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.
Some of the components will be built in Austrailia, Canada and the UK, and many of the components in these country’s Type 26 are already built in the US, including the Mk45 5 inch naval gun. There is also an economy of scale that will bring the price down because 32 are already being built. This is to be encouraged. All 4 countries are close allies and not even the US has an unlimited budget so closer cooperation on the design and manufacture of weapons systems to deal with threats such as the rise of China is to be encouraged, everybody will benefit from this and it will be the best anti-sub ship on the market, bar none. Anti submarine warfare has been the Royal Navy’s speciality since the cold war and our ship designers and sonar manufacturers know what they’re doing.
Yes, that I understand fully. And sadly the American companies building ships and aircraft want years and decades for their time-to-market. We need months.