US Navy Constellation-class frigate enters construction phase

News, US September 4, 2022 , by IRIA No Comments

U.S. shipbuilding company Fincantieri Marinette Marine is set to start the construction of the first Constellation-class frigate, U.S. Navy announced.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy for research, development, and acquisition, Tommy Ross said that the construction of the Constellation-class frigate will begin “a long way from scratch”.

According to the Program Executive Officer for Unmanned and Small Combatants, Rear Admiral Casey Moton, “Design maturity was probably the single biggest factor to reduce the risk to production. So we held ourselves to meet a high standard, and at the end, there were even a couple spots where we decided to continue maturing the design in order to meet that high standard. And it was the right thing to do, and I think it’s going to pay dividends in construction.”

The U.S. Navy has taken several steps to ensure that the risk in the frigate program has been reduced, including requiring companies bidding on the program to use an existing ship design as the basis for their proposals.

Earlier this year during a presentation about the new class of ships, Captain Kevin Smith highlighted that the Constellation-class project is focused on building frigates and not destroyers, which means the frigates would not carry heavy loads of weaponry. However, he mentioned that Constellation-class frigates would have the ability to perform small-scale escort missions in order to relieve some destroyers from these missions.

*^{Fincantieri Marine FREMM Frigate. (Image Credit: Fabius1975/Wikicommons)}*

According to Captain Kevin Smith, the Constellation-class frigates are aimed to work as an Anti Submarine Warfare (ASW) Platform. “That’s why ASW is listed first among the missions [of the ship, followed by] surface warfare, electromagnetic maneuver warfare, and air warfare. In a lot of ways, it is like a DDG, it just doesn’t have all the magazine capacity, it doesn’t have all the armament you would expect of a DDG,” Capt. Smith said.

The U.S. Navy’s Constellation-class Ships project is being developed under the perspective of FREMM, which is a concept based on multi-purpose frigates, initially developed and mastered by Fincantieri and Naval Group. Many navies have successfully implemented the FREMM concept from around the world, including the Italian and French Naval Forces. The Ships built under the FREMM model have certain specifications that enable them to carry out both ASW operations and escort missions.

The constellation-class frigate is expected to be used to carry out U.S. Navy’s agile multi-mission. It’s going to be used for escort missions for high-value units, steaming independently, and can also be integrated with a task force, surface action group. The final delivery and commissioning of the frigate are expected to be completed by 2026.