A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report laid out in stark terms how the Navy started with a new frigate program meant to reduce delays and costs but significant design changes from the parent design and metrics mistakes led to the current status of the lead ship being delayed up to three years.
The Navy planned for the Constellation
-class guided-missile frigate fleet to cost over $22 billion for upwards of 20 ships and decided to modify a parent design to limit technical risk. Fincantieri Marinette Marine won the contract to build a modified European FREMM ship.
However, GAO’s report, “Navy Frigate: Unstable Design Has Stalled Construction and Compromised Delivery Schedules,” details how Navy decisions to start construction before the design was complete and design instability led to growth in ship weight, cost, and timelines.
Notably, as of October 2023, a large amount of the ship’s 3D design was still incomplete a year after construction began.
“Delays in completing the ship design have created mounting construction delays. The Navy acknowledges that the April 2026 delivery date, set in the contract at award, is unachievable. The lead frigate is forecasted to be delivered 36 months later than initially planned,” GAO said.
The Navy admitted the scale of the delays in the Secretary of the Navy’s 45-day shipbuilding review (Defense Daily, April 3).
While the GAO said the setup for the frigate put the Navy in a good position to be optimistic the program could deliver capabilities on the schedule it promised, “subsequent missteps, however, have jeopardized the Navy’s ability to achieve these goals.”
“Navy decisions to substantially modify the frigate design from the parent design have caused the two to now resemble nothing more than distant cousins,” the report continued.
GAO argued that “inadequate functional design review practices and botched metrics that the frigate program continues to rely on obscured the program’s actual design progress and contributed to prematurely starting lead ship construction before the design was sufficiently stable to support that activity.”
Construction on the lead ship, the future USS Constellation (FFG-62), has “effectively stalled” 18 months after it began due to unstable functional design.
GAO said the Navy’s program office tracks and reports on design progress, but its stability metric largely focuses on quantity rather than the quality of completed design documents, obscuring functional design progress and how much design work remains.
The Navy and shipbuilder are now correcting deficient drawings previously submitted and credited as design progress, but GAO noted it still continued to credit design progress based on the amount of deliverables rather than the quality of them.
The Navy has 511 unique Contract Data Requirements List (CDRL) items for the functional design to modify and incorporate its weapon systems, add more robust damage control systems, a newly designed topside arrangement, and more. These CDRLs inform the ship’s 3D model and detail design. As of February 2024, GAO reported 168 CDRL items were approved while another 343 still open.
While the contractor has had issues completing all of these CDRLs, the Navy credits each one as 50 percent complete as soon as it is initially submitted, regardless of the quality of the item and how much more work may be needed to close it out. CDRLs are also credited as 75 percent complete once they are reviewed and the shipbuilder is told it needs to work and resubmit them. Once the CRDLs are resubmitted they are marked as 90 percent complete, but still often require multiple rounds of review to be finished. Even once a CDRL is complete, it can be reopened to ensure alignment with other design products.
“Navy engineering officials noted instances where the Navy received items largely incomplete and, in some cases, without any design content from the frigate shipbuilder—an occurrence the Navy officials attributed to the contractor’s desire to meet a contract deadline for submitting a given [Contract Data Requirements List or CDRL] item. In such instances, the Navy has credited these largely incomplete CDRL items as 50 percent complete. These practices and metrics caused the frigate’s functional design to appear more complete than what had been achieved,” the GAO said.
As of February 2024, GAO reported 168 CDRL items were approved while another 343 still open.
The report noted under best practices, construction of a block or grand module on a ship should not start until its detail design is complete, but Fincantieri started constructing grand modules with an incomplete detail design.
GAO said the shipbuilder is now confronted with two options: adding costly rework and out-of-sequence work on the modules once the design is complete or further delaying construction awaiting design completion.
The report said delays in completing the functional design “have had a cascading effect on other design activities, including 3D modeling, detail design, and development of work instructions needed to build the ship. These delays have stalled construction progress and jeopardized the Navy’s approach to reduce technical risk and deliver frigates sooner by leveraging an existing ship design.”
The report said one bright spot to the Navy’s frigate program was negotiating a fixed-price incentive firm target contract plus additional special performance incentive fees. This limits the Navy’s cost list and ceiling price on the first four frigates under contract to about $2.5 billion.
The Navy usually uses cost-reimbursement contracts for detail design and construction of lead and even follow-on ships, where the government usually bears the risk in cost, schedule and performance issues.
GAO made five recommendations to the Navy: the functional design metrics and practices should focus on measuring quality rather than quantity of deliverables from the shipbuilder; such restructured functional design review practices and metrics should be used to assess whether functional design is complete before starting construction of the second frigate; detail design for any given grand module of the lead and follow-on frigates should be completed before starting construction on it; the planned revision of the frigate’s Test and Evaluation Master Plan (TEMP) should incorporate additional land-based testing for propulsion system and machinery centralized control systems and schedule them on a timeline that realistically accounts for lead ship delivery delays; and before acquiring the 11th frigate, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition should review the frigate program’s acquisition strategy to identify opportunities to incorporate leading practices for product development and update that strategy.
The Navy agreed with four recommendations, but while it agreed on the fourth recommendation to upgrade the TEMP to incorporate more land-based testing activities, the service said it does not intend to incorporate them into additional test objectives because it views the primary focus of such activities to be for sustainment. The Navy expects the land-based engineering site to be complete in fiscal year 2029.