Thanks, Mr. Chair, and gentlemen.
Mr. Williams, thanks for incredibly depressing me.
I have a copy of the Congressional Research Service report. They've put out a report on the Constellation class. It actually shows that the U.S. are quite heavily modifying the ship, making it quite a bit larger than the FREMM parent, but still doing it at about $1 billion a ship, so about one-fifth of the cost that we're going to do.
Mr. Perry and Mr. Williams, I want to get your feedback on the issues with the Type 26 ships. We've seen the reports of our Australian allies struggling with it. Britain has pulled back from their commitment on how many they're going to do. They will do a few Type 26s and a lot more of a smaller, less expensive frigate.
When we had the navy in last week, we spoke about this issue and the weight issues, and their comment was that maybe they'd scale back some parts of the ship in order to reach the weight and the speed requirements. I'm going to express my horror at the fact that we could be cutting back perhaps on weaponry or other needed items on this ship, to meet the originally stated speed and other requirements from the RFP. The navy seems to be perhaps willing to throw away items in order to achieve this weight.
I wonder if you could both chime in on our allies' experience with the Type 26 design and what we are running into.