Winston Churchill once observed that the Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted. One could argue that going back to the
Legend NSC as was previously considered and rejected for the FFG(X) requirement fits Churchill's description: the right choice, just a decade (or two, or three) late.
Beyond the specific failings of the
Constellation program, I think it's worth considering the broader context of its demise. Or rather, the context of its birth and what that implies about the context of its demise.
From a certain perspective, that of seeking a 21st century FFG-7,
Constellation was always an odd choice, being derived from the largest, most capable and no doubt most expensive of the candidates evaluated. One could rationalise the selection by arguing that technology, requirements and design standards had evolved over time such that, actually, this was indeed a rather modest ship (and also by observing that, actually, FFG-7 was never
that modest), but those arguments were never entirely convincing. If you wanted a 21st century FFG-7, the
Legend NSC pitch was always the more natural fit. USN clearly didn't want an FFG-7.
At the time, USN was in the midst of re-evaluating its future inventory structure:
“Today, I have a requirement for 104 large surface combatants in the force structure assessment; [and] I have [a requirement for] 52 small surface combatants,” said Surface Warfare Director Rear Adm. Ronald Boxall. “That’s a little upside down. Should I push out here and have more small platforms? I think the future fleet architecture study has intimated ‘yes,’ and our war gaming shows there is value in that.”16
“The FSA may actually help us on, how many (destroyers) do we really need to modernize, because I think the FSA is going to give a lot of credit to the frigate—if I had a crystal ball and had to predict what the FSA was going to do, it’s going to probably recommend more small surface combatants, meaning the frigate … and then how much fewer large surface combatants can we mix?” Merz said. An issue the Navy has to work through is balancing a need to have enough ships and be capable enough today, while also making decisions that will help the Navy get out of the top-heavy surface fleet and into a better balance as soon as is feasible. “You may see the evolution over time where frigates start replacing destroyers, the Large Surface Combatant [a future cruiser/destroyer-type ship] starts replacing destroyers, and in the end, as the destroyers blend away you’re going to get this healthier mix of small and large surface combatants,” he said—though the new FSA may shed more light on what that balance will look like and when it could be achieved.17
The key point is that, at the time
Constellation was selected, the future frigate was envisioned as actually
replacing some existing DDG-51 destroyers (basically, the Flight Is) as part of a broader rebalancing of the surface combatant inventory, rather than simply supplementing that existing structure with additional hulls. Whatever the merits of that objective, a shift of that nature would inevitably ruffle some feathers -- doubly so if you were proposing to replace them with a reheated LCS. From this perspective,
Constellation was the largest step down from the DDG-51 baseline that the Navy was willing and able to stomach in pursuit of numbers. This perspective also helps to explain the otherwise perverse insistence on endless design changes that were so
obviously hostile to the project's core objective of bringing a mature design into service on budget and on schedule.
By extension, the end of
Constellation and the rebirth of the
Legend NSC suggests that these ideas have been substantially overturned. DDG(X) is in the long grass, DDG-51 production extends out to the horizon, and now we return to a more modest small combatant that will exist in the same
structural relationship to the larger ships in the inventory as LCS was always intended to.
