patrol frigates, and buying the Type 31 design back off us - although those failure were the combat management system, weapons and sensor integration - rather than the ship itself. I'm still rather confused as to why they seem to be saying they can't fix it. In the Red Sea they found that trying to fire the weapons took the radar off-line - thus meaning they had to resort to shooting down a missile with the canons, in electro-optical targetting mode, and worse, were using post expiration-date ammunition, much of which exploded as soon as it left the gun barrel.

I've read suggestions from several different sources that the US Navy wanted to go with Type 26 because it mostly met US safety standards, and so "all" they'd have to do is change every single weapons system and sensor on the ship. With FREMM, they've had to change every single weapons system, every sensor and re-design the internal bulkheads and sub-division and lengthen the ship in order to fit all the extra VLS cells that they want (although that last bit was at least well-understood beforehand).

The other reason for all the changes is that the Navy told porkies to Congress, or at least told them what they wanted to hear, because no off-the-shelf design actually existed. Or in fact, could exist. But they needed new ships that were cheaper than Arleigh Burkes, and also required smaller crews. And who manages the budget?

Thus we get to Congress. Oh dear God! Congress! They forced the Navy to not take Type 26, because it wasn't finished yet. As opposed to using an off-the-shelf design that didn't exist either... They made them build it in a shipyard that doesn't have a deep enough channel to get to the sea. So the ship is having to be built without a bow sonar, even though it's supposed to be a specialist ASW ship. It's got the best towed sonar available, but nonetheless...

There's a law against buying ships from abroad. So that's out. The law mandates that all ships comply with their damage standards. So buying a foreign off-the-shelf design is also out. They're also mandated to use mostly US weapons. So again, off-the-shelf is much harder. Congress also made them re-design Constellation again, ships from 3 onwards have to be able to carry Tomahawk and SM6, which means more strike length Mk41 VLS, rather than the shorter ones used for the ESSM SAMs they were planning to use.

I'd say Congress are the worst problem here, not the Navy. But it could be they're both as bad as each other? And the contractors shouldn't get off lightly either.

Now there are two early production fucking unicorns that the Navy has to deploy and pretend to use until things quiet down enough for them to mothball both of them before disposal?!?

Better to scrap the whole fucking works. No doubt the damn constellations don't have much in common parts and maintenance wise with any other fucking ship in this stupid fucking Navy.

Clearly the US Navy didn't want to be upstaged by the US Air Force's [1]KC-X shitshow , (wherein they took about twenty years to build aerial refuelling tankers, because they had to keep re-running the competition until Boeing won). Or the [2]Joint Strike Fighter program which started in the late 1990's to replace a bunch of other procurement projects that hadn't gone anywhere, and took twenty years to got at least [3]ten times over it's budget of $200 BILLION. Or maybe the US Army's [4]Ground Combat Vehicle program, which spent a billion dollars to deliver nothing, following up on the complete failure of the Future Combat Systems project. The current boondoggle is called the Next Generation Combat Vehicle program, and is set to run until 2035, and the same companies from the last two projects will be given even more money to come up with more designs which will probably never be built.

Honestly, the US Marines need to come up with a way to waste a truly monumentally huge amount of money, because they're really dropping behind the other services in terms of procurement fuckups.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC-X

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program

[3] https://www.gao.gov/blog/f-35-will-now-exceed-2-trillion-military-plans-fly-it-less

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_Combat_Vehicle