Its not a bad ship, it is the most capable ship offered. I think the key weakness was design maturity. FREMM seemed much better as a ASW platform than Navantia, and frankly that is no surprise. Navantia F-100 isn't really new and isn't a focused ASW platform for key technical reasons. FREMM was, but as the US has found, it still took significant modification to fit the systems and weapons, and they went for a 57mm gun and a much smaller radar and still had to add ~10m plug. And they are delayed as well.
This post has been updated with a statement from the Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro. ARLINGTON, Va. – The first Constellation-class guided-missile frigate will deliver at least a year late due in large part to workforce shortfalls at the Wisconsin yard where it’s built, USNI News has...
news.usni.org
Really it is damming of the process, not really of the ships themselves.
This.. Blind freddy could see RAN capabilities were going to be ambitious for the Sea5000 and that there would be no ready to go design that was going to meet the timeframes. Again, cursing the black hole and false economy of not building the 4th (and probably 5th AWD). Our planning and selection process needs to be better and be better scheduled themselves and not dictated to by government political timescales. Clearly too much politics over the top of these big projects. Lots of bad out comes. Even the companies involved hate it, because when shit blows up, they get blamed for clear political decisions (from within RAN or from within Government), but can't go around burning governments or navies.
I think this is an option, but not a certainty. There are options. Build 3 new "Hobart" type ships, but we don't even know what that means. Build "Tasmans" which we kinda know what that could look like. There are other options, but not as much industry support. CV90 seems to have no backers other than Mr Lurrsen himself, even NVL didn't poney up the few bucks to recreate their Bulgarian CV90 model for indopac23. I suspect a review of the Sea1180 selection would probably also find problems, but we would waste more money and time finding answers we to problems we already know.
We are trying to solve multiple problems:
Ships for the RAN that are
- More capable
- Newer and more reliable with greater growth potential
- More crew efficient
But also balance industry workload and efficiency, for multiple yards. Preferably in some sort of sustainable model. And probably do it on a tight budget the size of refitting Anzacs or similar. In a time frame where ships are delivered before 2030.
Again, the DSR Naval is the key document to unlocking all of this. Which is going to have to be some kind of magical wonder document.