As Fincantieri Marinette Marine prepares to start construction on the first Constellation-class frigate next spring, analysts and lawmakers say the Navy’s planned second frigate yard could both expedite the production of frigates and bolster the nation’s shipbuilding industrial base.
The Navy is planning to buy a total of 20 frigates, with 10 already on contract to Fincantieri Marinette Marine, and is planning on picking a second shipyard to support the program in coming years.
Major players in the shipbuilding landscape, including Austal USA, Huntington Ingalls Industries and General Dynamics Bath Iron Works are expected to compete.
Capt. Kevin Smith, the frigate program manager, said in August the Navy has the frigate’s technical data package that it can use to work with a second source, but said the timing of a second shipyard is still “pre-decisional.”
The Navy issued Fincantieri Marinette Marine a $795 million contract to design and build its next-generation frigate in April 2020, with options for the delivery of up to 10 ships for a total of $5.5 billion. The service exercised its option for the second frigate, FFG-63, in May.
The Navy has been pushing to retire some of the worst-performing Littoral Combat Ships, and the first Arleigh Burke class destroyers are set to be retired later this decade. Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who focuses on Navy issues, told Inside Defense in an interview that some analysts and lawmakers believe increasing frigate production could help fill the gaps caused by those retirements.
“There are folks arguing we should ramp up frigate production to backfill that capacity that is going to get lost when these older or obsolete ships leave the fleet,” he said.
Frigate plans
Fincantieri Marinette Marine is set to start construction on the first frigate next spring, CEO Mark Vandroff said last week. The company and the Navy are working on the ship’s design now, Vandroff said.
Smith announced in August the ship’s hull would be elongated.
The Navy is revising the design of Fincantieri’s FREMM frigate class, which is used by Italy and France. A Navy briefing slide provided to the Congressional Research Service published Sept. 15 stated the frigate hull will be elongated 23.6 feet to accommodate larger generators and future growth.
The frigate’s bow design will be modified from the FREMM to remove the sonar dome and the enclosure deck for stability, and the generator rating has been increased to support transit speed and future growth, the slide states.
Clark said that the Navy is also replacing the FREMM’s European systems with more expensive American systems.
The Navy is also adding self-defense systems and sensors, Clark said. While there were two variants of the FREMM which focus on either the anti-submarine or air defense mission, the Navy wants its frigate to be able to do both, Clark said.
While making the hull larger will not affect the cost of frigates, the ship’s systems themselves will contribute to cost growth, Clark said.
“What I’m hearing from the Navy is that the ship is becoming more expensive and becoming less and less of the affordable alternative to the destroyer that they originally envisioned,” Clark said.
The frigate was initially estimated to have a price tag of $700 million to $1 billion, around half the price of a destroyer, Clark said. The Navy contracted the first frigate for $1.3 billion, the second for just under $1.1 billion and proposed procuring the third for $1.1 billion in the fiscal year 2022 budget.
With the ship’s cost increasing, the frigate’s value is decreasing as it has half to two-thirds of the firepower of a destroyer, Clark said.
“They are kind of getting to the point where they are maxing out the cost of what the frigate should be as an alternative,” he said. “I think there’s going to be a concern in the Navy to keep the cost down on the frigate, because they are adding a lot of features to it, which is why they are making the hull bigger.”
If the Navy can’t control the costs of the frigate, there could be a push to build more destroyers instead, Clark said.
“At a certain point, the frigate becomes not really a good alternative,” he said. “You want to go back and buy more destroyers, because it's not that much more money for a lot more firepower.”
The Navy is working on a shipbuilding plan to include with the FY-23 budget, which Clark said will likely call for more frigates. The Trump administration’s last shipbuilding plan called for an increase in small surface combatants, and Clark said he anticipated the Biden administration’s plan would call for around 40 frigates.
Fincantieri Marinette Marine is preparing itself to build more frigates if the Navy decides to increase its purchasing plans, Vandroff said last week.
Vandroff said that the initial contract will provide work throughout the decade, with the possibility of more work if the company gets another frigate contract.
“That alone is work for the shipyard throughout the entire decade of the 2020s and given the Navy’s stated need for how many frigates they actually ultimately need, we expect to be building frigates here for at least the next two decades,” Vandroff said.
Fincantieri Marinette Marine is investing $250 million in capital improvements at its Wisconsin shipyard, including a 130-foot-tall frigate erection bay and a syncrolift. The company will be able to deliver two frigates a year to the Navy, Vandroff said.
Second shipyard plans
Clark said the Navy is aiming to add the second shipyard after Fincantieri Marinette Marine refines the design and builds the first frigate. He said the Navy could issue a request for information in 2022 before launching a competition in 2023 and awarding the second yard in 2024 or 2025.
The December 2020 shipbuilding plan called for the Navy to choose a "follow yard" for the program in FY-23 and increase production to three ships in FY-23 and four ships by FY-25.
The more recent shipbuilding plan, the first released under the Biden administration, was light on details and did not mention the follow-on frigate yard.
House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee Chairman Joe Courtney (D-CT) said in July that lawmakers need more information from the Navy than what was included in the plan. For example, lawmakers need to know the Navy’s build-rate plan for the program so Congress can know when to allocate funds for the second shipyard, Courtney said.
A second shipyard would ensure a back-up plan if Fincantieri Marinette Marine can’t produce the frigate at expected rates, Clark said.
“There’s a lot of concern about whether Marinette can successfully produce it,” he said. “They’ve been building the LCSs, they’ve had issues with being late, they’ve had issues obviously with the construction and design.”
Fincantieri Marinette Marine’s Great Lakes location also fuels delay concerns, Clark said.
“Building a larger ship up on the Great Lakes creates more possibilities that construction delays will result, either because they’re having difficulty ramping up to the larger ship or because the larger ship can’t make it out of the Great Lakes other than in the spring and summer,” he said.
Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA), the ranking member on the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee, told Inside Defense in an interview he believes the Navy should pursue a second yard.
“I think having a broad base in the shipbuilding industry is critically important, and the reason I say that is the LCS class is finished, and I want to make sure we have the ability to capture the skill sets that are out there,” Wittman said.
Wittman said having a variety of shipyards is critical to the success of the industrial base.
“Having that diversity in the industrial base is critically important to sustainability, and having capacity there,” he said. “I think it’s a smart thing to do dual-yard bidding.”
Second shipyard competition
Five shipyards -- Austal USA, Huntington Ingalls Industries, Fincantieri Marinette Marine, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works and Lockheed Martin -- received contracts to mature their frigate designs in 2018.
Lockheed Martin, which did not submit a bid for the program, declined to comment on the second yard competition. General Dynamics Bath Iron Works and Huntington Ingalls Industries also declined comment on the competition.
Clark said General Dynamics Bath Iron Works would be a leading contender for the second shipyard contract, as the company has wrapped up construction of Zumwalt-class destroyers.
“There’s a concern that if we don’t do something to give Bath more production and more ships to build, they are going to become less and less competitive and eventually they are going to have to close up shop, that’s the worry,” Clark said.
The Maine-based shipyard is now set to build just one destroyer a year for the foreseeable future, Clark said.
“Now as the Zumwalt’s are done, there’s a concern that Bath isn’t going to be able to stay in business or be competitive from a cost perspective if they are only building one Arleigh Burke destroyer a year, because that means one ship each year will have to carry all the overhead for the shipyard,” Clark said.
Huntington Ingalls Industries, which also builds destroyers will likely compete for the second frigate yard, Clark said. And while a few smaller shipyards might also be interested, the lack of a track record building large ships would likely disqualify those yards from being competitive, he said.
Austal will also be in the mix, Clark said, noting that the shipyard Austal built to produce the LCS is brand new and was built from scratch.
“It’s the newest shipyard the Navy works with,” Clark said. “Austal made a huge investment in Mobile to get it up and running, so it would be a shame for it to not be able to continue to operate in building Navy ships.”
Austal is planning to compete for the second yard competition, and has invested $110 million into its shipyard, including transitioning one of its aluminum production lines into a steel line.
“We started preparing for the frigate follow yard the day we found out we didn’t win the initial frigate competition,” Larry Ryder, Austal’s vice president of business development, told Inside Defense in an interview. “It’s a major focus for us, it’s a logical follow-on for the yard to keep building that size small surface combatant.”
Ryder said the company is ahead of schedule on its steel line project, which is set to be finished in April 2022.
“For where the Navy is headed, where the shipbuilding programs are going, the near-peer threat . . . it’s more of a steel shipbuilding requirement than an aluminum [one],” he said. “We took action on that on day one to re-align so we would have the capability to continue to deliver quality large high speed aluminum platforms but also be able to build the steel platforms that the Navy is looking at.”
Ryder said he believed the company had a solid design, cost proposal and facility in the initial competition but said he believed the Navy was looking for a different design.
About half of Austal’s workforce has experience with steel, Ryder said, and the company is sending some workers to refresher training to prepare.