"At one point the Constellation design shared about 85 percent commonality with the original FREMM design, but the alterations have brought that commonality down to under 15 percent, a person familiar with the changes told USNI News."

https://news.usni.org/2024/04/02/constellation-frigate-deliv...

— Kelly Johnson

Shocking that this quote still rings true a half-century later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer)#Kelly...

Which, to be fair to the Navy, is as much Congressional meddling and military procurement seeding--if you stop paying your contractors, they stop being military contractors and the knowledge you'd like walks out the door, which doesn't excuse the LCS program but does explain some of it--as anything else.

When we say that we're bad at procurement in the United States, there's a lot of targets for blame. (I think you're right that the Air Force tends to have the best project execution of the service branches though.)

The Navy builds years-long expensive ships, then sends them halfway around the world under command of someone. It has a structure to facilitate that.

The Army (at best) efficiency organizes a huge amount of people and material, and it deploys and sustains it wherever needed. It has a structure to facilitate that.

The Air Force procures, operates, and sustains the most technical platforms. So it's gotten halfway decent at doing that, or at least learned some lessons from repeated mistakes. It has a structure to facilitate that.

(And the Marines scrounge through everyone's trash bin, cobble something together, and come out armed to the teeth)

Point being, if you look at the people who have risen to the ranks of power, they've been moulded to fit their service culture. Which means some services might not be as good as procurement...

Space force. It is like flying a billion-dollar fighter jet that you will never be allowed to repair after it takes off for the first time.