The end of FFG-62
And what should we do now?
The U.S. Navy is officially cancelling the FFG-62 class after two hulls. This had been widely rumored, but it makes the scorecard of recent combatant surface ship programs even more dire:
DDG-1000 - Truncanted at three hulls, initially proposed weapon/sensor fit never fully operational.
DDG-51 Flt III - Producing ships; weapons, and sensors work.
LCS - Truncated early, several hulls retired, mission modules fell short of the original concept.
FFG-62 - Truncated after two hulls.
The comparisons to China, or even the UK Type 26 and 31 programs, are not pretty. China is commissioning new designs from CVs to patrol vessels in rapid succession. Against a far more limited budget, the UK has brought two surface combatant designs into production, which, while imperfect, have significant export orders and seem unlikely to collapse as the FFG-62 program did. The FFG-62 followed the FFG-7 program, some 40 years later. While the FFG-7 fully embodied the limitations of the design-to-cost-approach (one primary mission, difficulty in keeping the proven-but-already-aging weapon systems in service over the class’s life), the class provided the low-end backbone of the Navy for two decades, and the crews got far more out of the design than its “paper” capabilities suggested. Designing combatants at the low end of the cost spectrum is known to be difficult, and the work in the 1970s and 1980s led to significant exploration in naval architecture theory to determine why this is the case. Now, 40-50 years later, why have we gone backwards?
What is not the problem
In public discussion about the frigate program, several narratives have emerged about the program’s struggles. Unfortunately, not all of them are likely to be true root causes, and addressing them alone is unlikely to lead to future performance improvements. The first of these is the narrative that 85% of the original design drawings could have been reused from the original French/Italian design, while replacing the weapon systems, combat system, and sensors with U.S. systems. This idea is a complete unicorn. Adding something as simple as the MK 41 VLS in place of the SYLVER VLS touches the structure all around it and requires new electrical and fluid system connections and routings. Even systems not directly impacted also need to be updated - e.g. changes to the local structure require rerouting other systems passing through that area to move around new interferences. Keeping such changes within 15% would be a challenge, even before we get to the (partial) requirement to replace European equipment with domestic variants. Every pump, motor, compressor swap-out requires new foundations, new cabletrays, new switchboard configuration etc. The 85% concept was always a unicorn, something that looks great in PPTX format but has no real-world equivalent.
The concept of gold-plating, or an ever-growing NAVSEA engineering staff enforcing design standards that required re-work, is also commonly brought up. There is not a ton of truth here, either - NAVSEA’s design staff is currently about 25% of the size it was before the post-Cold War drawdown in the 1990s. NAVSEA standards are largely the result of hard lessons (e.g. the stability standards that required changes to FFG-62 are directly descended from the experience of losing vessels in Typhoon Cobra). The USN’s survivability standards are tough and unique. Also unique is that the USN is the only Navy in which at least one vessel in each of the major classes of surface combatants has suffered a weapon hit in service (USS Cole, USS Stark, USS Samuel B Roberts, USS Princeton). No other Navy has sailed in harm’s way like the USN. This makes it difficult to determine in advance what is gold-plating and what is necessary for a globally deployed force that could be called on to endure a high-end conflict thousands of miles from support in the Pacific. I have some thoughts later on how we can open up easier/faster compliance pathways, but throwing all of our learned experience (which is far larger in terms of ship years or stressful events at sea than any European navy) out as gold-plating is probably unwise.
Finally, the concept that we just needed to choose a proper parent hull as a starting point to limit risk is, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed. For something like a small surface combatant in the USN enterprise, a parent hull is more likely to increase programmatic risk than decrease it. We use parent hulls largely to short-circuit cumbersome acquisition processes, not to reduce risk. I’ve written extensively on this concept, and now the FFG-62 program has become yet another datapoint in supporting the idea that the parent hulls approach actually has very limited applicability in risk reduction.
Where to go from here
The nation is clearly capable of building ships. Over the last two decades, we’ve seen the DDG-51 IIA/III, National Security Cutter, LPD-17, ESB/ESD, JHSV, T-AKE, T-AO, NSMVs be delivered in successful serial production. But we have not designed a new successful surface combatant. Smaller surface warships are a unique challenge. For the USN, this is partially related to the qualities of the DDG-51 - any smaller design is always compared to the option of building more DDG-51s, and the DDG-51 is a hard platform to outperform in high-intensity conflicts. Additionally, “shrinks” - smaller, lower-capability vessels - always look worse budget-wise to larger, more capable platforms in terms of capability per unit cost. Of course, they provide great numbers and the ability to cover more missions simultaneously, not all of which will require high-intensity capabilities. So, smaller surface combatants stress the design and acquisition approach more than many of the other ships in the list above. Logically, it is in small surface combatants that we see our current shortcomings most clearly.
The ability to design a complex warship and bring it into physical form is a national capability that requires a national approach. It simply does not exist without a national-level strategy to promote, maintain, and advance it. It is a perishable capability, in the sense that without constant training and development, knowledge leaves as people move on to new positions. It is also constantly evolving as design tools, ship components, and the world at large evolve, so investment is needed to keep pace with developments. Since the end of the Cold War, we’ve made countless efforts to convince ourselves that we can maintain this capability with shortcuts and without investment - we can push some of these tasks onto industry alone, who will keep this capability as “overhead”, we can import the knowledge we need from overseas when we need it, ships are like other combat systems, we don’t need specialized marine expertise, this problem isn’t hard, etc. Now, after almost three decades without a successful surface combatant program, it is time to abandon this failed approach. Instead of excuses, we need to carefully examine and rebuild the combatant design pipeline, embracing the oxymoron of Festina Lente, to make haste slowly. Often symbolized by the speedy dolphin wrapped around the static anchor, the idea is that to truly move with speed, we need to take the time to make our process correct. There is no doubt that this is the path China’s PLAN took to reach its current state. In developing carriers, they started by taking advantage of the to-be-scrapped HMAS Melbourne's arrival in China to learn everything possible, then purchased a Ukrainian cast-off vessel, developed an improved version of that Russian-origin design, and are now working their way through their own concepts.
The good news is that we are not starting from scratch on this challenge. Elements within the Navy and Government have recognized this need, and work on many of these topics is already underway, including important investments in workforce expansion from skilled trade through to engineers. We now need to complete the pipeline from concept to delivery, ensuring there are no gaps. In addition to all the current, essential, ongoing work, three additional areas require long-term investment.
The contrasting features of Festina Lente also apply to our early-stage platform acquisition process. We need to both make this faster, so there is less desire to short-circuit by choosing parent hull approaches, but at the same time, make it more thorough. While I am not fully convinced that the Navy can adopt all commercial best practices, the recent GAO report on Navy design processes did a good job contrasting the highly linear, constrained Navy early acquisition process with the more iterative commercial process. We need an approach that uses risk and feature off-ramping to explore far more concepts and react more fully to knowledge gained during design than the Navy’s requirements-driven design process currently allows. This requires more work in a shorter period of time, but is essential to reaching a good starting point. Set-based design is another effort toward the same ends, but using it within the engineering world alone is not enough - fundamental acquisition reform is required to grant these methods the freedom needed to improve program outcomes.
We need better maturity and risk metrics. The GAO and CRS have written widely on the idea of design stability before construction, using the metric of drawing completion to highlight unstable designs. This is a valid, but it is an extremely lagging indicator, more of a symptom of a problem that is about to arrive than an early-warning indicator. It also struggles to catch component maturity; programs like DDG-1000 (which I believe was above average in drawing-based maturity) struggled mainly because the AGS, radars, and other components did not exist in workable forms, even if we knew how to integrate them into the design. What does it mean to be done with preliminary or contract design? How do we know that we have done #1 above correctly? And can we break the linear acquisition process to allow re-work when we are not happy with what these metrics say, vs shoving things forward and hoping for the best in our current linear stage-and-gate approach?
There is a strong need for adequate investment in NAVSEA’s standards and approval process. During the drawdown in the 1990s, we moved many of the engineers working in this area from a core-funded capability supported by the Navy to project-based work, where engineers needed to find funding each year from PEOs supporting specific acquisition programs. Over time, investment in the new generation of standards that can leverage advances in simulation and risk analysis has fallen by the wayside, as this sort of “infrastructure” work's timelines and benefits did not align with those of the sponsoring acquisition programs. The result is that while both IMO and international navies have developed robust, goal-based standards for surface ships, the U.S. Navy has not. Goal-based formats explicitly allow rapid consideration of alternative means of compliance, new materials, or construction techniques. Existing codes, with an implicit “iron triangle” of linked demand cases, analysis techniques, and acceptance criteria, aren’t flexible enough to support rapid assessment of alternative ideas proposed by designers or shipbuilders. As we get into uncrewed concepts, goal-based standards become even more important for making informed judgments of acceptable risk in the absence of 150+ person crews. It is notable that our key comparative strengths (e.g. the AEGIS system and SPY radars) have supported multiple designs and have received the equivalent of this type of long-term stable funding.
What to do now? How about replacing the FFG-62 with three programs? One MASC-related, larger uncrewed vessel makes sense to explore what we can do with uncrewed vessels. Second, we are going to build two FFG-62s and will end up de-risking their propulsion, combat, and countless other components. A good risk-reducing approach is to use proven components from prior vessels as the base of a new design, what can be built from the successful “bones” of the FFG-62 program as the second program? And then finally, what makes sense as an even lower-cost option? This is the most challenging of design spaces, but one that is still worth exploring- our predecessors did so in the 1970s and 1980s, and came up with some winners.
The Secretary of the Navy hinted earlier this week there is a plan. And I suspect it will involve Huntington Ingalls, and some hulls remarkable similar to a USCGC WMSL painted grey.