Navy’s Latest Shipbuilding Plan Signals Little Change In Fleet Size For The Foreseeable Future

Rumor has it that the United States has entered, or reentered, an era of great-power competition. At least, that’s what the last two iterations of the national defense strategy stated.

However, if you are one of those nervous nellies who think the return of great-power rivalry requires a bigger U.S. maritime force, then you probably aren’t going to like the Navy’s latest 30-year shipbuilding plan.

The plan was delivered to Congress on Monday evening, and what it signals is that the number of warships in the fleet will not increase between now and the end of the decade. In fact, the number will shrink, from today’s 296 to somewhere around 290.

Furthermore, in two of the three scenarios laid out by the plan, the fleet only grows incrementally thereafter, to 311-312 warships in 2035 and 323-327 in 2045.

In other words, the size of the fleet would increase a mere 5% over the next dozen years, and maybe 10% over the next quarter century.

There’s a third, more aggressive, funding scenario that envisions a fleet of 363 warships in 2045—22% above today’s level—but Navy officials don’t seem to think that scenario is likely.

Needless to say, proponents of naval power on Capitol Hill are not happy. Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker, a key player on the Senate Armed Service Committee, called the Navy’s near-term shipbuilding plans “anemic.”

That is an understatement. The service wants to buy nine new warships next year, but it wants to retire 11—five cruisers, two littoral combat ships, three amphibious warships and an attack submarine.

So the fleet gets smaller if the Navy has its way, shrinking every year until 2026. Some military observers have speculated that China could move to invade Taiwan in the same timeframe.

There’s no way of knowing for sure if and when Beijing will make that move, but one thing is abundantly clear: China will have a lot more warships operating in the Western Pacific than America will at that point.

If you think defending Taiwan might require local maritime dominance, then the Navy’s current plan looks like a countdown to catastrophe.

However, there are several caveats that have to be kept in mind when considering this alarming prospect.

• The numbers cited above do not include unmanned warships, which may be making a sizable contribution to U.S. maritime power by the mid-2030s.
• Although the number of warships in the fleet may be static, the capability of each vessel is increasing thanks to improved sensors, weapons, communications and warfighting tactics.
• The U.S. will continue to deter Chinese aggression with a potent strategic nuclear force, and most of the warheads in that force will be deployed on ballistic-missile submarines that Beijing cannot track or target.

The latter point is important, in part because it underscores the U.S. Navy’s commitment to modernization. The service’s top modernization priority is replacement of aging Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines with a new Columbia class of more quiet and capable subs.

Undersea warfare looks to be the most robust feature of the proposed shipbuilding plan, with one Columbia-class sub and two Virginia-class attack subs being funded annually—maybe more if Washington goes through with plans to transfer several Virginias to Australia, America’s most important Pacific ally south of Japan.

Submarines are the type of warship most likely to survive within missile range of China in the future, and the Navy is moving to capitalize of this feature by tripling the land-attack capability of the Virginia class with a mid-hull payload module housing conventionally-armed cruise missiles.

However, once we get beyond the undersea fleet, the 30-year shipbuilding plan seems shaky. For starters, the plan envisions increasing production of surface vessels in later years, the “outyears” sometimes described by budget-watchers as “mythical.” Rising ship construction rates have a tendency to recede like the horizon at sea.

The Navy says it wants to transition from a surface force structure dominated by multi-mission Burke-class destroyers to a combination of smaller Constellation-class frigates and more capable next-generation destroyers.

At $3-4 billion each, the next-gen destroyers will be too costly to buy in large numbers, while the frigates are decidedly inferior to the latest, Flight III versions of the Burke class. So this facet of the shipbuilding plan looks problematic.

Aircraft carriers will remain the signature expression of U.S. naval power, but the shipbuilding plan buys so few of them—one every five years—that the fleet likely will never get to the dozen carriers Congress has endorsed as a goal.

And then there are the 31 amphibious warships that the Commandant of the Marine Corps has repeatedly stated are his service’s absolute minimum force necessary to accomplish wartime goals. The plan ends new production of the most common type of large amphib in midstream, which will hobble the Marines and violate the law with regard to how such decisions must be rendered.

So without getting into details on the lesser categories of vessels like auxiliaries and sealift, the fiscal 2024 long-range shipbuilding plan is not adequate to assure U.S. maritime dominance over the long run. Congress is certain to amend the plan and demand that next year a new Chief of Naval Operations presents a more robust roadmap.

That will require more money as the service struggles to reconcile challenges ranging from delays in ship maintenance to a shortfall in recruiting.

Fleet size will remain the most handy yardstick for assessing maritime power, so the fact that the Navy hasn’t managed to achieve a force structure of 300 warships for 20 straight years—during which time China has risen to military prominence—has to be judged a failure of leadership.

Several companies with an interest in naval shipbuilding contribute to my think tank.