The Bunker: Anchors astray!

The Bunker, delivered to our subscribers Wednesdays at 7 a.m., is a newsletter from the desk of National Security Analyst Mark Thompson. Sign up here to receive it first thing, or check back Wednesday afternoon for the online version.

This week in The Bunker: yet another class of U.S. Navy warships sinks into oblivion; the Pentagon doesn’t want you to know who’s building President Trump’s Golden Dome pipedream; parting words from the late SECDEF Dick Cheney; and more.

“OH, FRIGATE!”

Another Navy fleet runs aground

It was almost eight years ago that The Bunker sounded the klaxon about the Navy’s future $1 billion-a-copy frigate. Last week, two days before Thanksgiving, the Navy finally heard it, too. At long last, it put that turkey on the chopping block and swung its axe.

The service scuttled the program after spending about $2 billion to begin work on the first pair of ships, the USS Constellation and the USS Congress. The Navy scrapped its plans to buy four more, although original projections had called for building up to 20 of the small warships for more than $22 billion.

“We are reshaping how the Navy builds and fields its fleet,” Navy Secretary John Phelan announced November 25. “Today, I can announce the first public action: a strategic shift away from the Constellation-class frigate program.”

Technically, “strategic shift” is Pentagobble for “this isn’t working any more, so we have to try something else.” There’s lots of chatter about how this move will free up more money to buy more ships faster, but we’ve seen this war movie before. The same thing happened with the Navy’s flotillas of Zumwalt-class destroyers and Littoral Combat Ships.

“Both programs were hampered by weak business cases that overpromised the capability that the Navy could deliver,” the Government Accountability Office said (PDF) in March. “Together, these two ship classes consumed tens of billions of dollars more to acquire than initially budgeted, and ultimately delivered far less capability and capacity to fleet users than the Navy had promised.”

But things will be different with the new frigate! the Navy had pledged. We have learned costly lessons from those floating fiascos!

For starters, the new lightly armed warship would be based on a proven Italian design. When the Navy tapped Fincantieri Marinette Marine of Marinette, Wis., to build the vessels in 2022, it declared the ship’s blueprints 88% complete. But, as in so many military procurement programs, the Navy was using a rubbery yardstick and wishful thinking to reach that number (the GAO more gently said [PDF] that the service simply “used metrics for measuring design progress that obscured its visibility into the actual basic and functional design process”). Bottom line: “the basic and functional design was just 70% complete, as of December 2024, over 2 years after the Navy certified the design was 88% complete and construction began.”

The Navy took a proven design and larded it with new requirements that delayed its development, boosted its cost, and made each frigate heavier. The service had been, in fact, “considering a reduction in the frigate’s speed requirement as one potential way, among others, to resolve this weight growth,” the GAO said (PDF). That’s metaphorically rich, given that one reason the Navy cancelled this program is to speed up future ship production.

Incredibly, the day after the Navy killed future work on the frigate at Fincantieri’s Wisconsin shipyard, it took delivery of the final Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ship from the very same contractor at the very same yard. “With the final Freedom-variant LCS now delivered, we celebrate the successful outcome of years of innovation and commitment,” the Navy official overseeing the LCS procurement disaster said. “This highly capable and lethal warship is ready to assert maritime dominance and protect global waters with unparalleled precision and power.”

Wow. The first rule in solving a problem is to admit that you have one. So long as the Navy can’t admit when it has royally screwed up, U.S. sailors will continue to sail, and U.S. taxpayers will continue to buy, over-priced and under-performing ships.

GOLDEN DOME’S STEALTH CONTRACTORS

Blueprints aren’t the only thing that’s missing

Two months ago, defense contractors interested in building President Trump’s “Golden Dome” shield were complaining that they hadn’t been told just what the pie-in-the-sky project actually entailed. Last week, taxpayers learned that multiple companies have received contracts to develop the system’s key missile-killing interceptors. Pentagon officials envision such interceptors would orbit the Earth aboard satellites, blasting enemy missiles ferrying U.S.-bound warheads into space during their “boost phase” shortly after launch.

But the Defense Department, with its long-standing fetish for excessive secrecy, refused to name the contractors involved. That became the focus of the story. “Space Force Awards Secret Contracts for Golden Dome Interceptors,” Bloomberg reported. “Space Force won’t say who got money to start developing orbital interceptors,” added Defense One.

Who do those damn former Pentagon reporters — remember, Defense Secretary Pete “Hands-Off” Hegseth booted them from the building after they refused to sign his edict limiting their reporting to his pre-approved agitprop — think they are? Imagine their perfidious intrepidity, seeking information on where our tax dollars are going? Don’t they know that revealing such sensitive intelligence will imperil national security? The Pentagon, for its part, said the contractors’ names didn’t have to be divulged because each initial award was for less than $9 million and the companies’ identities “are currently not releasable as they are protected by enhanced security measures.”

Never mind. Reuters said the contract recipients included the usual suspects, among them Lockheed and Northrop. The Bunker is keeping its fingers crossed. It hopes Golden Dome does a better job at protecting the homeland from incoming threats than its “enhanced security measures” do at shielding those contractors’ names from outgoing reporters.

CHENEY’S LAST WORDS

Wisdom from the late defense secretary

As defense secretary from 1989 to 1993, Dick Cheney could be an acerbic, yet funny, guy. As vice president from 2001 to 2009, especially after 9/11, not so much. The Bunker, who covered Cheney like a blanket at the Pentagon, was reminded of that following Cheney’s death, at 84, November 3. We went looking for some of his insights and humor, and found examples in interviews he did in 2000, in between those two powerful government gigs, with the University of Virginia’s presidential oral history project.

Cheney, who enjoyed his 10 years in Congress, turned on his former colleagues after leaving Capitol Hill to run the Pentagon:

“I’m convinced we still waste an awful lot of money in the Defense Department because we spend it on things we don’t need to spend it on. We do it because Congress directs that it be done, not because we’ve got a bunch of admirals and generals in the Pentagon who sit around trying to figure out ways to waste the taxpayers’ money.”

On giving marching orders to the military services:

“The Army would salute smartly and try like hell to do it. The Navy would say, ‘Hell no, no way.’ And the Air Force would do everything they could to convince you they were doing it, and then they’d do something else.”

Speaking of the Air Force, Cheney recalled its push to use its new F-117 stealth fighter-bomber when the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989:

“I remember going over the plans and raising questions. ‘You’re going to fly 117s to Panama?’ I said, ‘How tough is the Panamanian air defense system? Do they even have one?’ In the end, the argument, of course, was that they wanted to drop these weapons to stun the Panamanian forces. It was a lot of hooey. They finally cut the size of the deployment, but I think they flew two aircraft down there, did fly a mission and claimed great accuracy, which turned out not to be true: they missed when they got there.”

In 1990, Cheney was leery of telling Morocco’s King Hassan about secret U.S. war plans against Iraq with the king’s interpreter present (His Majesty spoke pretty good English):

“He pulled out this little gold box, that I guess had a piece of the Koran in it, and gave it to his aide and made him swear on pain of death that he wouldn’t reveal what he was about to hear. I thought, ‘Boy, I could use one of those in the Pentagon. Great way to enforce some discipline.’’”

WHAT WE’RE READING

Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently

→ Readying-For-War, Inc.

The world’s top 100 defense contractors saw their revenues jump 5.9% last year to a record $679 billion, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported December 1.

→ Anduril’s angst…

Hot defense start-up Anduril is hitting some bumps in its weapons-development efforts, the Wall Street Journal’s Shelby Holliday, Heather Somerville, Alistair MacDonald, and Emily Glazer reported November 27.

→ Coasties rule!

The U.S. Coast Guard flies each of its helicopters for roughly twice as many hours per year as other branches of the U.S. military, the Congressional Budget Office reported November 20 — and even used Navy choppers dramatically increase their flying time once they’re inherited by the Coast Guard.

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