Insanity. If you want a ship to perform destroyer-type jobs and to replace destroyers, why the hell are you trying to do this with a frigate? It's a project that's basically doomed to failure.
Honestly, for all that the Legend-class is going to be a lot less capable, I think that it's just a much healthier concept going forward. Frigates aren't supposed to be able to do everything, so being more limited is fine as long as it's still good at doing frigate-type jobs. Of course, this is still the US Navy we're talking about, so I expect them to screw it up somewhere.
I think that having
Constellation as the low-end counterpart to a future ~14k tonne DDG(X) was a workable concept. The argument for such a large "small" combatant, while conceding to some extent on capabilities and cost in service of boosting inventory numbers, would have been along the lines of that which pushed USN in the direction of an all-
Burke inventory in the first place: that larger and more capable ships are also more efficient ships and that USN combatants require higher baseline capabilities than those of other navies that are satisfied with more modest combatants. A future DDG(X)/
Constellation mix would still have been meaningfully "lighter" than the preceding
Tico/
Burke mix.
The problem is that the genesis of such a first-rate frigate, with the potential to become the Navy's new baseline combatant for the post-
Burke era, sits awkwardly alongside the imperatives of the FFG(X) program as, in large part, a crash response to the failure of LCS. Working "up" from LCS, the clear priorities are schedule, risk, cost, and delivering a certain threshold of multirole capability. But the fleet architecture perspective outlined above isn't so much working "up" from LCS as "down" from
Burke. From the latter perspective, the priority is to ensure that the design is satisfactory in all fundamental respects and with sufficient margins for future growth to potentially be developed into the Navy's future baseline combatant. Hence the fiddling with compartmentalisation for passive survivability, strike-length cells, etc. Characteristics that are difficult to change later need to be dialed in from the start. Ditching
Constellation and embracing the National Security Cutter suggests that rather different objectives are now being pursued, plausibly in service of an alternative vision for the future inventory, perhaps informed by ongoing developments with DDG-51 and DDG(X).
The truth is that that any requirement for a US Navy frigate, modest or otherwise, really calls for a clean-sheet solution. Neither FREMM-IT or the
Legend NSC were or are ideal solutions. That USN and the associated MIC drove itself into a ditch such that a foreign ship and a coast guard ship were amongst the most compelling options available remains the real story here, even if it is an old one -- the still-wagging tail of decades of USN choosing not to invest in a modern general purpose frigate.
