Vietnam Cuts Steel on Its First Indigenous Frigate, But the Real Story Is the Scale Gap It Can't Close

 

On 10 August 2026, Vietnam held a ceremony at Song Thu Corporation's Da Nang shipyard to mark the start of construction on the Vietnam People's Navy's (VPN) first domestically designed multipurpose frigate, an anti-submarine warfare (ASW) platform that General Pham Hoai Nam, Vietnam's Deputy Minister of Defence, described as carrying a very high proportion of domestically developed weapons and technical systems. Earlier reporting had suggested the ship would be a 4,000-tonne, 125-metre vessel derived from a heavily modified Russian Project 11356R Admiral Grigorovich-class hull, but those figures proved inflated; the actual design appears closer to 2,500-3,000 tonnes and roughly 105 metres, putting it only slightly larger than Vietnam's existing Gepard 3.9-class (Project 11661) frigates rather than in an entirely new displacement class.

The weapons fit, insofar as it can be inferred from the scale model and rendering shown at the ceremony, is a genuinely ambitious package for a first indigenous surface combatant. Forward-mounted RBU-6000-style ASW rocket launchers sit ahead of a 76mm naval gun based on the AK-176 design and already in production at Vietnam's Z173 and Z125 Factories, while a twelve-cell vertical launch system amidships is speculated to house a naval variant of Viettel's TLĐK-01 surface-to-air missile, itself still under development with an estimated 70km range. Round that out with quad-packed VCM-family anti-ship missile launchers, MANPADS launchers for counter-drone work, 533mm torpedo tubes, AK-630M-type close-in weapon systems, and a Viettel-developed phased-array radar, and the ship is clearly designed to be Vietnam's most capability-dense surface combatant to date. A 36-month build timeline has been set, though for a first-of-class indigenous design integrating a domestically developed SAM that hasn't finished development yet, that schedule carries real risk of slipping.

This program sits inside a broader indigenous shipbuilding push that has picked up noticeably over the past two years. Song Thu is separately finishing a second submarine rescue vessel, the Naval Technical Institute closed out its TN-75 midget submarine project in 2025 with a boat capable of a week submerged and a six-to-seven-man commando payload, and Ba Son Corporation is simultaneously building a VDC-01 landing ship and a third and fourth PS500 guided-missile corvette. Taken together, this is less a single headline program than a sustained, multi-yard effort to reduce Vietnam's historical dependence on Russian-sourced hulls like the Gepard-class frigates and Kilo-class submarines that still form the core of the VPN's blue-water capability.

The strategic logic is straightforward and explicitly stated by Hanoi: Vietnam lost the Paracel Islands to China in 1974 and continues to face Chinese pressure around the Spratlys, and the country's 2016 Resolution No. 20 committed it to becoming a "strong country of the sea" less dependent on any single foreign supplier for its naval hardware. What that logic runs into, though, is a scale mismatch that indigenous shipbuilding alone cannot close. China's naval shipbuilding capacity has been assessed by U.S. Navy briefings and CSIS analysis at roughly 230 times that of the United States, and the PLAN commissioned close to 20 new warships in 2025 alone, including multiple Type 052D destroyers and two ship classes of frigates entering service in the same year that Vietnam is laying the keel for its very first indigenous one. A single 2,500-3,000 tonne ASW frigate, however capable, is not a fleet-level answer to an adversary building destroyers and frigates on a near-monthly cadence.

What Vietnam's approach actually buys, then, isn't parity with China's surface fleet, which was never realistically on the table, but rather the kind of technological and industrial self-sufficiency that reduces vulnerability to external supply disruption and gives Hanoi a genuine indigenous baseline to build on for the next class of ship. It mirrors a pattern visible across the wider Indo-Pacific, where the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan have all pursued their own domestically built landing and amphibious platforms rather than betting solely on great-power patronage. None of these programs individually shifts the regional balance of naval power away from China, but collectively they signal that Beijing's neighbors are choosing to absorb the cost and risk of building their own capability rather than remaining wholly dependent on suppliers whose interests may not always align with their own.