The Navy Needs Precise Mass and Here Is How to Get There

Maintaining deterrence in the Indo-Pacific and around the world requires the U.S. Navy to change what it builds and how it fights. Roger Wicker observed in 2024 that the United States’ approach to fleet design and ship construction is “ too small and too old .” The current model of naval power cannot scale at the speed modern war demands.

The war with Iran is already exposing the limits. High-end ships are being consumed in sustained operations, munitions inventories are thinning, and replacement timelines for exquisite weapons stretch into years. Against a more capable adversary, such as China, those constraints would not be manageable. China’s advances in its ability to detect, track, and strike ships mean that America’s advanced surface ships — even aircraft carriers — are now profoundly vulnerable. The Navy’s struggles are putting deterrence and warfighting capabilities at risk. Naval power is as central to U.S. economic and military power today as it was when Naval officer and historian Alfred Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History in 1890 and coined the phrase that “whoever rules the waves rules the world.” To build a larger and more capable fleet by 2030, the Navy should double down on investing in, fielding, and sustaining smaller attritable autonomous systems to support Indo-Pacific Command’s Hellscape concept, which will increase short-term deterrence and warfighting capabilities. Further, as the Iran war shows, the American military is short on munitions, and replacing exquisite, expensive, hard-to-produce weapons like Tomahawks will take too long. To complement the existing arsenal, the Navy should aggressively procure lower-cost, long-range munitions. For example, the Navy should follow the example of the Air Force by rapidly moving a low-cost cruise missile into production. Third, and most disruptively, the Navy should maximize funding for the development and production of what it calls “medium unmanned surface vessels,” autonomous boats between 45 and 190 feet with displacement up to 500 tons. For the sake of using plain language, I will simply call these kinds of vessels, medium autonomous warships, given ever changing terminology and debates about is and is not a ‘drone.’ The Navy should look in particular at lessons learned from the USX-1 Defiant , which was christened on Aug.

Key points

• The war with Iran is already exposing the limits.
• High-end ships are being consumed in sustained operations, munitions inventories are thinning, and replacement timelines for exquisite weapons stretch into years.
• Against a more capable adversary, such as China, those constraints would not be manageable.
• China’s advances in its ability to detect, track, and strike ships mean that America’s advanced surface ships — even aircraft carriers — are now profoundly vulnerable.
• The Navy’s struggles are putting deterrence and warfighting capabilities at risk.