From the magazine – Under the combative slogan “Moving Forward Together”, Minister of Defence Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius and her State Secretary Derk Boswijk published a fine Dutch Defence Strategy (Defensienota 2026) on Monday 29 June, four months after taking office in the Jetten government, with many ambitious policy objectives. However, there is still no prospect of the much-needed new frigates for the Royal Netherlands Navy. This not only threatens the Dutch Defence Force’s capabilities to defend our country, but also puts the Dutch naval shipbuilding industry at serious risk.
In every issue of SWZ|Maritime, SWZ|Maritime’s editor Antoon Oosting writes an opinion piece under the heading “Markets” about the maritime industry or a particular sector within it. In September 2026’s navy special, he discusses the Dutch government’s lack of decisiveness regarding the replacement of the Royal Netherlands Navy’s frigates. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher (the SWZ Foundation), the KNVTS, or other editors.
Now that the construction of the new submarines has already gone to France’s Naval Group, it remains to be seen who will eventually secure the contracts for new frigates, both the ASW frigates and the future LCFs, as well as amphibious transport ships: the British, French or Damen? While almost all seafaring countries in Europe are busy ordering new ships for their navies, orders from the Dutch government continue to fail to materialise.
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Decisions must be made
There are plenty of plans and wishes, which repeatedly result in new designs, working drawings and higher-than-expected costs, but so far the Dutch government has failed to make any decisions. Meanwhile, Belgian Defence Minister Theo Francken has had enough of the procrastination and is investigating whether it might be better for Belgium to order new frigates from France, Italy, Spain, Germany or Turkey instead.
The German decision to cancel its order for four and subsequently another two F-126 frigates appears to be having a downright disastrous impact on what is officially known as Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding. All Northern European countries on which Damen had pinned its hopes for newbuild orders are either building their frigates and corvettes themselves, as Finland is doing, or ordering them from Britain, as Norway and Denmark are doing, or from France, as Sweden is doing.
Norway has ordered five Type 26 frigates from Britain’s BAE Systems. Denmark plans to place an order for three or four frigates at the end of this year or the beginning of next year with a Danish-British consortium for the Type 31 design by Britain’s Babcock. At the end of August, Sweden signed a contract with France’s Naval Group for four so-called FDI (Frégate de Défense et d’Intervention) frigates, of which Naval Group is already building four for Greece. In addition, Greece signed a contract at the beginning of this month for the construction of two FREMM frigates in Italy. FREMM stands for Fregata Europea Multi-Missione. Portugal has also recently ordered three of these frigates from Italy’s Fincantieri.
Results from the past…
Damen is also being confronted head-on with the saying that past performance offers no guarantee for the future. The fact that the Netherlands once sold two M frigates to the Portuguese at a low price, and that the Greeks once operated nine Kortenaer-class frigates taken over from the Royal Netherlands Navy, is of little benefit to Damen now, apart from the drone carrier that Damen is currently building for the Portuguese.
And although Damen has genuinely tried, most recently in Finland for corvettes, all the investments in tenders have yielded very little. Nor has all the effort put into the Northern Naval Capability Cooperation resulted in any substantial orders for Dutch naval shipbuilding, apart from the exchange of knowledge about seagoing drones and underwater defence systems.
Outside Europe, too, the competitive struggle is difficult. Damen has managed to sell engineering packages for the construction of landing ships to the United States and Australia. Damen’s qualities as a shipbuilder are therefore recognised, but Damen is not allowed to build the ships itself. Despite all the contrite Dutch apologies for colonial exploitation, police actions and the prosecution of Damen for paid commissions in Asia and South America – matters that the French and Italians have never had to contend with – the fact remains that the Indonesians no longer order anything from Damen. After Damen previously built many vessels for Indonesia, the Indonesians can now build many types of vessels themselves. And when it comes to frigates, they prefer to work with the Islamic brother country of Turkey, where two frigates were recently ordered.
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Turkey an emerging competitor
Turkey, as an emerging industrial powerhouse, is also threatening to become an increasingly significant competitor for Damen in particular. The Dutch were able to see for themselves what the Turks can now do in naval shipbuilding at the end of February this year, when a squadron of no fewer than four Turkish ships visited the Port of Rotterdam. The new helicopter-drone carrier Anadolu, berthed at the Wilhelminakade, made a particularly strong impression on maritime experts. Turkish shipbuilding is therefore capable of quite a lot, although the Anadolu was still built to a design by Spanish shipbuilder Navantia, it was built in Turkey. But the Turkish frigates are also worth considering.
Reports in the maritime media often fail to mention where Damen had intended to build the frigates for foreign customers, but so far Damen’s frigates, including those for foreign customers, have always been built at the yard in Galati, Romania. Other locations would also be possible, as is now happening in Mexico and Colombia, but ordering countries would of course need to have the necessary industrial capacity. Damen, for example, has a very fine and successful award-winning yard in Dubai with its company Albwardy Damen. But with Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, that is of course of little use.
Galati is not safe from the Russians
Damen’s large production yard on the Danube in Galati, Romania, lies in the danger zone of Russian drones and missiles. On 29 May, a block of flats in the city of Galati was hit by a Russian drone. You would no longer have your naval ships built there. Even if orders for Dutch frigates eventually materialise, Damen will have to look for a yard outside the Black Sea. If only because NATO member Turkey can close the Bosporus for whatever petty or ridiculous reason.
The French have experienced this with the new mine countermeasure vessels that Naval Group and Pirou are building for the Belgian and Dutch navies. The hull built at a French yard in Romania spent two months sailing around the Black Sea this summer before Turkey allowed it to pass through the Bosporus and Dardanelles. France had incurred the wrath of the Turks because it had concluded a defence treaty with Cyprus. After two months of delays caused by smoothing over diplomatic differences, the unfinished mine countermeasure vessel arrived in early August in the French port of Concarneau, where it is being completed.
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Joint frigate deal with Belgium under pressure
But two months of delay is of course nothing compared with everything that has happened so far with the joint Dutch-Belgian frigate project to replace the existing four M frigates, two of the Royal Netherlands Navy and two Belgian. In November 2016, Dutch Minister of Defence Jeanine Plasschaert and her Belgian counterpart Steven Vandeput signed a declaration of intent for this purpose. The first frigate, specifically intended for combating Russian submarines, should have been operational in 2025. Ten years after the declaration of intent, construction has still not begun. And the worst part is that nobody seems to know when it will.
What is clear is that, with all the new requirements formulated over time, the ASW frigate has become much larger and, above all, much more expensive than originally thought. According to Francken, the estimated construction costs have risen from EUR 600 million to first EUR 900 million and now EUR 1.3 billion, per ship no less. For the Belgians in particular, who are already struggling with a government debt that is far too high at 107.9 per cent, more than twice the Netherlands’ 44.4 per cent (in 2025), this is a bitter pill to swallow. De Telegraaf quotes Francken, who is furious about the delays and ever-rising costs, as calling it nothing less than ‘a disaster’.
According to a former naval officer, many of the problems stem from the Defence Ministry’s ruthless cuts to its own design capacity, despite all the warnings. In the past, the Navy’s Directorate of Materiel was not only responsible for designing all ships for the Royal Netherlands Navy, but also acted as the prime contractor. To date, Damen has mainly designed smaller types of corvettes and frigates itself, such as the Sigma class.
Bad for Damen’s reputation
Although Damen is paid for repeatedly redesigning the ASW frigate, this is of course anything but healthy for Damen’s reputation as a naval shipbuilder. Here too, seeing is believing. This is also why the Turkish navy sent no fewer than four ships on a flag-showing visit to, among other places, Rotterdam at the end of February. In addition to maintaining relations, such flag-showing visits are primarily intended to demonstrate what a navy can do. Francken was apparently sufficiently impressed to ask the Turks how much such a newbuild frigate would cost for the Belgian navy.
For the planned amphibious transport ships, four for the Royal Netherlands Navy and four for the British Royal Navy, it is also still uncertain where they will be built, according to the British. The English newspapers had already assumed that they would build them. That could of course happen if Damen chooses a yard there as an alternative to Galati.
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French interest in LCF
The fact that Damen is capable of building very good ships is demonstrated by the current air-defence and command frigates (LCFs). In March this year, the French navy specifically wanted HNLMS Evertsen to accompany and protect its aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle when it was sent to the Middle East to intervene in the event of an escalation in the war between the US, Israel and Iran.
On 2 September, French President Macron was in Eindhoven for talks with Dutch Prime Minister Jetten. According to the Marineschepen.nl website, run by the often very well-informed Jaime Karremans, Macron discussed cooperation in the areas of ‘advanced nuclear deterrence’ and ‘the programme for replacing the air-defence frigates’. Karremans learned from naval sources that France would like to jointly develop the successor to the LCF with the Netherlands, with the ships then being built in both countries for their respective navies.
But first the Dutch Defence Ministry and Damen will of course have to agree on which Dutch ASW frigate Damen is to build. Otherwise, we will have neither ships nor an effective defence against Russian submarines.
Cartoon by Hans de Wilde/SWZ|Maritime.
