Op/Ed: Constellations of Disasters

Rik van Hemmen, Contributor

Rik van Hemmen is the President of Martin & Ottaway...

February 19, 2026

Italian Navy Carlo Bergamini-class FREMM frigate ITS Carlo Margottini (F 592) sails near Cape Warth, North Atlantic Ocean, during exercise Formidable Shield 2023. Formidable Shield is a biennial integrated air and missile defense (IAMD) exercise involving a series of live-fire events against subsonic, supersonic, and ballistic targets, incorporating multiple Allied ships, aircraft, and ground forces working across battlespaces to deliver effects. (Courtesy photo by Italian Navy)

After spending about 3 billion dollars, the Constellation frigate program was shut down with absolutely nothing to show for it.

The New York Times produced an Op-Ed titled “America can’t make what the Navy Needs.”

That title may indicate the United States does not have the technical ability to build ships for the US Navy. However, the article itself clearly shows that the issue relates to the Navy not being able to figure out what it wants US shipbuilders to build.

The Navy wanted US shipbuilders to build a standard design. They contracted with a US builder who had proposed a standard design and then the Navy proceeded to modify the design to death.

The article has an excellent animated graphic that shows how the design changed, and to an engineer it is scarier than Jack Nicholson screaming “Here’s Johnny” in the Shining.

I posted the article on LinkedIn and it received a personal record amount of comments, likes (actually expressions of shared disgust), and reposts.

From the comments it appears that at the outset hardly anyone thought this was a good idea, which leaves one to wonder why the decision to adopt a foreign design for US Navy consumption was ever made. It might have been a desperation move, noting that recent attempts at native designs had been deemed failures.

I actually feel bad for our Navy.

They have become the whipping boy for a system that develops naturally when large amounts of time and money are available in a risk averse environment with too many cooks spoiling the broth.

The US Navy simply no longer is an environment for experimentation and innovation. It has gotten too large, risk averse, bureaucratic and beholden to its contractors to go from a concept to an actual ship in a reasonable amount of time at a reasonable cost.

In wartime these obstacles disappear, but decades since last actual naval combat has resulted in a massive counterproductive morass. To describe the morass would take too long for this column, but note that for the Italian job the Navy was required to run the design through their proprietary CREATE-SH computer aided design system. This system, developed over decades at massive cost, was supposed to simplify Navy ship design, but it actually makes ship designs grow out of control. It is rumored that when the Arleigh Burke design was run through that CAD system it required over 30% additional displacement to carry the same combat systems.

It is easy to criticize, but it is much harder to come up with solutions. I am sure that there is no single answer (short of becoming involved in a war that requires naval combat), and the resistance to change will be immense because there are too many players that benefit from the system’s disfunction. However, if there is motivated leadership for change, they may want to listen to those who actually know how to design Navy ships.

I did, and this is what I heard.

Design depends on design leadership. Design leaders are unique professionals who have a solid grasp of the process and the willpower to say “no” ten times before they will allow a design to be modified. They are still out there. I am even sure that there are quite a number of those people working at NAVSEA and for US Navy design contractors. The problem is that they are not allowed to say “no”. Ship design is very complicated, but relatively simple in process terms. The process simply consists of getting a good team together of no more than 30 generalists and specialists and lock them up for 6 months with an unalterable design assignment. They will come out with something that is just as good, if not better, than when there are hundreds of people over multiple years working on one project. Nothing is worse than a design team that is larger than needed and takes more than the absolute minimum amount of time.
It is also good cost control. 30 Engineers for six months should be budgeted for no more than $6M, and that allows for the best of the best to work on the project with money for late night pizza to spare.
I used the term “unalterable design assignment”. What I mean is that before the design effort starts, there has to be a clearly defined mission. If the mission changes, the design should not be altered to suit the new mission. Instead, the design should be scrapped and a new design should be started. This puts a heavy burden on the Navy, but it will teach the Navy discipline, because changing missions will simply start a new 6 month cycle and if they don’t stop changing missions, they will never get to build a boat.

Image courtesy PEO USC / the author

There is another way to install discipline and that can be driven by legislation. The Navy can simply be told that they are allowed to have vessels of certain maximum displacement, top speed and top speed range. Maybe they are allowed to have 80,000 ton vessels, 13,000 ton vessels, 9000 ton vessels and 5000 ton vessel, etc. all with specified speed and range. There will be a fixed fleet procurement budget and it is up to the Navy to pick the mix. However, if the prototype vessels do not make the speed, range, or go over displacement, funding will stop automatically for the next vessel to that design. It is up to the Navy to figure out how they will fix a design. In this approach the designers have a stronger barrier against mission creep, and it will be more attractive to design a simpler ship that will be certain to meet the constraints and then to build out the concept in later versions.

Remarkably this is what has actually occurred with the Arleigh Burke destroyers. The original Burkes were quite conservative and did not even have a hangar, but later versions have become much more capable (although the displacement increases would not be allowed in the above approaches, and later Flights also suffered from design dithering delays).

There is no guarantee that any design will be a raging success, regardless of who designed it and how many people provided input. That means that we simply have to accept that some designs work better than others and just learn from it and carry on. In that light we do not have to think of the LCS and Zumwalt designs as failures. The only failure in those projects is that it took forever to actually build those boats to see how good or bad they were.

The American engineering (tinkering) approach of building something and then making it better is a valid concept in complex designs with rapidly changing technology. However, that means that there has to be strong pushback against second guessers when things don’t work out in the first pass. Innovation is hard work. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.

I often think back on watching TV coverage of one of the Space X rockets failing to land on its feet. To me it registered as: “Oh, well it did not work this time, but I am sure they learned something.” However, the TV voiceover said: “For the sixth time in a row Elon Musk’s Space X rocket failed to land in its feet.”

I ended up screaming at the TV: “Well what did you expect? This is really really hard! The only way to make it work is to keep trying! Just let them do their job and shut up!”

For every column I write MREN makes a small contribution to an organization of my choice. For the foreseeable future I am selecting SL7Expo. An industry wide effort to develop a Smithsonian level exhibit center for commercial maritime on a ship that is a paragon of a fast design process.