Gratuitous background: as a native of North Dakota, I’ve always been fascinated by ships and the sea. We North Dakotans are a maritime people; the salt water runs through our veins.
So after seeing ship program after ship program go wildly over budget and slide into morasses of cloudy requirements and unplanned changes in mission over the past couple of decades, and aware of the critical need to rebuild the Navy’s ability to fight neer-peer wars, I was encouraged to see the Navy not only contemplating buying an “off the shelf” ship design for its new “frigate” requirement, but actually act on it.
The Navy decommissioned the last of its Cold War-era “frigates” ten years ago. Frigates are “small” by warship standards, in the 3,000-6000 ton range, designed to protect convoys of merchant ships, groups of Marine amphibious warfare vessels and other…
