Farwell, Connies
By 
Somehow, the Constellation-class frigate program went bad.
Yesterday, the US Navy announced that procurement of the Constellation-class frigates, expected to be a mainstay of the fleet for decades to come, is being suspended at two ships.
Four ships were immediately cancelled, and there appears to be no expectation of resuming further construction.
What happened?
It turns out that redesigning a foreign hull to meet USN operational and technical requirements was too difficult a task for the Navy’s bureaucratic architecture to handle.
Additional problems involving shipyard and workforce capacity drove up costs and pushed back delivery dates.
And now the program has failed and died, just like the Littoral Combat Ship and the Zumwalt class destroyer.
Some of the problems probably had something to do with the Worst Powerpoint Slide Ever, displayed above. Someday possibly the US Navy will build something. For its part, the People’s Liberation Army Navy has constructed something like forty destroyers over the past decade, along with a lot of smaller ships.