Misleading title. The ships are being scrapped mainly because they fucked up the combined propulsion main gear assembly. The ships are powered by both diesel and gas turbine power plants. Under diesel power the ships can cruise at up to something like 14 knots. Under combat situations the turbines can be brought online and the ship could do 40 knots. Problem is the gearbox used to combine the power plants is flawed and prone to failure (often leading to complete failure of propulsion). The problem is so fundamental it would require a very major overhaul in dry-dock (have to cut open the ship to get to the gear assembly). This might have still been worthwhile except for the issue hinted to in the link. The ships were designed for 3 rolls, surface warfare, mine countermeasures, and anti-submarine warfare. This was to be accomplished through a modular design that saw combat modules swapped in and out of the ship. The swap was suppose to take hours however in reality it took weeks. Further complicating things was the towed submarine sonar unit which was the keystone to the anti-submarine warfare package never worked well and the mine countermeasures module had lack luster performance as well (apparently the surface warfare package was usable although could be better if not saddled by design compromises needed to support the modular system). Anyway, seeing that the module system did not work out the way they had hoped, doing nothing particularly well and some not a all, it was deemed not worth the expense to retrofit the propulsion system. It was cheaper to scrap the existing ships and actually replace them with fresh builds that dropped the module design and were designed to do a singular roll.