My only concern is that we keep the “know-how” U.S. based, so that we keep up with the latest tech and designs of this class of warship.
We need to pick up where things left off, if some of these relationships ever go South.
While this sounds like outsourcing, I wonder how much of it may in fact be our President tweaking our builders/suppliers in order to break loose some better deals design and cost-wise.
Part of the problem is that the Navy and most of America’s naval contractors put all their eggs in the now clearly failed LCS basket and the very troubled DD-X project. We no longer have any modern designs between the two ready to go and the modern threat picture is such that we do not have time to start from scratch and retrain people to design a new one.
Back in the seventies I used to see a number of Naval frigates in the US stockpile. I had heard later that the use of frigates by the US Navy was a stopgap type of a program until the Arleigh Burke class destroyers came out. But I’m not sure if that’s accurate.