All the Chinese Have to Do Is Wait for Us to Destroy Ourselves

It's gotten to the point that the US Navy cannot develop ships any larger than a dinghy. 

Case in the point the recently canceled Constellation-class Frigate Program.

They took an existing platform, the FREMM, which has over 20 ships in service and almost 60 planned for eventual service, and decided to load it up with every bell and whistle that they could think of, resulting in delays, immature technologies, and ballooning cost and weight.

So only the 2 which have been laid down will be built, and the rest have been canceled. 

The Navy is walking away from the Constellation-class frigate program to focus on new classes of warships the service can build faster, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan announced Tuesday on social media.

Under the terms negotiated with shipbuilder Fincantieri Marinette Marine, the Wisconsin shipyard will continue to build Constellation (FFG-62) and Congress (FFG-63) but will cancel the next four planned warships.

“We are reshaping how the Navy builds its fleet. Today, I can announce the first public action is a strategic shift away from the Constellation-class frigate program,” reads the statement from Phelan. “The Navy and our industry partners have reached a comprehensive framework that terminates, for the Navy’s convenience, the last four ships of the class, which have not begun construction.”

………

The Navy awarded the contract to build what would become the Constellation to Marinette in 2020 following about six years of deliberation after the Navy determined it would truncate the two classes of Littoral Combat Ships. Marinette previously built the Freedoms as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin before competing for the frigate program on its own. The Navy decided that the competitors to base the warship on an existing parent design to speed up the design of the program. The Navy selected the FREMM multi-mission frigate, already operated by the French and Italian navies, as the parent via a Naval Sea Systems Command rapid requirements process.

However, once the complex design work commenced, the Navy and Marinette had to make vast changes to the design in order to meet stricter U.S. survivability standards. The delays resulted in an estimated three-year setback in the delivery of the first ship from 2026 to 2029 at a cost of about $1.5 billion.

The US Military Industrial Complex is a bigger threat to US security than the Soviet Union was at the height of the Cold War.