Battleships Are Back! Navy Abruptly Boosts DDG/CG Building Targets For 2045

Battleships are back! In little more than five months, the shape of America’s future Navy fleet changed. Between February and July, U.S. Navy leadership went from advocating for a modest fleet of 60 cruisers and destroyers to supporting a more robust vision of 96 large surface combatants by 2045.

Nobody really knows what, exactly, pushed the Navy to favoring large combatants—a rating traditionally comprised of high-value cruisers and destroyers. Neither the U.S. Department of Defense, the Secretary of the Navy, nor America’s Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Mike Gilday, has offered taxpayers any real detail on what spurred the Navy, after years of fretting over the relevance of large surface combatants, to redirect at least $70 billion in future funding towards building bigger ships.

The shift was abrupt. In February, at the annual WEST 2022 conference in San Diego, Gilday sketched out a future fleet of 60 large and 50 small combatants, breaking from the traditional 355-ship fleet goal of maintaining a 2:1 ratio of large combatants (cruisers and destroyers) to small vessels (frigates and Littoral Combat Ships). Last month, Gilday changed his tune, releasing a “2022 Navigation Plan,” aiming for a fleet of 96 large combatants by 2045.

Both targets are out of step with the 30-year shipbuilding plan detailed in April’s “Report to Congress on the Annual Long-Range Plan for Construction of Naval Vessels for Fiscal Year 2023,” which suggested to Congress that the Navy was intent upon fielding a fleet of between 70 to 80 large surface combatants by 2045.

What is going on?

Given the public reporting to date, it is tough to tell what, exactly, is driving the Navy’s sudden interest in large surface combatants. Industry press has been less than dogged in its efforts to understand the dramatic—if not unprecedented—oscillation in the U.S. Navy’s demand for large surface combatants.

That failure is unfortunate, as America’s public and policymaker communities need clarity more than ever.

The line between large and small combatant, always fraught to begin with, is getting progressively tougher to distinguish. The Constellation-class frigate, a ship type traditionally rated as a small combatant, is expected to clock in at over 7,400 tons, a mere 1,500 tons less than a Flight I Arleigh Burke destroyer. An Independence-class Littoral Combat Ship, rated as a small combatant, is 418 feet long, just 87 feet shorter than the larger destroyer. Large and small do not mean what they used to, and the Navy’s rating system probably should be redefined to better align with modern warfighting capabilities.

While the Navy’s growing appetite for large surface combatants—whatever they might turn out to be—is welcome news for the large surface combatant industrial base, the Navy’s inability to fix on a consistent plan is a public relations and strategic disaster. For years, the Navy has publicly worried over the future of large and pricey platforms on the battlefield, and the April sinking of the 11,000-ton Moskva in the Black Sea seemed to reinforce the vulnerability of large combatants at sea. Given the Navy’s abrupt break from the prevailing narrative, somebody in the Navy needs to step up and explain the Service’s sudden change in direction.

With no viable strategic or tactical justification forthcoming from Navy leadership, the Navy’s free-form approach to the future of the surface fleet does little more than bemuse rivals and irk everybody else. The Navy has little room to make sudden whipsaw changes. After repeated operational fiascoes, the U.S. Navy has little credibility right now, and an unexplained strategic change leaves pro-Navy advocates confused, and an already impatient Congress frustrated.

Many observers blame Pentagon bureaucracy, suggesting the Navy’s shifts in demand are just part of an ongoing battle between a future-minded Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, and Carlos Del Toro, a former destroyer captain and a traditionalist-minded Secretary of the Navy. But the battle between battleship admirals and some “divest-to-reinvest” Defense Department futurists is nothing new; this column has been covering the struggle since Jim Mattis was Secretary of Defense.

The increased demand signal for larger ships may have no strategic basis, and merely reflect the Navy’s excitement over a future destroyer. The as-yet-unnamed DDG(X), whose conceptual plans exploded into public view in January 2022, was an unserious project until sometime in 2021. The notional new ship would be enormous, merging the Flight III Arleigh Burke (DDG 51) Class Combat System into the Zumwalt (DDG-1000) Class integrated propulsion system. The new vessel, capable of launching hypersonic missiles and hosting directed energy weaponry, is clearly the Navy’s next shiny new thing, and the momentum to build a big, prestigious platform—one that keeps up with China’s beefy 13,000-ton Type 055 destroyer—is shoving aside some of America’s long-held concerns over the survivability of large ships in battle.

But the Navy may have a viable point in going big. Big ships have good reasons to exist. In the high seas, a big ship offers a steady platform for new capabilities, with good endurance and strategic speed that smaller craft are simply unable to offer. Storms and high seas take a toll on small boat operations, and—as I have written before—even the 8,000-ton Spruance Class Destroyer was partially operable in Sea State 5 and struggled to operate in Sea State 6. A big ship can punch through seas that stop small vessels in their tracks.

Is The Navy Sinking Small Crewed Ships?

The embrace of big ships in Gilday’s new force structure turns distributed lethality on its head. Rather than working to grow the small-surface combatant fleet and using those vessels to smear sensors and shooters all over the sea, the surface Navy is, with DDG(X), re-inventing the battleship and, apparently, returning to the traditional World War II-era battle group, leaving distributed lethality for crew-less things.

That’s fine. But, as originally articulated, the Distributed Maritime Operations concept was set to push the fleet towards a 2:1 ratio of smaller crewed ships to bigger crewed surface combatants. If the mechanics behind Distributed Maritime Operations are shifting to feed the Navy’s craving for larger vessels, that shift—particularly if it is sacrificing smaller crewed vessels for robots— is worth a bit of public discussion. Crewed small ships are as vital as they are unpopular in Navy circles, and yet the Navy will have a desperate need for them in Oceania.

If the Navy does not want to get into a public discussion of tactics, is might be smart for the Navy to simply acknowledge that growing the Navy’s larger vessel fleet solves a lot of pesky political problems. Demand for big new ships keeps the large surface combatant shipyards busy, enables the rapid retirement of broken Freedom Class Littoral Combat Ships, and allows the Navy to hold off on really committing to build large numbers of the as-yet-unproven Constellation (FFG-62) Class frigate. It keeps the Navy’s options open.

The challenge for naval observers is to determine just where the Navy’s big sudden embrace of big ships may fall in the interplay between strategic necessity and bureaucratic utility. It would help if the Navy had the courage and sensibility to make a wider public case for big surface combatants, detailing the broad strategic and tactical benefits from large craft. Lacking that support, Gilday’s newly-discovered role as a battleship admiral risks being dismissed as a last “throw of the dice” before America’s outgoing Chief of Naval Operations transforms into a lame duck, checking out of the Pentagon turf wars to eye new openings on plumb corporate boards.