EVERETT— A plan to house a dozen guided missile frigates promised for Naval Station Everett is dead after Secretary of the Navy John Phelan scrapped a contract to build the Constellation class ships.
Phelan announced on social media and in a statement back on Nov 25, that he wanted to reshape “how the Navy builds and fields its fleet.”
“Today, I can announce the first public action is a strategic shift away from the Constellation-class frigate program,” Phelan said.
He promised in a video on X to “not spend a single taxpayer dollar unless it contributes directly to readiness and our ability to defeat future threats.”
Phelan announced a new plan to replace the Constellation class frigates on Dec 19 in another video on X, calling it a strategic shift to new, faster-built ships.
In June 2021, the U.S. Navy announced that the Everett base would serve as homeport for 12 Constellation-class frigates.
As late as October 2024, U.S. Navy Capt. Stacy Wuthier, commander for Naval Station Everett, said the ships were still headed to the base.
“The resources are a little bit delayed, but that hasn’t changed the overall strategy for the frigate program,” Wuthier said at the time. “They’re still coming, and Everett is still the preferred future home port for the first group of the Constellation-class frigates.”
With Phelan’s decision, that no longer appears to be the case.
The decision to kill the shipbuilding program came after the frigate program was already behind schedule and over budget.
In a May 2024 report, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, said that the first ship was three years behind schedule and would not be ready until 2029.
The GAO attributed the delay to the Navy’s decision to begin construction before the design was complete, which it said “was inconsistent with leading ship design practices.”
In 2020, the Congressional Budget Office found that the ships could cost $1.2 billion each, 40% more than the Navy had initially estimated.
The first two of the Constellation class frigates continue to be built by shipbuilder Fincantieri Marinette Marine in its Wisconsin shipyard, with Phelan canceling the construction of the next four ships, said Capt. Ron Flanders, a naval public affairs officer at the Pentagon, in an email.
It’s unclear if Naval Station Everett will even get those first two ships.
“Typically, homeporting decisions are not made until much closer to a ship’s commissioning date,” said Flanders.
Wuthier was not available for comment, said a base spokesperson on Dec. 16, who referred all questions to the Pentagon.
Naval Station Everett is “uniquely situated” for the new frigates, said Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Everett, in an interview on Dec. 18
He said the same rationale that Navy officials originally made to house the scrapped frigate program should be put in play for the replacement combatants.
“It’s one of the closest locations to the Pacific Ocean,” he said.
Larsen first lobbied for the Naval Station Everett as the home of the Constellation Class frigates in 2019.
Ray Stephanson, president and CEO of the Economic Alliance Snohomish County, said the demise of the frigate program is bad news for the county.
“The decision to end the frigate program is very disappointing,” he said.
A Naval Environmental Study in early 2024 found that the frigates wouldn’t have necessarily increased jobs at the Everett base. The study estimated that the frigates would have brought in 2,900 new sailors and civilian personnel, but that 3,100 people now working at the base would be reassigned as seven guided mission ships were moved to a new base.
But Stephanson said the assignment of the frigates would have cemented the base’s role as a key asset for the U.S. Navy. He said the military is always examining which bases are essential strategically, and that Naval Station Everett has been threatened before with closure.
Stephanson said a new base realignment committee kept Everett off the list of potential base closures in May 2005, but only after lobbying efforts by him and other local leaders. Stephanson, who was mayor of Everett at the time, said the efforts included trips to Washington, D.C. to lobby Pentagon officials.
“The whole idea of the naval base was to diversify the Snohomish County economy,” he said.
Phelan said the design of the new frigates will be based on an existing U.S. Coast Guard Legend-class cutter and could be deployed within several years.
“Built on a proven American design, in American shipyards, with an American supply chain, this effort is focused on one outcome: delivering combat power to the Fleet fast,” he said in the video.
Navy officials say the first ship could be launched by 2028.
The announcement did not detail any information on where the new ships could be based.
While Larsen said he was disheartened with the Navy Secretary’s decision to kill the Constellation-Class frigate program, Larsen said he was putting his focus on lobbying defense officials for the future frigates.
Randy Diamond: 425-339-3097; randy.diamond@heraldnet.com.
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