On April 30, the Navy awarded Fincantieri's Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin an initial $795M contract for design and construction of a Fast Frigate based on the Italian company's "European Multi-purpose Frigate (= FREMM in Italian)" design with an option for nine more for a total contract value of $5.6B.
- The Navy estimates that each 547 foot, 6,800 ton ship will cost the Navy just under $1B with the difference from the Fincantieri contract (~$425M/ship) being the cost of standard Government Furnished Equipment, e.g. radars and weapons, provided by other contractors.
- The ship features excellent quality of life features with enlisted personnel finally enjoying officer-level billeting.
- CBO believes that the Navy's total cost estimates are ~20-25% too low.
- The Navy intends to buy 20 of the new Frigates and to recompete the contract after the initial 10-ship options.
- First delivery should occur in July 2026 with the tenth ship delivered in November 2030. Eight ships will be in work at the time of the first delivery.
- The Fast Frigate class is a follow-on to the 35 ships of the much-maligned Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) class, 16 of which were produced at the Marinette Marine yard under a contract with prime Lockheed Martin with the remaining 19 produced by Austal in Mobile, Alabama.
- The award to Marinette Marine is worth at least 1,000 direct jobs and thousands more indirect and assures the viability of the yard through the end of the decade.
Fincantieri's competitors for the Frigate award were:
- HII, which proposed to build a variant of its US Coast Guard National Security Cutter in Pascagoula, MS
- GD Bath Iron Works, which proposed a variant of a Spanish destroyer design to be built in Maine.
- Austal, which proposed an upgraded version of its Independence variant of the Littoral Combat Ship to be built Alabama.
While it is very unusual for the US Navy to adopt a foreign design for one of its combatants, the award to Marinette Marine is not a complete shock.
- First, the original FREMM design is mature and well appreciated with 15 hulls already in commission with Italy, France, Morocco and Egypt, five more being contracted and even more foreign sales planned.
- Second, there was a clear industrial base consideration. The Marinette Marine yard has a looming workload deficit mid-decade: the final LCS is already under contract for delivery in Jan 2024. The yard's contract with Lockheed to deliver four frigates based on its LCS design to Saudi Arabia will only add about two years of work. Don't forget Wisconsin's value as a swing state in the coming election either. As a senior shipbuilding executive recently observed, "Navy shipbuilding contracts are not awarded, they're allocated."
HII has not been ignored in the DoN's desire to keep the shipbuilding base intact in the COVID-19 crisis. On April 3, the Navy awarded HII a $1.5B contract for LPD-31, an acceleration from its previously planned award date of December and then on April 30, awarded HII a $188M contract for long lead items for the LHA-9 large deck amphibious ship, which is not due to start construction for at least two and a half more years.
