Constellation Lessons

Christopher Cavas has a maritime podcast and recently offered a ‘lessons learned’ episode about the Constellation.[1]  In it, he speaks with former Under and Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly and retired Rear Admiral and former Fincantieri executive Chuck Goddard about lessons from the Constellation disaster.  Both Modly and Goddard were intimately involved with the Constellation.  Modly’s contribution was the usual worthless civilian nonsense.  Goddard’s thoughts are what we’ll focus on.  The podcast is interesting and worth listening to but not for the right reasons.
 
As you listen to the podcast, understand that both men were involved with the Constellation and, given the magnitude of the program failure, clearly neither man was part of the solution which means they were part – a very large part! - of the problem.  The entire interview, then, is the problem explaining what went wrong without being aware enough to even recognize that they were what went wrong!  The problem was trying to explain what the problem was!  The resulting discussion was exactly what you’d expect:  a mishmash of delusion and obvliviousness.
 
Before we go any further, it is important to understand Goddard’s background.
 

• Senior Vice President responsible for the FFG 62 Program for Fincantieri Marinette Marine (FMM)
• Capture Executive for the $5.5 billion FFG(X) program at Fincantieri Marine Group
• CEO, President and GM of FMM from Jun 2011 – Jul 2014
• Lockheed Martin director of Aegis Program Integration and Capture Manager for the Aegis Combat Systems Engineering Agent (CSEA) competition
• During his thirty-year career with the Navy, he led a variety of complex ship programs from destroyers to sealift ships, culminating in his role as the Navy Program Executive Officer, Ships
• Vice Commander Naval Sea Systems Command
• Chairman SUBSAFE Program review
• DDG 1000 Major Program Manager during design and development
• New Construction Officer at Supervisor of Shipbuilding, San Diego, CA overseeing AOE-10, Sealift Conversion and Sealift New Construction programs

 
He has been involved in a lot of failures and had an entire career to effect positive changes and completely failed to do so.  Almost every group he was with has been heavily criticized on this blog.  He has been part of, and known nothing but, failure his entire career.
 
As a general observation, Goddard utterly fails to grasp any actual lessons learned beyond the superficial and nearly irrelevant level which is typical of managerial incompetence.  Such managers simply can’t see or grasp the real lessons.  If they could, they would have changed things while they were in a position to do so.
 
For example, one of the major (perhaps the main) lessons from the Constellation was something we’ve harped on relentlessly:  the failure to generate a comprehensive Concept of Operations (CONOPS).  The Constellation never had a sharply defined mission/function.  It was a mini-Burke which is to say that it was all things to all people.  Goddard himself offers an observation that simultaneously demonstrates this and illustrates his complete failure to grasp what it means.  He noted that the Constellation eventually sank under the weight of the never-ending flood of change orders emanating from NAVSEA’s attempt to spec and build the frigate as a destroyer because they had no experience designing and building a frigate so they fell back on what they knew:  the Burke!  They designed and spec’ed the Constellation as if it were a Burke.  This demonstrates the lack of a CONOPS that would have filtered out any destroyer-like, non-frigate changes.  Absent a sharply defined CONOPS, there was no basis to reject any change order since each change, in isolation, seemed justifiable.  While recognizing the harmful effect of the constant change orders, Goddard fails to understand that they originated from his early involvement with the Constellation and his failure to establish a CONOPS.
 
While he fails to understand the true relevance of his observation, Goddard nevertheless identifies a key failing of the Navy:  they only know how to make one type of surface combatant, the Burke.  All their expectations, requirements, specifications, etc. are from the Burke.  I’ve repeatedly talked about the folly of continuing to build the Burke class (see, “Burkes – TheAnchor Around the Navy’s Neck”) and the folly of building large, multi-function ships, in general.  We should be building many types of single function ships and this is yet another reason why.  We need a Navy/NAVSEA that is comfortable with multiple ship types and understands why they exist, what their roles are, how they differ, and how to spec and build them.  The Chinese have extensive classes of missile boats, corvettes, frigates, destroyers, and destroyer/cruisers.  We have Burkes and that’s it.  We are a one-trick pony surface fleet and one-trick NAVSEA.  We know nothing else but Burkes.
 
Goddard’s comment about NAVSEA attempting to spec the Constellation as a Burke finalizes and confirms the observation that the Constellation was a mini-Burke rather than an ASW frigate or convoy escort or whatever else some observers wished it was.  Again, Goddard recognizes the change orders as a problem but fails to see that the mini-Burke mindset was a problem stemming from the lack of a CONOPS and that NAVSEA should have been “educated” and squashed from day one.
 
The entire NAVSEA attempt to spec the Constellation as a Burke also offers the larger issue of how to appropriately “downgrade” a ship from a high end destroyer to a low level frigate.  What degree of reduced structural strength is appropriate?  What level of reduced survivability?  How much redundancy?  What degree of separation of key components? And so on.  A frigate must be “less” than a destroyer or else it is a destroyer.  Navy/NAVSEA have clearly not come to terms with the appropriate level of downgrading for a frigate.
 
Goddard and Modly go on to offer other, multiple, supposed lessons learned but fail to accept even the slightest blame for their own involvement and failings.  For example, Goddard notes that the Constellation, still only partially complete, had already gained 1000 ton on what was intended to be a 7000 ton ship.  That’s more than a 14% growth even before the ship was half complete!  Despite that stunning failure, no one made any attempt to figure out why the weight gain was occurring and what to do about it.
 
The podcast is interesting but ultimately worthless in terms of any actual lessons learned and illustrates that the people running the Navy are so completely incompetent that they are inherently incapable of recognizing and learning any actual lessons.
 
 
 
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[1] Defense & Aerospace Report CAVASSHIPS Podcast [Dec 04, ’25] Ep: 220 Tom Modly & Chuck Goddard on Constellation Lessons Learned, 4-Dec-2025,
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/defense-aerospace-report-cavasships-podcast-dec-04/id1573063059?i=1000739767674