Constellation Frigate Cancelled: The US Navy Picked a Cutter With No VLS

The US Navy cancelled the Constellation-class frigate and replaced it with a Coast Guard cutter. The new FF(X) carries no vertical launch system at all. Here is why. On November 25, 2025, Navy Secretary John Phelan cut the Constellation-class frigate program from six ships to two. His verdict was blunt: the ship was "80 percent of the cost of a destroyer and 60 percent of the capability." Behind that line sat a design that drifted from roughly 85 percent commonality with its Italian and French FREMM parent to under 15 percent, weight growth the Government Accountability Office put at 759 metric tons by October 2024, and a lead ship whose delivery slipped from April 2026 to April 2029. USS Constellation, FFG-62, was about 12 percent complete on the day the program died. On December 19, 2025, the Navy announced its replacement. The FF(X) is built on the hull of HII's Legend-class National Security Cutter, a Coast Guard ship Ingalls Shipbuilding delivered ten times between 2008 and 2024. Ingalls received a 282.9 million dollar lead yard contract on April 28, 2026, awarded without competition under a finding of unusual and compelling urgency. Flight I runs 421 feet long on a 54-foot beam and displaces about 4,750 tonnes, roughly two thirds of the Constellation. It makes 28 knots, ranges 12,000 nautical miles and carries a crew of 148. The armament is a 57mm Mk 110 gun, a 30mm mount, and a Mk 49 launcher with 21 Rolling Airframe Missiles. There is no Mark 41 vertical launch system, or VLS, and there is no sonar. Instead, an open bay aft of the flight deck takes containerized launchers holding up to 16 Naval Strike Missiles or as many as 48 Hellfires. The ship's firepower is cargo. Critics call the missing launch cells a glaring omission, and the comparison that stings is the Littoral Combat Ship, whose surface warfare module carried a strikingly similar loadout before its modules failed and its hulls were retired early. The sharper comparison is China's Type 054B. The first two hulls, Luohe and Qinzhou, carry 32 VLS cells on a frigate of roughly the same displacement. This video covers what the Navy traded away, why it made that trade, and what happens next. An FF(X) Flight II with vertical launch cells and anti-submarine systems exists only as budget studies. Meanwhile the Navy is evaluating Japanese Mogami, South Korean Chungnam and Turkish Istanbul class frigate designs under a 1.85 billion dollar study due to the White House on November 12, 2026, and Babcock has pitched a Type 31 variant. Phelan himself was removed as Navy Secretary on April 22, 2026, six days before the contract that started construction. Every figure here is drawn from primary sources: Congressional Research Service report R44972, Government Accountability Office reports on the frigate program, Navy budget documents, Department of Defense contract announcements, and reporting by USNI News, The War Zone, Naval News and Defense News. Subscribe to The War Dockyard for the decisions behind the world's warships, explained with the numbers that actually drove them. #USNavy #FFX #Frigate #ConstellationClass #NavalNews