After years of navalist hand-wringing, could this be the year the U.S. Navy gets the support, and the changes, that enable a substantially larger fleet? Maybe.
Let’s start with Congress, where the bipartisan SHIPS Act was introduced to general applause in December. The bill aims to revitalize U.S. shipbuilding—naval and commercial—along with the U.S. shipping industry and the Merchant Marine workforce. A chief sponsor was Mike Waltz, a Florida congressman before he became President Trump’s national security adviser.
That bill could work in tandem with Sen. Roger Wicker’s FoRGED Act, which proposes to speed up Pentagon contracting—including shipbuilding—by reducing bureaucracy, increasing competition, and accelerating the adoption of innovative technologies. The new Senate Armed Services chair has also pushed for a larger defense budget to fund, among other things, more warships, amphibious ships, and submarines.
Over at the White House, Waltz’s new boss is prodding the executive branch to get on with it. In an April 9 executive order, “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance,” President Trump handed the secretaries of defense, commerce, and other agencies a Nov. 5 deadline to devise a plan to “revitalize and rebuild domestic maritime industries and workforce to promote national security and economic prosperity.” There’s also a May 24 deadline for recommendations to increase competition and reduce cost overruns in “government vessel construction.” Trump also recently announced that he would propose a defense budget “in the vicinity” of $1 trillion, up from this year’s $892 billion.
Will that come true? Leaving aside Trump’s mercurial nature—“There’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1 trillion on [the] military,” he said in February—proposals for defense plus-ups may face opposition from deficit hawks who note that DOGE is expected to reduce tax revenues far more than it trims expenditures, and that the president’s erratic economic policies have increased the chances of a recession.
Back to the Navy. The fleet currently has about 296 battle-force ships and a longstanding policy goal of getting to 355. Pressed by lawmakers who expressed frustration at the gap, service leaders last year delivered a 30-year shipbuilding plan that aims for 381 manned ships and 134 large unmanned surface and underwater vehicles. The Congressional Budget Office estimates this plan would require 46 percent more money annually, in real terms, than the Navy has spent in each of the past five years—and that it would cost an average of $40 billion (2024 dollars) per year, some 17 percent over the service’s estimate. A new shipbuilding plan is due with the 2026 budget submission, which is expected this month or the next.
That new plan, though largely completed before the Trump administration took office, may well be reshaped by Navy Secretary John Phelan, a financier without military or industrial experience before he took office last month. “I see numbers on things that are eye-opening to me,” Phelan said at the recent Sea-Air-Space conference, where he repeated his confirmation-hearing vows to bring shipbuilding costs down and fleet readiness up. “These are solvable problems,” he said. “There are a number of questions that we need to get answered. I think understanding our strategy first and then developing what the force posture looks like from that strategy, and then understanding what that then would cost is what we have to do. And so we will reverse-engineer from that.”
He’s beginning the work without a chief of naval operations. In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, whose 26-year naval career included command of a destroyer, two carrier strike groups, and the U.S. Sixth Fleet, and whose “Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy” drew praise and remains Navy policy. The former Army National Guard major, who called Franchetti a “DEI hire” in a recent book, hasn’t publicly given a reason for firing her.
Far from the Pentagon, the Navy has been fighting—and learning—in the waters off Yemen. Eighteen months of engagements with Houthi missiles, drones, and unmanned boats have honed not just warship crews but the wider surface fleet’s ability to deal with aerial attacks—and indeed, all manner of combat. Over the past year, the Navy has improved a process that gathers up all the data associated with a fight—radar tracks, electronic signatures, relative positions, and more—and flashes it back to the United States for analysis.
While it once took weeks and months to glean useful lessons from a fight, it now takes days or even hours. That means a destroyer that shoots down an incoming missile on Sunday can have a new, better approach on Monday. “This tactical reachback—if you’re somewhere around my age or [more] senior—is something you didn’t have growing up. But it has been a game-changer in creating tactical advantage at sea,” Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, deputy commander for U.S. Central Command, said in February. But the campaign—officially, Operation Prosperity Guardian—also underscores the dangerous imbalance between the U.S. arsenal of expensive, slowly replenished U.S. missiles and the far cheaper weapons employed by enemies and potential enemies.
Some other advancements are newly arrived. The long-belittled littoral combat ships are finally proving their worth, according to Rear Adm. Ted LeClair, deputy commander of Naval Surface Forces, who noted that an LCS was at times the only warship defending commercial vessels in the Red Sea. The Joint Simulation Environment—the hyper-realistic fighter-jet simulator that’s said to be the first to strike fear into aviators—went to sea aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, where it helped aircrews maintain specialized skills amid routine daily operations. And Naval Sea Systems Command says 3D printing is making it easier and cheaper than ever to produce hard-to-get, high-spec parts—even for submarines.
Other improvements are just around the corner. Two warships will be fitted this year with a prototype AI system designed to help find targets amid the clutter of radar returns. The year will also see naval aviation’s first robot aerial tanker, the Boeing MQ-25, fly as a production aircraft, according to Naval Air Forces commander Vice Adm. Daniel Cheever, who says it will begin routine operations aboard an aircraft carrier in 2026.
Still others are farther off, like the “hundreds of thousands” of naval drones that may one day help defend Taiwan—if China doesn’t invade it first. Shipboard lasers—the tantalizing “solution” to limited air-defense missile magazines—remain under development and far from actual routine deployment.
And some appear to be receding. The Pentagon’s testing office says development of the software that is to power the next big jump in F-35 capabilities—the code that was so buggy that the U.S. military refused to accept new jets for a year—isn’t getting any better. And the Constellation-class frigate program, which aimed to head off cost and schedule slips by using an existing European design, is at least three years behind schedule.
Is this the year the Navy embarks upon a new, more productive era in shipbuilding? Lobbyists for the aircraft carrier industry, who recently threw a well-attended Capitol Hill breakfast, and the eight(!) retired Marine Corps commandants who recently penned a joint letter pleading for more amphibious assault ships certainly hope so. Congress and the Trump administration are unusually enthusiastic, at least for now. But other factors—the economy, the administration’s inexperience, the shell-shocked and shrinking defense-civilian workforce—will weigh in as well.
Jesus Christ is King
Comments are closed.