The False Hope of the Clean Sheet

The US Navy just canceled the Constellation guided-missile frigate program, truncating it to two ships (from a planned 6+). The intent is to jettison a troubled program and replace it with a clean-sheet "new small surface combatant" that would be cheaper and faster to build. That's a false hope.

Concept image of the Constellation class. Credit: Marinette Marine Corporation

As an aviation enthusiast and someone who has experienced the descent of a new design from pristine drawings to messy, compromised hardware, I've seen the allure of "clean sheets" many times. The first versions of a new aircraft or ship are often plagued with "teething difficulties": the P-51 Mustang is now considered one of the best airplanes of World War II, but it started off grossly under-powered. The M4 Sherman tank became successful only after a larger gun was installed. The M16 rifle was so unreliable that it prompted Congressional investigations on improper procurement; now it's been in service for 60+ years because no rifle has been able to be a big-enough improvement. In any of those cases, a clean-sheet replacement might have had the same severity of teething issues, and their operators would then experience a parade of replacements that never overcame those issues.

In aviation, it's been fashionable to badmouth the F-35 Lightning II. I have my own complaints about the program, but many of its severe issues have been fixed. And the alternative is terrifying: people have said "let's replace this gold-plated fighter with something low-cost," which betrays ignorance that the F-35 was originally designed to be a "low-cost" fighter (the "low" part of the "high/low mix" with the F-22). Any low-cost replacement for the F-35 is likely to be at least as expensive as scope creep sets in. The only possible exception is buying an off-the-shelf or lightly-modified design: replacing an F-35 with an F-15EX or F-16V has a somewhat-firm price, but that also means that people can't project their hopes and desires onto it like a clean-sheet design.

In ships the clean-sheet optimism seems to have won, which has left the US Navy with several "orphan" classes of tiny numbers of ships, tons of development spending, and a shrinking overall fleet size. The two types of Littoral Combat Ships were curtailed after they failed to demonstrate their ability to perform some missions, and are already retiring. The Zumwalt-class destroyers went from a fleet size of 32 to three, and the unique 155mm naval guns are useless because the Navy found the ammunition too expensive. These ships are in service with the valuable bow-center of the ship taken up by two guns with no ammunition. The remaining ships are undergoing refit to replace the guns with missile launch cells.

Finally the ill-fated Constellation class was a modification of an existing frigate design, and was intended to be simpler and cheaper than the Littoral Combat Ships. Now, we're canceling the Constellations to find something simpler and cheaper again. Even with all of its delays, the Constellations would probably have been in-service before the next design and source-selection is completed and well before their replacements commission.

Thinking of clean-sheet designs is fun, and they're perfect in our minds before metal-bashing starts. But eventually reality sets in, and we find that fixing the existing system (or ship or aircraft) would have been faster, cheaper, and just as effective.