This is John Batchelor, conversation with colleague Tom Maudley, former under and acting secretary of the Navy.

What goes wrong when you build ships?

What goes wrong is they add things.

The frigate, Fram, bought by the Navy out of Italy.

Finchentiary, the maker of it, a luxury craft. Beautiful racehorse.

It is now ballooned in costs 40% to 1.6 billion each, and instead of delivering in 26, they're going to

deliver in 29. What happened? Tom Details. This is what happens to all new classes of Navy ships, all Navy ships, as I understand.

They want to fight the last war, maybe. It's a frigate. It's meant for the Red Sea to run in on the Houthis.

A frigate. The romantic craft of the Napoleonic agent.

Now, here's Tom to describe. More of this later tonight.

Well, that's true. There's certain requirements that Navy C-System command looks at for all Navy

warships, and there's things related to watertight compartments and so on

that the standards of the time ship didn't meet. And so in order to make those changes, it requires

massive changes. Small changes like that translate into massive changes because of things that need to be

moved, bulkheads need to be strengthened, et cetera, weight and balance changes.

And it just adds time to the process.

So it's no longer a frigate.