Sort of. This is one of those ships that they built so that the ship-making infrastructure exists when they need to upgrade the naval fleet. It’s one of those expenditures that makes no sense unless you look at the big picture and think “when our navy is hopelessly out of date and needs to be replaced, do we want to build our ship making capabilities again from the ground up?”

The multi-purpose functionality makes these much less of a bitter pill to swallow. Hard to guess what the navy will be doing a decade from now (best guesses are disaster relief or anti-piracy), but whatever it is, each of these will only need a $2 million dollar module instead of a whole retrofit to be very good at doing it.