How the U.S. Navy Can Right the Ship

By Seth Cropsey

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

 

The capture of Nicolás Maduro — and the accompanying admirable demonstration of advanced U.S. military proficiency — stand in contrast to President Trump’s delayed action against Iran: With major U.S. naval forces committed elsewhere, U.S. options are constrained. Yet just as the Navy needs more ships, not fewer, the service plans to retire the USS Nimitz. The 50-year-old carrier’s final deployment included stints in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East, providing the U.S. with flexibility and deterrence credibility against Iran during its war with Israel this summer.

 

Pulling a key warship from the fleet just as the U.S. needs even more combat power indicates that the Navy is already losing a war of attrition — not against an enemy, but against its own bureaucracy. The Navy offered no explanation for why USS Nimitz — like the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise — could not have remained in service for one year past its scheduled date of retirement. Righting the ship demands not only the significantly larger defense budget Trump has floated, but a serious cultural change in the service that puts combat readiness back at its core.

 

The recent termination of the Constellation-class frigate, in a decades-long cycle of failed designs and shifting requirements, is a blunder that immediately preceded the USS Nimitz’s untimely inactivation. An abundance of operational, acquisition, and leadership mistakes further underscores the point. In the past year, the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman strike group lost two aircraft overboard and collided with a merchant vessel. Insufficient training, manning, and communications were responsible, according to the official investigation, the same causes that were identified in the 2017 collisions of two U.S. destroyers with merchant ships in Asian waters.

 

These operational debacles mirror the needlessly convoluted process of designing and building ships. The Navy’s late November cancellation of its Constellation-class frigate is but one of several expensive, delayed, and finally aborted combatant-ship construction programs. More importantly, the mistakes indicate a crisis within the service most critical to deter and defeat China in Asia’s waters. If the Trump administration is serious about deterrence, the Navy requires a shot in the arm, starting with both a prolonged shipbuilding budget boost and a real strategy.

 

China’s combat fleet currently exceeds the United States’ by 83 ships: 370 People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) vessels to 287 for the U.S. Navy. The PLAN possesses a coherent, clear strategy. It combines thousands of long-range missiles, land-based naval aviation, surface combatants and submarines, dual-purpose merchant and fishing ships, cyberwarfare, and satellite reconnaissance to keep U.S. naval forces out of a thousand-mile bubble extending from China’s coast. Beyond that range, the U.S. struggles to launch operations in the Western Pacific. American naval planners recognized this as far back as the 2010s, when the Navy released its Air-Sea Battle operational concept. But there is little evidence that they have any idea how to surmount today’s challenge.

 

Last year, President Trump proposed the creation of a White House shipbuilding office and said that the U.S. must again make ships “very fast and very soon.” Nearly a year into his second administration, the U.S. has made little progress toward this goal. Although the administration’s requested increase of seven surface ships and submarines, alongside a dozen needed support vessels, is a positive step, most of these will not be completed for years. China built 30 surface combatants, of which half were large ships — including cruisers, destroyers, and an aircraft carrier — in 2023 alone.

 

While the U.S. Navy has embraced the idea of fielding a large fleet of small crewed and uncrewed ships to frustrate an enemy’s targeting, the service gives off mixed signals about resourcing and executing this strategy. It is phasing out the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), a design conceived in the late 1990s, because its combatant abilities are insufficient, while its costs and delays are excessive.

 

Therefore, the Navy still wanted a smaller warship. It initiated another program, the FFG(X), in 2017, deciding on the European-designed FREMM-class hull in 2020. Redesignated the Constellation-class frigate program, costs and delays owing wholly to the Navy’s changing requirements during the ship’s construction upended the program. Navy Secretary John Phelan announced in late November that the Navy would terminate the program after building two ships of the 25 initially planned. Hence the Constellation blunder replaced the LCS blunder, leaving the Navy no closer to a fleet of agile surface combatants.

 

Adding to the confusion is the idea of a very large cruiser — or “battleship,” as Trump terms it — with far greater displacement than the replacement for current cruisers, which, because of their age, are expensive to maintain. This concept has operational merit: A large warship of some 30,000-plus tons can carry more weapons, including hypersonic missiles, and operate with smaller warships to target Chinese vessels from afar. But the concept ignores industrial realities. The Navy has only a handful of yards that could build such warships, all of which are booked with carriers, large amphibious ships, and other major combatants. Building a new yard would take years at best. Designing a new combatant of this size and sophistication will take no less than six years before construction can begin.

 

Putting aside industrial constraints, it is entirely unclear what a mixture of many small and several very large naval combatants might look like operationally. The Chief of Naval Operations’ staff for force development (N7) has been studying the question — very quietly. It is as silent as the Navy’s civilian and uniformed leaders about strategy and the mix of vessels to execute it.

 

The Pentagon has sought to address cost overruns, delays, and bureaucratic non-accountability by creating new positions that, for example, place accountability for building submarines in the hands of a single executive — a reasonable idea, except for the fact that responsibility already rests in the persons of the Navy secretary and the chief of naval operations. Would a two-star flag officer or civilian equivalent thus negate or oppose the authority of current military service leadership? This is a prescription for bewilderment, not accountability.

 

But it points to the larger problem, and it is particularly acute for the Navy because of its uncertain primacy in a conflict with China, which geography dictates must be chiefly naval. The U.S. Navy is invisible to the country it defends today. It has no clear strategy. It cannot explain what it is doing. Its secretary and undersecretary have been at odds with each other. There is no articulated connection between what the Navy wants to buy and how its purchases will defeat potential foes. A hard course correction is needed.

 

The Navy must articulate a maritime strategy that is an integral part of the United States’ national security strategy, and the resulting document must guide the composition of the nation’s fleet. Congress should insist on delivery of the strategy before the end of 2026. Sailors should leave their staff jobs and desk exercises to return to training at sea and in the air. Further, no changes should be made to ships under construction unless the secretary of the Navy approves them. Untangling the nest of overlapping authorities that superintend the processes between a ship’s conception and its commissioning with the appointment of a two-star officer will exacerbate, not solve, problems. The Navy must retake control of its procurement, including executive line authority and accountability, and the ability to counter bureaucratic impediments.

 

Finally, the next National Defense Authorization Act must include a major shot in the arm for shipbuilding. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Navy would need around $40 billion per year to resource its 2025 shipbuilding plan. Unless the Navy decides on a radically smaller fleet, this will be necessary for any naval recovery.

 

The Navy is this maritime nation’s sine qua non for preventing crises on the Eurasian landmass from reaching our hemisphere. The massive volume of our exports and imports that transit international waters is protected by the Navy. Protecting our economy and security is impossible without a strong, global U.S. naval force. The dysfunction into which the U.S. Navy has fallen since the Cold War’s end must be reversed.