Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday aboard the littoral combat ship USS Detroit

The US Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday was blunt when he was recently quoted saying, “I don’t mean to be dramatic, but I feel like if the Navy loses its head, if we go off course and we take our eyes off those things we need to focus on, I think we may not be able to recover in this century.”

Paul McCleary writing in Breaking Defense observes that for months, Gilday has been pointing to the extremely expensive failures of the Littoral Combat Ship, Ford-class carrier, and Zumwalt destroyer — all of which are years behind schedule and billions over budget — as a cautionary tale for what is to be avoided in building new ships.

Much of the problem rests with decisions made to develop new technologies at the same time as the new hulls, a complex juggling act where one dropped ball puts the whole project in jeopardy. Speaking at the annual Surface Navy Association symposium, Gilday pledged that those days are over.

“We’ve decoupled new technology development from building ships,” he said. “Instead, we’re designing them with program-of-record systems in their baseline and margins to insert future technologies when they’re tested and ready.”

The admiral said the new Constellation-class frigate program will model this approach, and will use a range of existing technologies and phased upgrades in order to get the first ship in the water in 2026.