Maybe buying a US-designed, US-built ship is more important than shopping for one on the international market?
We don’t have time to wait for a fresh frigate design. We bet on the LCS and they turned out to be a massive failure in that respect. We need replacement ships NOW - that’s why the requirements include “already in service elsewhere”. Off the shelf, ready to go is what we need now. They will be built in the US, no matter who designed them.
We need the ships *now*, not in 10-15 years. And with LCS, we screwed up and killed off all the frigate development programs. There is *no* ready-to-go US frigate design - the Navy made sure of that with LCS.