“We are pursuing a design [for FF(X)] that is producible, it has been proven, it is operationally in use today, and it will evolve,” Chris Miller, Executive Director at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), told attendees at the Surface Navy Association symposium.
That sentence embodies the new split-screen definition of the U.S. Navy of a “frigate”. A route would pursue a high-quality escort that would insert smoothly into combat power in carrier strike group and the sensors and launching capability would add air defense, strike and anti-submarine warfare also in the same tactical environment as cruisers and destroyers. The other route is comfortable with a smaller base, more focused on the hulls in the water and a growth margin living on the weather deck instead of the inside of the ship.
The aborted Constellation-class proposal was planned to be a full-spectrum surface combatant: Aegis Baseline 10, Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar and a 32-cell Mk 41 VLS were core elements of the proposal. The reasoning was not new- create a smaller battleman that was nonetheless capable of contributing meaningful magazine volume and sensor coverage, as well as protecting the high value targets and acting in more hostile environments. However, the seriousness of the program changed with the amount of design changes. An evaluation by the Government Accountability Office characterized a program that was no longer true to its parent design but could not withstand increasing weight and schedule pressure, and tolerance limits, forcing the Navy to find an alternative way to build capacity without returning to the engineering spiral.
Rather than a totally redesigned newbuild, the Navy adopted a variant of the Legend-class National Security Cutter of the U.S. Coast Guard, with the aim of locking in a stable hull form, and reducing the design-to-production time by shortening the time gap. According to Navy officials, an early vessel of 4,750 ton displacement, a 40m baseline fit, was designed to rely on self-defense: a 57mm gun, 30mm gun, a launcher of up to 21 RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missiles, electronic warfare through SLQ-32(V)6, and Nulka decoys. In Navy-supplied details, the inaugural flight will have no inherent Vertical Launch System (VLS) which is a stark departure of the Constellation premise.
Where Constellation has focused capability within an integrated combat system, FF(X) focuses options in payload space, particularly in aft. Navy briefings have also indicated a harsh area meant to accommodate containerized arms such as up to 16 Naval Strike Missiles or up to 48 Hellfire missiles in different configurations. The discipline that informed this decision was presented by Rear Adm. Derek Trinque: “There was a lot of desire to put an awful lot of expensive capability into these ships. And that would have been cool, except that wasn’t really what we needed, because we have in the Flight III [Arleigh Burke class] destroyers coming down the ways right now, the large surface combatants that are appropriate for today.”
That comment bears less of a demeaning ship than a re-allocation of positions in a fleet. The Navy leaders positioned FF(X) as the low end of a low-medium-high spectrum, which is supposed to be used in work in which destroyer and cruiser steaming days are consumed, but their full combat capability is not required. Trinque gave the ungrateful experience of an example: a guided missile cruiser (or nowadays, a guided missile destroyer) as the means of counter-narcotics is a decision that I would not like the fleet commander to experience.
The engineering wager is that “capability in a box” can add lethality or mission specialization without destabilizing the baseline design. Trinque also drew a boundary line with earlier modularity efforts: “I want to distinguish between LCS mission modules and containerized payloads… we are going to take existing systems and to all intents and purposes, put them in a box with an interface to the ship’s combat system.”
In practice, that turns the frigate conversation into a production question as much as a combat-systems question. Constellation aimed to be a smaller high-end escort with a familiar U.S. Navy combat system architecture; FF(X) aims to be a repeatable hull with a simpler baseline and a clear path for iterative “flights.” The result is not a Constellation replacement, but a rebalanced definition of what a U.S. frigate is supposed to do before it is asked to do everything.
