An Imperfect Frigging Frigate is Better Than No Frigging Frigate At All

X follower A Roehart apparently not only knows me, but can read my mind:

I’m sure @streetwiseprof has written on the travails of the USN. Shocking.

— A Roehart (@JAH5198) November 27, 2025

I say read my mind because on today’s agenda was writing a post on this latest US Navy clusterfuck of a shitshow: the cancellation of the Constellation class frigate program with two ships partially completed.

Yes, I knew they were late. Yes, I knew they were over budget. What isn’t in the USN? But this made my head explode: “Weight growth reduced the speed to below 25 knots.”

25 knots? RUFKM?

I say again: 25 knots???

Great! They could keep up with battleships launched in 1912! A nuke carrier or an Arleigh Burke? Not so much.

To put things in perspective, a WWI era four stacker could make 35 knots with 300 psi boilers.

Who would even think about proceeding with construction of a ship class that is so overweight Ozempic couldn’t fix it?

The basic lesson here is that every aspect of Navy shipbuilding (and per A Roehart’s point, procurement generally) is broken, from design to construction.

The supposed genius of the Constellation program was that it would be based on a proven foreign design. Then the Navy would do a few tweaks to improve, and voila! A reliable class that could be churned out quickly and (relatively speaking) inexpensively.

But nooooo. Tweak was layered on tweak, which was layered on more tweaks, until the sleek foreign frigate became an American fatso frigate that gets out of breath when breaking 20 knots. And all that tweaking took time and money.

No doubt the Navy wanted the perfect frigate. But the perfect is the enemy of the good. And even a faulty frigging frigate is better than no frigging frigate at all. Which is what we have, after the expenditure of much treasure and time.

In WWII, the US was renowned for producing adequate but not stellar armaments, but doing so in huge numbers and low cost. In contrast, the Germans were renowned for producing state-of-the-art weapons in low numbers and exorbitant cost. Think of the M4 Sherman vs. the Tiger or Panther.

Remind me: who won?

The US has evidently adopted the German philosophy, and jettisoned its own. No more so than in the Navy.

Or put differently, as Stalin (supposedly) said “quantity is a quality of its own.” The US Navy needs hulls in the water. Functional, pragmatic ships (Nimitz always bridled at calling Navy ships “vessels,” which reminded him of chamberpots).

Moreover, since the dawn of naval warfare it has been recognized that the optimal fleet consisted of specialty types with relatively narrow functionality that performed complementary functions. A combination of high end and low end, with frigates (from the days of sail, for crissakes) being at the low end. The Oliver Hazard Perry class of FFGs introduced in the 1970s are an excellent example of this.

But the Navy has instead tried to create ships that do it all and end up doing nothing. Not least because they don’t get built.

Who is to blame? Everybody. Generations of Navy brass and civilian leadership, of course. But also Congress and the defense contractors.

How to fix it? With some accountability, to start with. Who has ever been held accountable for past fiascos, e.g., LCS or Zumwalt? Indeed, if anything there has been negative accountability. How many military officers or Pentagon bureaucrats have moved into cushy jobs at contractors?

The more this happens, the more attractive the Admiral Byng corrective (“pour encourager les autres”) appears.

If you deem that too extreme, then Commander Salamander’s suggestion of defenestrating everyone RADM and above, and their Pentagon civilian counterparts, is a good start. They are products of a diseased culture and the culture must be purged to be (in Sal’s words) “baseline reset.” Yes, it is collective punishment, but the collective is at fault.

I am ambivalent about Pete Hegseth, but one thing he has done that deserves support is his recent initiative to reform defense procurement. Alas, it is an initiative, not a fait accompli. Whether it is even possible to reform so thoroughly broken a system is, alas, highly uncertain.