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Force Structure

Five Issues for the National Commission on the Future of the Navy

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By Bruce Stubbs

In 2022, Congress established the independent National Commission on the Future of the Navy to conduct two overarching studies, one examining naval force structure and the other focused on shipbuilding and innovation.[1] The former will recommend the size and composition of the Navy, while the latter will identify opportunities to better integrate advanced technologies into shipbuilding, new construction, and repair shipyards. China now possesses the world’s largest navy by ship count, and its shipbuilding capacity vastly exceeds that of the United States. Chinese shipyards are producing warships faster than American yards can repair them. China has spent a generation building a fleet capable of contesting sea control and converting industrial scale into military power, while the United States has allowed its shipbuilding capacity, naval industrial base, and force structure to deteriorate over the same period. The Commission is required to submit an unclassified report in 2027, and its recommendations could shape American naval power for years to come. To fulfill its mandate, the Commission must resolve five foundational issues.

Issue #1: A Navy Without a Strategy

The Commission cannot responsibly recommend a force structure until it answers a question that Congress, the administration, and the Navy have all failed to answer clearly to date: what is the Navy expected to do?[2] Without a clear answer, every force structure recommendation lacks a coherent strategic foundation.

The current situation reflects an accumulation of partial answers. Title 10 provides a floor. The Navy shall be organized, trained, and equipped for the peacetime promotion of national security interests and for prompt and sustained combat at sea. But this is a generalized statutory minimum rather than a strategy.[3] The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) and the 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS) provide overarching direction, but they are administration-specific documents that will not survive the current presidency. The strategic objectives they reflect, preventing Chinese hegemony in the Indo Pacific, deterring Russian aggression in Europe, maintaining freedom of navigation, and protecting maritime commerce, have remained substantively consistent across recent administrations even as the terminology, emphasis, and policy frameworks surrounding them have changed. But consistent objectives alone do not constitute a strategy. For decades, the Navy has acknowledged operational strain, force structure pressure, and readiness shortfalls without clearly identifying which missions would receive priority, which risks would be accepted, and what strategic tradeoffs would follow from those choices.

CNO Caudle’s Navy Fighting Instructions is an unclassified public document, but the Navy Warfighting Concept and the developing Navy Deterrence Concept, the foundational guidance documents that the Fighting Instructions references and depends upon, remain classified. What is currently absent in unclassified form is not operational detail. Classified guidance is the appropriate place for theater-specific net assessments and force-sizing specifics. Missing instead is strategic direction concrete enough to shape force planning decisions. Effective strategy must do more than describe objectives. It must identify priorities, accepted risks, and strategic tradeoffs clearly enough to drive force structure decisions. Without that level of clarity, force planning becomes vulnerable to bureaucratic drift, budget pressures, and competing operational demands unsupported by a coherent strategic framework.

Without that conceptual foundation available in both classified and unclassified form, the public, Congress, and the defense community cannot evaluate whether the Commission’s force structure recommendations derive from realistic strategic guidance. Congress requires a classified version to conduct effective oversight and an unclassified version to communicate requirements and justification to the American public. No adequate unclassified naval strategy currently exists to anchor the Commission’s work. Indeed, three days after the President’s Golden Fleet announcement, a Wall Street Journal editorial observed that the larger problem was the apparent absence of clear direction for the Navy.[4]

The 1980s provide the relevant model for how this problem should be solved. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James L. Holloway III established the correct analytical sequence in 1978. Force requirements depend on three factors: strategy, threat, and risk, in that order.[5] As CNO, Admiral James D. Watkins declared the Maritime Strategy “the bedrock of planning, programming, and operations throughout today’s Navy,” providing “a clear framework against which all budget proposals are judged.”[6] The Maritime Strategy existed in both classified and unclassified form. At least eight versions were produced at the secret level and above because Congress, the public, and allies all needed to understand the strategic logic supporting the 600 Ship Navy.[7] Strategy defined the ends, and the 600 Ship Navy provided the means. That sequence and that transparency are what the Commission should require. This does not mean strategy alone determines force structure. Political and budgetary realities play an equally important role in shaping the size of the Navy. But strategy must come first and must provide the framework within which those realities are applied.[8]

The Commission must also look forward rather than remain anchored to current guidance. Ships built on the basis of its recommendations will still be operating in the 2050s. Force planning that ignores future threat environments across a service life extending more than thirty years risks producing forces optimized for today’s problems but poorly matched to tomorrow’s. Yet forecasting is genuinely difficult. Benjamin Jensen, a defense policy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and former Marine Corps officer Michael Rountree observed that “there is no single future, but an endless unfolding of alternative pathways and timelines.”[9] That difficulty is not a reason to avoid the effort. It is precisely why the Commission must undertake it seriously. It also argues for force designs that preserve room for adaptation. Ships operating in the 2050s must be capable of incorporating warfighting technologies and responding to threats that cannot yet be fully anticipated.

Issue #2: A Sea Control or Sea Denial Navy

The Commission must determine whether the Navy should be designed primarily to achieve sea control or to conduct sea denial. These are fundamentally different strategic objectives that require similar but not identical force structures. Sea control is the condition in which one has freedom of action to use the sea for one’s own purposes while denying that use to the enemy. It enables all other naval functions and historically has been the objective of the stronger naval power. Sea denial involves partially or completely denying the adversary use of the sea without necessarily securing it for one’s own purposes. It has generally been the objective of the weaker side.[10]

The current administration and the Navy have shifted toward sea denial as the primary organizing concept. The 2025 NSS directs the military to build a force “capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain.”[11] The 2026 NDS reaffirms this approach by directing a “strong denial defense along the First Island Chain” and declaring that making clear any attempt at aggression will fail “is the essence of deterrence by denial.”[12] CNO Caudle’s December 2025 C-NOte stated explicitly that the Navy will “build an integrated, all domain Fleet capable of conducting sea denial and, when needed, sea control.”[13] His Navy Fighting Instructions translated this concept into operational guidance through the Hedge Strategy, which he described as necessary because “building a Fleet to cover every possible threat is too expensive, unrealistic, and sub optimized.”[14]

This was an acknowledgment that the current fleet of roughly 295 ships cannot sustain sea control and therefore must prioritize sea denial supported by unmanned and tailored offset capabilities.[15] The Navy’s own emerging small surface combatant concepts reinforce this reality. While senior leaders increasingly describe frigates and other lower-end platforms as necessary to relieve operational pressure on destroyers, those same platforms lack the area-air-defense capability required to replace large surface combatants in high-threat environments. The result is an implicit admission that the Navy is designing portions of the future fleet around the operational requirements of sea denial and presence missions rather than sustained sea control against peer adversaries. Throughout the Cold War and afterward, the Navy described its overarching purpose as sea control or power projection, and at times both, but never as sea denial. Naval Doctrine Publication-1 states explicitly that “Sea control enables all other naval functions.”[16]

The Commission cannot recommend a force structure without first determining whether that structure is designed to control the seas or merely to contest them. Nor can it make that determination without telling the nation plainly what each choice costs, what each choice risks, and what each choice forfeits.

Issue #3: The Navy’s High–Low Force Mix

The statute’s core mandate to recommend the size and force mixture of ships across four funding scenarios directly requires resolving the Navy’s high- low balance. CNO Caudle acknowledged the operational cost of failing to do so plainly at the Paris Naval Conference when he stated, “what I find now is I end up having to use CSGs [carrier strike groups] and amphibious strike groups in places where I believe I could tailor a force package and be more suited to the threat.”[17]

High-end forces such as aircraft carriers, nuclear powered submarines, and advanced multi mission surface combatants are designed to operate in contested environments against capable adversaries. They are essential for sea control, deterrence, and power projection. They are also expensive, finite in number, and poorly suited for missions that do not require their capabilities. Every high-end platform assigned to a mission below its capability threshold is a platform unavailable for the high-end fight it was designed and funded to win. The Navy’s operational problem is increasingly one of using sledgehammer solutions for missions that require only a tack hammer. Destroyers designed for high-end combat are routinely consumed by counter-drug patrols, maritime security missions, presence operations, and other low-threat requirements that steadily expend readiness, service life, and maintenance capacity without contributing meaningfully to preparation for major war.

The definition of low-end forces has evolved considerably beyond the crewed patrol ships and frigates of previous decades. Today it encompasses two distinct categories. The first consists of affordable crewed surface combatants. These are smaller and simpler ships optimized for presence, maritime security, and constabulary missions while still capable of contributing to wartime escort and force protection without the cost and complexity of a destroyer. The second and increasingly important category consists of robotic and autonomous systems. These include uncrewed surface vessels configured for scouting, screening, offensive mining, and containerized missile payloads; uncrewed underwater vehicles designed for area denial and counter mine missions; and attritable autonomous platforms capable of coordinated operations without continuous human control.[18] CNO Caudle’s Hedge Strategy explicitly identifies these systems as “Tailored Offsets,” describing them as force multipliers that expand mass and complicate adversary targeting at a fraction of the cost of crewed platforms.[19] The unifying characteristic of low-end forces, whether crewed or uncrewed, is mission specificity. They are optimized for defined tasks rather than the full multi mission spectrum expected of high-end combatants.

Not all adversaries operate high-end warships. China’s People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia employs hundreds of nominally civilian fishing vessels to assert maritime claims and harass foreign ships in the South China Sea. Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fast attack craft have repeatedly threatened U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf. Houthi forces have used anti-ship missiles, drone boats, and mines to disrupt Red Sea shipping, requiring sustained naval responses. None of these threats requires a carrier strike group. All require a capable, persistent, and affordable low-end presence that the current force structure cannot efficiently provide.

Six factors shape the Commission’s resolution of this question. The Navy is only infrequently engaged in high-consequence, low-probability conflicts such as war with China or Russia, but it must remain constantly prepared for them. That reality means high-end platforms cannot expend their readiness on lower tier missions. For most of this century, the Navy has instead been consumed by high-probability, lower-consequence maritime security and naval diplomacy missions that neither require nor should routinely employ its most sophisticated combatants. In a general war, low-end forces are essential for convoy escort and force protection. They cannot be absent from the wartime order of battle. Shipbuilding and weapons system costs continue to rise faster than defense budgets, making affordability a binding constraint. The sophisticated weapon systems that define high-end combatants are unnecessary for low-end missions and add cost and maintenance burdens without corresponding operational benefit. The Navy has also repeatedly demonstrated an institutional inability to define and maintain clear requirements for small combatants. The Constellation–class frigate, cancelled after its cost approached that of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, stands as the most recent and costly example. Persistent maritime security requirements cannot be sustained indefinitely through episodic deployment of scarce high-end combatants.

The Commission must resist two symmetrical errors in resolving the high-low question. The first is allowing the desire for low-end platforms to participate in high-end warfare to drive their cost and complexity toward that of the high-end platforms they are intended to supplement. Both the littoral combat ship and the Constellation–class guided missile frigate illustrate this problem clearly. The second error is designing low-end platforms so narrowly around peacetime security missions that they become wasted assets during conflict and cannot contribute to escort, force protection, or sea control operations when war comes. In a general war, every hull counts. Low-end ships must therefore be affordable enough to procure in quantity, simple enough to crew and maintain, and capable enough to contribute meaningfully to the wartime fleet.

The 2025 NSS and 2026 NDS sent strong demand signals for both ends of the spectrum simultaneously. High-end forces are needed to deny Chinese aggression in the First Island Chain. Low-end Navy and Coast Guard forces are needed to control sea lanes, counter narco-terrorists, and secure key terrain in the Western Hemisphere.[20] The high-low force mix is ultimately not an acquisition question, but a strategic question. A fleet composed entirely of high-end platforms would be strategically capable but numerically insufficient and operationally inefficient. A fleet composed primarily of low-end platforms would be numerically adequate but strategically hollow. The Commission must define the proper balance, specify what low-end actually means in terms of capability and cost, and recommend a force structure capable of performing the full spectrum of naval missions, from maritime security in the Caribbean to sea control in the Western Pacific, without exhausting its high-end platforms on missions they were never intended to perform.

Issue #4: The Navy’s Shipbuilding Crisis and Its Legislative Fix

The Commission’s Study on Shipbuilding and Innovation should draw upon the Vinson-Trammell Act of 1934 as a model for correcting the shipbuilding crisis confronting the Navy today.[21] That Act served as the charter that built the modern U.S. Navy.[22] Its enduring principles for maintaining the fleet and sustaining the associated shipbuilding industrial base, if applied consistently, would have prevented most of the problems affecting the Navy’s industrial base today.

First, the United States must build and maintain a Navy composed of modern warships that remain on true parity with rival maritime powers. Achieving that goal requires determining on a long-range basis the numbers, types, and tonnages of warships to be laid down each year. Second, any surface ship more than twenty years old should be considered obsolete and of limited military value. Large numbers of aging hulls can mislead policymakers about actual naval strength, especially when a rival power is building rapidly. Third, sufficient warship replacement programs must be financed consistently from year to year in order to prevent mass obsolescence, maintain constant modern fleet strength, and reduce costs through repetitive construction. Finally, the sequence itself is nonnegotiable. National security requirements and sea power needs must be established first. Only afterward should cost considerations be applied. The purpose of that sequencing is to ensure budgets do not silently redefine national strategy through force erosion and deferred replacement.

The abandonment of these principles after the Cold War did not create an immediate crisis. It produced a slow-moving one whose consequences are now fully visible. When the peace dividend gutted shipbuilding budgets during the 1990s, the Navy retained aging ships in service rather than replacing them on schedule, violating the principle of systematic replacement. Without steady and predictable construction programs, private shipyards lacked any basis for investing in facilities or workforce development, violating the principle of repetitive construction. Public naval shipyards fell decades behind in infrastructure modernization. The skilled workforce contracted. When submarines required overhaul, there were too few dry docks, too few workers, and insufficient spare parts because the industrial base had not been sustained in the manner the Vinson-Trammell framework required.

The fate of USS Boise (SSN-764) illustrates the cumulative consequences of that failure. Commissioned in 1992 and docked a decade ago for what should have been a routine overhaul, Boise remained out of service for years while the Navy awarded a $1.2 billion repair contract in 2024.[23] More than $800 million was spent. The overhaul was only 22 percent complete when CNO Caudle announced in April 2026 that Boise would be inactivated.[24] Every dollar spent on her refurbishment was wasted. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed called Boise the “poster child” for the Navy’s submarine maintenance backlog. From then, Bosie waited until the service awarded a $1.2 billion contract to HII for the work in 2024. Combined, the Navy has invested about $1.6 billion Boise, based on Pentagon contract announcements. [25] Boise was not simply a story about one submarine. It became a visible symbol of what happens when long-range shipbuilding discipline, maintenance capacity, and industrial sustainment are allowed to erode simultaneously.

The Commission, whose mandate explicitly includes recommending legislative changes, can present this case publicly and with full analytical authority. The Navy cannot resolve its shipbuilding and maintenance crisis through internal reform alone. The incentive structures, funding mechanisms, and oversight frameworks that produced the current crisis are embedded in law and congressional process, and correcting them requires Congress to act. Recent small surface combatant proposals also suggest the Navy is increasingly attempting to use force structure decisions to stabilize the shipbuilding industrial base itself. In practice, some future fleet programs appear driven as much by the need to sustain shipyard capacity and production continuity as by clearly defined warfighting requirements. That reality further reinforces the need for coherent long-range maritime planning linking strategy, force structure, and industrial capacity rather than allowing industrial weakness to shape fleet design indirectly through crisis management. A modern Vinson-Trammell Act, properly conceived and boldly recommended, could do for the twenty-first century Navy what the 1934 original Act did for the Navy that won the Second World War. It could establish the legislative foundation for sustained naval power adequate to the strategic competition the nation now faces.

Issue #5: American Sea Power and the Coast Guard

Any assessment of American sea power that excludes the Coast Guard is incomplete. The Commission’s governing statute requires it to ensure the Navy possesses sufficient capacity for current and anticipated homeland defense missions. That requirement cannot be fully addressed without considering the Coast Guard’s unique statutory authorities, capabilities, and role within the maritime domain, particularly given the 2025 NSS direction calling for “a more suitable Coast Guard and Navy presence” in the Western Hemisphere. The United States has always required constabulary power. It must possess the capability to uphold maritime sovereignty, prevent illegal and illicit use of its waters, protect maritime borders, ensure the safe passage of cargo and people, and preserve marine resources. These are maritime law enforcement missions that constitutional practice and historical precedent have assigned primarily to the Coast Guard rather than the Navy.

The case for including the Coast Guard in the Commission’s deliberations rests on six grounds. The Coast Guard possesses maritime law enforcement and counterterrorism authorities the Navy does not have, including statutory authority to arrest vessel operators and crews suspected of illegal activities on the high seas. That authority is essential for the constabulary missions the NSS and NDS now explicitly prioritize. The Coast Guard also operates the nation’s only icebreaking fleet, which is necessary to assert sovereignty and protect national security interests in the Arctic and Antarctic regions that the current administration has identified as priorities. The National Fleet Policy requires Navy and Coast Guard commonality and interoperability. Colin Gray observed in 2000 that the predictable shortage of frigate sized warships in the future Navy pointed toward closer integration with the Coast Guard because large cutters would increasingly need to function as warships.[26] The 2025 NSS explicitly calls for a more suitable Coast Guard and Navy presence in the Western Hemisphere in order to control sea lanes, reduce human and drug trafficking, and secure key transit routes during crisis. This direction acknowledges that the Coast Guard is part of American maritime dominance rather than a peripheral service. The 2025 executive order on shipbuilding directs a government-wide review of production delays and cost overruns that specifically includes Coast Guard programs alongside those of the Army and Navy. Finally, the Coast Guard has served, fought, and died beside the Navy in every major American war and contingency, including its permanent patrol boat presence in the Persian Gulf, which in 2026 consisted of six Sentinel class cutters, a shore maintenance unit, and a maritime engagement team.

Recent operations have reinforced this argument. In March 2026, CNO Caudle identified maritime domain awareness and drug interdiction as the principal challenges facing U.S. Southern Command.[27] He acknowledged that he wished the Navy had progressed further in developing alternatives so that when the Ford Carrier Strike Group departed the Caribbean, he could have offered something more appropriate for the mission. Historically, that mission set has belonged to the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard is also directly relevant to Issue #3. The low-end presence gap identified in the high-low force mix discussion, namely the need for persistent and affordable maritime security capacity below the threshold of high-end combat, is precisely the mission the Coast Guard was designed and statutorily authorized to perform. The Commission cannot responsibly address force structure without asking whether a properly resourced and integrated Coast Guard is the answer Caudle acknowledged the Navy could not yet provide. Force structure recommendations that fail to incorporate Coast Guard capabilities fully will remain incomplete.

Conclusion

Congress directed the Commission to examine force structure, readiness, shipbuilding capacity, naval aviation, personnel policy, and the force-generation model that sustains combat power at sea. Those problems are interconnected and their causes are well understood. Based on the Commission’s public statements, hearings, and commentaries, the recurring problem is that immediate operational demand, near-term political pressures, and annual budget cycles have repeatedly overpowered long-term maritime planning, industrial continuity, and strategically disciplined force planning. The consequences are now visible across the fleet. Readiness is consumed to meet current tasking. Maintenance is deferred to preserve near-term presence. Shipbuilding programs expand, contract, and change direction before industrial capacity can stabilize around them. Force structure drifts as priorities shift between administrations and budget cycles. Long-term strategic priorities blur because the Navy is continually forced to satisfy immediate operational requirements at the expense of sustained strategic coherence.

The underlying relationships are not conceptually complicated. During the Cold War, the United States understood that strategy had to establish priorities and accepted risks, force structure had to reflect those priorities, industrial capacity had to sustain that force structure over time, and readiness had to be preserved for the conflicts the nation considered most dangerous. The Commission’s statutory task is to provide Congress an unclassified report with findings, recommendations, and legislative proposals addressing those interconnected problems. In practice, however, the Commission is being asked to do something broader and more consequential. It must identify not only how to recover from the Navy’s present readiness, maintenance, force structure, and industrial base problems, but also how to prevent their recurrence. That requires more than shipbuilding targets or future fleet numbers. It requires a realistic framework for setting maritime priorities, defining accepted risks to the force and to the nation, aligning strategy with resources and industrial capacity over time, and sustaining American sea power across decades rather than budget cycles.

The Commission has the independence, the authority, and the mandate to confront these problems directly. Its report will have little value if it merely restates the Navy’s existing challenges or proposes force structure ambitions disconnected from industrial reality, operational sustainability, and accepted strategic risk. The Commission’s real task is to impose long-term strategic discipline on problems that have repeatedly been overwhelmed by short-term operational demand and political pressure. Whether it does so candidly and coherently is the measure by which its work should ultimately be judged.

[1] James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, Pub. L. No. 117-263, 136 Stat. 2395 (2022), § 1092.

[2] Mackenzie Eaglen, Filemon Vela, and Benjamin Jensen, “How Congress Can Revitalize American Sea Power,” The National Interest, January 21, 2026.

[3] 10 U.S. Code § 8062, subparagraph (a).

[4] The Editorial Board, “The Navy Needs Direction,” The Wall Street Journal, December 25, 2025.

[5] CNO Admiral James L. Holloway III, Naval Warfare Publication 1: Strategic Concepts of the U.S. Navy, May 1978, in John B. Hattendorf, ed., U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1970s, Naval War College Press, 2007, p. 59.

[6] CNO Admiral James D. Watkins, “The Maritime Strategy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 1986.

[7] Peter M. Swartz with Karin Duggan, U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies and Concepts (1970–2010), Center for Naval Analyses, MISC D0026437.A1, December 2011, slide 21.

[8] Anand Toprani, “Was the 600-Ship Navy a Chimera? Budgets, Force Structure, and the Political Realities Behind Reagan-Era Naval Strategy,” Journal of Strategic Studies, June 24, 2024, p. 3.

[9] Benjamin Jensen and Michael Rountree, “Driving the Dark Road to the Future: A Guide to Revitalizing Defense Planning and Strategic Analysis,” War on the Rocks, July 1, 2022.

[10] Naval Doctrine Publication-1 (NDP-1), April 2020, p. 22.

[11]Donald J. Trump, National Security Strategy, November 2025, p. 24.

[12] Pete Hegseth, National Defense Strategy, January 2026, p. 4.

[13] ADM Daryl L. Caudle, CNO C-Note #3, “World-Class Fleet,” December 1, 2025.

[14] ADM Daryl L. Caudle, CNO C-Note #3, “World-Class Fleet,” December 1, 2025.

[15] ADM Daryl L. Caudle, CNO C-Note #4, “The Way We Fight,” January 15, 2026; Breaking Defense, January 28, 2026.

[16] NDP-1, April 2020, p. 22.

[17] ADM Daryl L. Caudle, Speech, Paris Naval Conference, February 2026; Naval News, March 13, 2026.

[18] ADM Daryl L. Caudle, CNO C-Note #4, “The Way We Fight,” January 15, 2026; Breaking Defense, January 15, 2026; NAVSEA Modular Surface Attack Craft contracting notice, 2025.

[19] ADM Daryl L. Caudle, Remarks, Surface Navy Association. See also: Press Office, Department of the Navy, “Chief of Naval Operations Unveils ‘Fighting Instructions’ at U.S. Naval War College,” Press Release, 9 February 2026.

[20] Trump, National Security Strategy, November 2025; Hegseth, National Defense Strategy, January 2026.

[21] Matt Wright, “Just-in-Time Production,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2023.

[22] Charles F. Elliott, “The Genesis of the Modern American Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 1966.

[23] Justin Katz, “CNO Nominee Adm. Caudle Says He’ll Look ‘Hard’ at Whether to ‘Walk Away’ from Sub Boise,” Breaking Defense, July 24, 2025.

[24] Sam LaGrone, “Navy to Inactivate Attack Boat USS Boise After $1.6B Repair Effort,” USNI News, April 10, 2026.

[25] Justin Katz, “Navy Awards HII $1.2B Contract to Overhaul Long-Sidelined Sub Boise,” Breaking Defense, February 23, 2024.

[26] Colin S. Gray, “Keeping the Coast Guard Afloat,” The National Interest, No. 60, Summer 2000.

[27] Caitlyn Burchett, “SOUTHCOM Doesn’t Need a Carrier for Maritime Interdiction, CNO Says,” USNI News, April 6, 2026.

Prior to his full retirement as a member of the U.S. senior executive service, Bruce Stubbs had assignments on the staffs of the Secretary of the Navy and the Chief of Naval Operations from 2009 to 2022. He was a former director of Strategy and Strategic Concepts in the OPNAV N3N5 and N7 directorates. As a career U.S. Coast Guard officer, he had a posting as the Assistant Commandant for Capability (current title) in Headquarters, served on the staff of the National Security Council, taught at the Naval War College, commanded a major cutter, and served a combat tour with the U.S. Navy in Vietnam during the 1972 Easter Offensive.

Featured Image: IONIAN SEA (Feb. 21, 2022) Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 ships and submarines sail in formation in the Ionian Sea off the coast of Sicily Feb. 21, 2022 during Exercise Dynamic Manta 22 (DYMA 22). 

 

 

 

Force Structure

Four Fleet Designs: Which Navy is Best for America?

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By George Galdorisi

Perspective

Military leaders often use military-industry conferences to unveil new strategies. Coming on the heels of a new National Security Strategy (NSS) issued in December 2025 and a National Defense Strategy (NDS) issued in January 2026, the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Daryl Caudle, revealed the Navy’s strategy designed to support the NSS and NDS, the U.S. Navy Fighting Instructions in February 2026.

The venue for unveiling this document was The Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA)/U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) “West” symposium, the largest military/industry symposium on the West Coast with over 10,000 registered attendees. Admiral Caudle was the keynote speaker on day one of this event, and he provided a briefing on the U.S. Navy Fighting Instructions.

One of the key points the CNO made during this keynote, as well as during a subsequent Service Chiefs panel, was that the U.S. Navy is a differentiator. Here is how he described it in the Fighting Instructions:

“Winners set themselves apart by excelling in difficult endeavors. It is what separates successful businesses or world-class athletes from the competition. Doing difficult things well means identifying and delivering differentiated value. For the United States Navy, prioritizing what the Navy does better than anyone else—any other Service, any other Nation—is central to ensuring that the Chief of Naval Operations designs and resources a strategy that ruthlessly prioritizes the Sailors, Foundry, Fleet, and Fight needed to execute our essential global missions. We provide differentiated value to two primary stakeholders: the Nation and the Joint Force.”

The CNO’s emphasis on the U.S. Navy as a differentiator comes at a time when there is intense discussion regarding the different options for what the Navy-After-Next will look like. The discussions within the Navy, the Department of Defense, the Executive Branch, the U.S. Congress, think tanks and a plethora of other stakeholders and influencers and others have never been more varied or intense, and much of that discussion occurred during the “West” symposium.

Which Fleet?

Four options for fleet composition have gained purchase within the U.S. Navy.

The first is the Navy’s current shipbuilding plan as reported by the Congressional Research Service. This includes 381 crewed ships and a number of uncrewed surface vessels. This number comports with the recently released Navy Shipbuilding Plan which envisions a battle force inventory reaching 382 crewed ships in 2056.

The second option that has gained traction is called the “hybrid fleet.” This concept was unveiled by then-Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, and endorsed by his successors. This envisions a Navy of 350 crewed ships and 150 uncrewed surface vessels. The idea of a hybrid fleet evolved due the U.S. Navy’s ongoing challenge of building enough crewed ships to adequately meet the Navy’s global commitments.

The next option is called the “hedge fleet.” This envisions a forward-deployed force of robotic autonomous systems and crewed ships to be employed quickly in any crisis. Of the four options, the CNO spoke most extensively about the hedge fleet, explaining the rationale this way: “We need ‘tailored forces’ and a Navy that has other battle formations beyond carrier strike groups. Tailored offsets include capabilities such as attritable and easily replenishable unmanned surface vessels, unmanned undersea systems, mine warfare and cost-effective counter drone defense. The hedge fleet avoids a brittle single-purpose force.”

The final option is the “golden fleet,” a recent initiative announced by President Trump in late 2025 to rapidly expand and modernize the fleet. This plan focuses heavily on battleships alongside frigates and uncrewed surface vessels. While media reporting regarding the golden fleet centers primarily on large ships, knowledgeable observers have suggested that the small- and medium-sized uncrewed surface vessels armed with long range strike and missile defense systems will be the most strategically impactful in the near term.

One common feature among these four options is the inclusion of uncrewed surface vessels as vital assets within a future fleet. There are two reasons for this sea change.

The first is that ships are expensive to build and operate. The cost of Ford-class aircraft carrier is $13B and an Arleigh Burke destroyer is $2.2B. The new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine approaches $10B. However, those procurement costs only represent the tip of the iceberg. Populating those vessels with sailors is also increasingly expensive, given that seventy percent of the total operating cost (TOC) of a ship over its lifespan is providing a crew year-over-year.

The second is that after over a decade of development the Navy has confidence that uncrewed surface vessels have reached a point in their development that they are no longer prototypes, but production-ready vessels (some are commercial-off-the-shelf or COTS). that are ready to deploy with their crewed counterparts.

As evidence of this technological maturity, the CNO noted how Navy and Marine Corps exercises, experiments, and demonstrations such as the those conducted by Fifth Fleet/CTF-59, Fourth Fleet and a series of uncrewed surface vessel-focused events with NATO allies have accelerated the development of these craft. As just one of many examples of this testing in recent years, MARTAC, a U.S. uncrewed surface vessel designer/builder, has frequently been invited to showcase its MANTAS T12, Devil Ray T24 and Devil Ray T38 unmanned surface vessels (USV) to a wide range of Navy and Marine Corps at-sea events.

These events have included the U.S. Pacific Fleet-led Integrated Battle Problem series of exercises, the Integrated Maritime Exercise series held under the auspices of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/Commander Task Force 59 in the Arabian Gulf, NATO exercises BALTOPS, REPMUS, and the follow-on Dynamic Messenger, Australian Defence Force Exercise Autonomous Warrior, among others.

The Navy Shipbuilding Plan reveals how this confidence in the technical maturity of uncrewed surface vehicles has given the Navy confidence to provide funding for USVs to: “serve as a direct, dual-use supplement to existing ready forces, providing a flexible “tailored force” to enhance the nation’s maritime posture.”

The number of medium uncrewed surface vessels (MUSVs) projected in the Shipbuilding Plan are substantial, growing from 39 in FY27 to 83 in FY31 when MUSVs will comprise 18% of the Navy’s fleet. As the Plan explains, MUSV integration will unburden higher-value assets, such as Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, as the autonomous fleet can take up long endurance maritime domain awareness missions.

The Road Ahead

Regardless of which design for the Navy-After-Next prevails in the coming years – be it one of the existing conceptual designs, a hybrid design drawing elements from among these options, or a completely different design – a future U.S. Navy comprised of formations of integrated crewed ships and uncrewed surface vessels represents a once-in-a-generation sea change for the U.S. Navy.

While deciding on the composition of the Navy-After-Next is a necessary first step it is not a sufficient one. The U.S. Congress has been reluctant to authorize the Navy’s planned investment of billions of dollars in USVs until the Service can come up with a concept-of-operations (CONOPS) for using them. Congress has a point.

Via the Navy Shipbuilding Plan, the Navy has announced plans to procure large numbers of uncrewed systems—especially medium uncrewed surface vessels—but a CONOPS, in even the most basic form, has not yet emerged. Such a CONOPS must be thoughtfully conceived, analyzed, vetted through stakeholders, war-gamed and widely distributed. Only through this disciplined process can the Navy-After-Next be the strongest Navy the nation can field.

Captain George Galdorisi, USN (Ret.) is a career naval aviator and national security professional. During his 30-year career he had four tours in command and served as a carrier strike group chief of staff. Additionally, he led the U.S. delegation for military-to-military talks with the Chinese Navy. He is the Emeritus Director of Strategic Assessments and Technical Futures at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific. He is the author of seventeen books, including four consecutive New York Times bestsellers. His most recent novel, Fire and Ice, is eerily prescient, as it foresaw Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Featured Image: PHILIPPINE SEA (Nov. 16, 2018) Ships with the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group and John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group transit the Philippine Sea during dual carrier operations. (U.S. Navy photo)

Capability Analysis

Selective Sea Denial: The Rise of Land-based Anti-Ship Missiles as Political Instruments

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By Helge Adrians

Recent conflicts in the Middle East highlight how maritime kill chains from ashore impose risk on global shipping. However, Western navies have yet to fully grasp that within these loosely integrated sensor-to-shooter networks, land-based Anti-Ship Missile (AShM) systems have become the decisive instruments by which littoral actors — both state and non-state — generate coercive effects at sea. It is through these systems that such networks translate dispersed sensing and targeting into episodic operational effects, thereby producing conditions that resemble artificially generated chokepoints or barriers in narrow seas.

Typically consisting of mobile, often truck-mounted launchers, sensor inputs, and command-and-control elements, land-based AShMs — whether ballistic or cruise configurations — facilitate a form of selective sea denial. Rather than enforcing broad area exclusion, they allow actors to threaten specific shipping lanes, vessels, or temporal windows of opportunity, thereby imposing calibrated risk, delay, and uncertainty while avoiding decisive confrontation.

While this approach is not new in principle, its contemporary expression is shaped by the growing integration of land-based AShMs with both traditional and emerging elements of coastal defense, including unmanned systems (UxSs). These combinations enhance target acquisition, extend operational reach, and complicate defensive planning by saturating attention and forcing continuous trade-offs in detection, prioritization, and engagement, thereby creating conditions in which AShMs can be employed to greatest effect — not necessarily through technological sophistication alone, but through dispersion, redundancy, and temporal unpredictability. Within such configurations, AShMs remain the central kinetic enabler, translating otherwise transient sensing and targeting opportunities into tangible maritime effects. Even limited successful engagements can therefore generate disproportionate operational, psychological, and economic consequences, particularly in narrow seas and heavily trafficked maritime corridors.

Accordingly, this form of selective sea denial is more than a tactical adaptation. It reflects a recurring but under-theorized pattern in evolving conflict: the use of land-based strike capabilities, operating in a distributed manner and under the protection of terrestrial topography, to disrupt global maritime trade flows and generate political consequences. Yet Western military thinking still tends to treat land-based AShM systems within sensor-to-shooter architectures as supporting assets rather than as the central coercive instruments, leaving a gap in conceptualization and countermeasures — one that is particularly acute in other narrow seas, especially in inland seas such as Baltic. Closing this conceptual gap demands moving beyond kinetic countermeasures alone and instead finding ways to contain the political utility of AshMs. 

Land-Based Anti-Ship Missiles in Practice: From Tactical Denial to Political Leverage

Land-based AShM systems have often been viewed in the West through the lens of China’s defense posture in the Western Pacific — labeled as ‘anti-access/area-denial’ since 2003 — where they were popularized as ‘carrier killers.’ Although other states also began to acquire or modernize such weapons during this period, their significance has only become globally visible in recent years.

This shift is illustrated by the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea since late November 2023, which shows how rapidly limited military capabilities can generate outsized maritime effects.

What began with drone-based harassment soon expanded into a layered approach that included the recurrent use of land-based AShMs, drawing mostly on Iranian technology, itself rooted in Chinese designs. While UxS established presence and imposed friction, it was the integration of these missiles within a broader multi-vector threat environment that fundamentally altered the character of the battlespace. The coexistence of different trajectories — high/fast for anti-ship ballistic missiles, low-altitude high-speed sea-skimming anti-ship cruise missiles, and low/slow for UxSs — creates a persistent strain on sensor management, as systems can no longer exclude entire kinematic regimes from consideration. This forces continuous tradeoffs in detection, classification, and resource allocation, increasing processing load and degrading overall situational awareness. The destructive characteristics of AShMs — particularly the speed, range, and terminal flight profiles of ballistic variants — introduce a qualitatively different layer of risk, in which even limited successful engagements carry the potential for sudden kinetic loss at sea.

As attacks grew more frequent and less discriminate, the Houthis translated localized military means into broader economic and political consequences. Crucially, these effects were achieved mainly from the mountainous hinterland of Western Yemen, highlighting how even episodic missile employment can exert continuous pressure on commercial traffic.

In response to the escalating situation in the Red Sea, the United States — together with partners — launched multiple rounds of strikes against Houthi targets beginning in early 2024, building on earlier efforts to contain the group’s regional activities. The objective was not solely to eliminate land-based AShMs, but to degrade the broader ecosystem enabling maritime attacks, from sensors to shooter platforms. Precision strikes from the air and the sea hit suspected launch sites, storage facilities, and command elements, yet failed to produce a decisive reduction in the threat. Houthi forces adapted quickly, relying on mobility, concealment, and redundancy to preserve operational capacity. As a result, attacks on commercial shipping persisted, and the risk environment remained largely intact. Within this evolving campaign, land-based AShMs continued to play a central role, illustrating how even under sustained military pressure such systems can endure as instruments of regional disruption.

Structural limitations already visible in operations against the Houthis were reinforced in the joint U.S. and Israeli campaign against Iran since the end of February 2026.

Although U.S. and Israeli forces faced little difficulty in achieving theater entry — again demonstrating the limited effectiveness of Iranian anti-access measures, the ‘outer ring’ — this initial advantage did not translate into control over the threat environment within the ‘inner ring(s).’ This was evident in the maritime domain. For instance, while conventional Iranian naval forces were quickly degraded through stand-off strikes, this did little to affect the more resilient layer of land-based AShMs and UxSs. These dispersed capabilities, likely supported by foreign target acquisition, continued to pose a credible risk to merchant vessels transiting the Persian Gulf, maintaining a persistent sea-denial threat despite continued operational pressure. Operational and public attention, however, remained disproportionately focused on the possibility of mining in the Strait of Hormuz, diverting attention from the more immediate and lethal challenge posed by missile-based sea denial. Air-centric efforts — including strike aircraft and rotary-wing assets operating within a loosely integrated kill web — failed to fully neutralize these systems, highlighting the difficulty of suppressing mobile, land-based AShM threats without escalation or ground presence.

Repeated efforts to suppress these capabilities have highlighted their resilience once dispersed, as well as the limits of strike-centric approaches in countering land-based AShM threats in littoral environments. More importantly, their persistence preserves their value as a coercive instrument: by sustaining risk, they drive up insurance and operating costs, shaping maritime behavior without requiring the physical interdiction of shipping, while allowing actors to effectively switch maritime access on or off at short notice.

Targeting Flows: The Economic Consequences of Selective Sea Denial

Maritime commerce warfare, or the selective targeting of merchant shipping is not a new phenomenon. However, the time-compressed execution from dispersed, protected coastal or peripheral sites introduces a qualitatively higher level of uncertainty regarding when and against which vessels attacks may occur. This situation is structurally reinforced by the inherent difficulty of detecting, locating, and pre-emptively neutralizing modern land-based AShM systems, even for advanced militaries.

Significantly, their effectiveness does not depend on frequent successful strikes, but on the persistent possibility of sudden, high-impact AShM engagements generated by land-based, heterogeneous, sensor-enabled kill chains. Unlike other forms of coastal maritime disruption, such as piracy, these systems derive their strategic effect from their ability to disturb and compress naval decision-making processes under conditions of multi-vector uncertainty. That is, their strategic utility lies less in missile performance than in inducing cognitive overload, misallocation of defensive resources, and degraded engagement sequencing within shipborne combat systems.

This risk environment is rapidly translated into economic calculations through maritime insurance mechanisms, where elevated perceived risk leads to adjusted war risk premiums and the redefinition of high-risk zones along global shipping routes. In this sense, the proliferation of land-based AShMs in geographically constrained maritime environments takes on significance beyond the military domain, informing insurance assessments of emerging high-risk maritime areas.

Rising war risk premiums and associated operating costs undermine the economic viability of transiting affected sea lines of communication. Crucially, these effects are expectation-driven, as perceived rather than actual risk shapes insurance pricing and routing decisions. Even low-intensity or sporadic activity can therefore sustain elevated risk perceptions, allowing the mechanism to persist over time without escalation to major conflict.

Shipping companies are thus forced into costly trade-offs between absorbing higher premiums, rerouting vessels, or suspending operations. Such adjustments increase transit times, fuel consumption, and logistical complexity, reducing supply chain reliability even in the absence of sustained kinetic disruption. Insurers, in turn, aggregate localized threat perceptions into broader high-risk maritime zones, translating tactical developments into systemic market signals. In the wake of repeated conflicts in the Middle East, land-based AShMs have emerged as a distinct risk category within maritime insurance assessments, alongside established threats such as piracy or naval mines.

Insurance markets thus act as amplifiers of localized military signals. Even limited and visible deployments, as well as indications of the acquisition or modernization, of land-based AShMs can generate disproportionate macroeconomic effects. Such actions are incorporated into insurers’ assessments of emerging maritime risk through a feedback loop between perceived threat and commercial behavior. In this dynamic, maritime traffic is redirected not through physical denial, but through the imposition of cost and uncertainty. Over time, this produces not only disruption but a gradual reconfiguration of global shipping routes, as land-based AShMs shape maritime behavior indirectly through economic pressure rather than direct control of sea lines of communication.

From Effects to Strategy: The Political Logic of Selective Sea Denial

The economic effects outlined above are not yet globally diffused in a uniform manner, but are instead mainly concentrated in three regions where land-based AShM capabilities are either already fielded or undergoing sustained modernization: the Middle East, the South China Sea, and the Baltic Sea.

The South China Sea resembles a contested archipelagic space with layered maritime claims. Should a conflict arise there and maritime kill chains — including land-based AShMs — be activated, shipping traffic could still be diverted, as was the case in the Red Sea.

In contrast, the Baltic Sea constitutes a quasi-enclosed maritime corridor with severely constrained routing flexibility, as alternative routes are few — primarily the Kiel Canal and the White Sea-Baltic Canal — and subject to state control. As in the Persian Gulf, disruption to maritime traffic in this region and its associated supply chains would have consequences for the global economy, not primarily through energy exports or trade flows, but through the activation of mutual assistance obligations among European states and the resulting increase in financial market uncertainty.

Building on this systemic exposure, the political significance of land-based AShMs in narrow inland seas lies primarily in their role within escalation dynamics rather than in their direct employment.

Both in the Baltic Sea and in the Persian Gulf prior to the outbreak of the current conflict, these systems remain embedded in broader coastal defense postures of the respective littoral states but continue to be relatively underweighted in crisis planning when compared to more immediately visible instruments of maritime disruption such as warships, naval mines, or naval aviation. Where they are considered, the focus tends to lie on the capabilities of Russia and Iran rather than on those of other regional actors. For instance, the land-based AShM capabilities of Baltic NATO members have so far received comparatively less analytical attention.

The Iranian case nevertheless illustrates that such systems can retain a persistent deterrent effect even under conditions of sustained military pressure, due to their mobility, dispersion, and survivability. Their relevance is therefore not static but contingent, functioning in a manner that can resemble an on/off logic depending on perceived targeting pressure and operational visibility. As such, they can serve as instruments for shaping the order of a maritime space and for exerting coercive pressure in both peacetime and crisis, by enabling a controllable form of escalation.

This is also relevant for Russian strategic considerations in the Baltic Sea, where perceptions of NATO’s qualitative superiority — reinforced by recent Ukrainian tactics and operational innovations in the Black Sea, and concerns about its ‘shadow fleet’ tanker flows — may further incentivize caution in exposing naval assets to comparable attritional dynamics. This translates into land-based AShM deployments in Kaliningrad and around St. Petersburg in the Gulf of Finland, where geographical conditions may generate episodically visible but structurally persistent deterrent effects.

Across these cases, escalation unfolds not as a binary transition but as a staged process, ranging from signaling and sensor deployment to targeting preparation and eventual kinetic employment. Within this framework, the political value of land-based AShMs derives less from their actual use than from their integration into credible escalation pathways that remain visible yet only partially suppressible. This generates a cognitive effect in which perceived survivability and latent operational availability enhance deterrence and coercive leverage even in the absence of engagement.

Selective Sea Denial as a Persistent Condition of Maritime Conflict?

The patterns observed in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf indicate two transitions. First, they reveal how networked and distributed technologies shape conflict. Second, they demonstrate a shift from episodic disruption to a structurally elevated level of risk in key maritime corridors. Both are defined by the ability to calibrate maritime access through temporally and spatially bounded threats rather than area-wide denial. Looking ahead, other powers, notably China and Russia, may adopt and evolve selective sea denial in regions such as the South China Sea or the Baltic Sea. If this approach becomes a persistent rather than exceptional condition, it is likely to diffuse further as an attractive model of limited escalation under conventional constraint.

The demonstrated effectiveness of land-based AShMs is likely to accelerate their proliferation across multiple channels in the coming years, reinforcing a current structural dilemma for Western militaries. Stand-off strike campaigns and maritime defensive measures have so far proven insufficient to neutralize such capabilities, while the deployment of human ground forces remains politically and operationally unattractive, despite its doctrinal relevance in scenarios such as the South China Sea. This proliferation is likely to be accompanied by operational and doctrinal adaptation, as both state and non-state actors refine how these systems are integrated into broader sensor-to-shooter architectures. As long as traditional arms control and non-proliferation efforts are unlikely to gain traction given the simultaneous offensive and defensive character of these systems, and Western approaches do not overcome risk aversion or find new ways to counter them, they will increasingly have to operate within the constraints of remote and low-visibility forms of warfare.

Restoring the manageability of risk, effective management of the threat will depend less on eliminating elements of land-based AShM systems than on constraining their political utility. Rather than attempting to dismantle the networks in which these systems are embedded, planners must pursue deterrence, resilience, and the protection of critical shipping flows. This requires reducing systemic vulnerabilities to temporally and spatially limited disruptions of global trade, as well as greater resources for managing distributed sensing and engagement demands. Consequently, land-based AShMs should be understood not primarily as tactical enablers, but as relatively easy-to-use instruments of controlled strategic escalation. Accordingly, the strategic focus must shift from targeting platforms to shaping the behavior of the actors and networks that employ them.

Commander Helge Adrians, German Navy, M.A., is a Visiting Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

Featured image: An Iranian Qader missile being fired during an exercise in 2020. (Photo via Fars Media Corporation/Wikimedia Commons)

Strategy

Maritime Cost Imposition: A New Approach to Great Power War

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By Greg Malandrino and Aaron Marchant

Operation Epic Fury raises many questions about how well the U.S. military is prepared for the character of a 21st-century great-power war against the People’s Republic of China. While it appears too early to assess the results of this latest war or the effectiveness of the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian shipping, President Trump’s willingness to employ economic warfare in this conflict should raise questions about how well the U.S. military is postured to conduct such operations against a great power adversary. Now is the time to consider how the U.S. military – and the U.S. Navy in particular – should prepare for waging a prolonged great-power war via economic punishment.

Three factors make maritime punishment a potentially effective U.S. option against China. First, threats from China’s reconnaissance strike network potentially push the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carriers and destroyers, its high-end platforms, hundreds of miles from the Chinese mainland, suggesting the need to consider alternative approaches for these units. Second, over the past two decades, Beijing has developed a globe-spanning array of infrastructure, assets, and dependencies, while its military strength, to date, has remained regional. This creates a vulnerability that the United States can exploit given its ability to concentrate force globally. Third, it is plausible that low-cost autonomous systems and stealth platforms, such as submarines, may allow the U.S. Navy to achieve sea denial without relying on traditional surface platforms. If the U.S. Navy fields a customized denial force of submarines and inexpensive autonomous systems, it would relieve its carrier strike groups and surface action groups from this mission, freeing them for global punishment operations.

The U.S. Navy remains intent on using its high-end platforms for sea denial. To its credit, it is developing the kinds of unmanned systems that are ideally suited for this mission, but only at too slow a pace. To optimize its force structure and accelerate the development of technology, the U.S. Navy should instead commit to a strategy of customized, low-end sea denial coupled with high-end global maritime punishment, and then tailor its doctrine, tactics, and weapons systems to each mission.

Why Singular Emphasis on Denial Is Problematic

For years, Taiwan has been a decisive point of Washington’s security approach to the Pacific, and as a result, one of the U.S. Navy’s current foci is denying China the ability to seize the island nation by maritime invasion. The 2026 National Defense Strategy states that the U.S. joint force must be postured to ensure aggression against U.S. interests in the western Pacific fails, a deterrence by denial strategy. Commander, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Samuel Paparo, has likewise testified that the Joint Force’s mandate is to “thwart an invasion of Taiwan” in the Indo-Pacific.

Senior leaders’ emphasis on sea denial implies that U.S Navy high-value, multi-mission platforms will participate in these operations, possibly within range of China’s reconnaissance strike network. For example, U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Adm. Steve Koehler has emphasized operating within range of China’s anti-ship missiles, arguing for U.S. Navy persistence within China’s weapons engagement zones.

Using high-end U.S. naval platforms to deny the Chinese comes with enormous risks. Per naval combat theory, an engagement’s outcome depends on scouting, setting up screening forces, and firing effectively first. China has an expansive anti-ship missile arsenal, interior lines of communication, and operates close to its own shores. Thus, in a war over Taiwan, particularly the opening phase, China will likely have significant scouting and fires advantages over the U.S. military. These disadvantages pose great risks to carrier strike groups, and in a worst-case scenario, the Navy may lose several.

Given the extreme risks from operating deep within China’s weapons engagement zones, U.S. Navy commanders would likely seek to reduce the risk to force by operating high-end combatants farther from Taiwan. This could significantly reduce the effectiveness of high-end, multi-mission warships during sea denial operations. These platforms are most effective when they are closer to their targets, allowing them to deliver concentrated, decisive attack waves. As an aircraft carrier’s range from the battlefield increases, the number of carrier-based attack waves and the number of munitions per wave decreases exponentially. This results in the synergistic reduction of a carrier fleet’s combat effectiveness compared to when it operates in more permissive environments.

Additionally, a singular emphasis on denial could leave the U.S. military prepared for a situation that might never materialize, limiting high-end unit flexibility to respond to other contingencies. The focus is on defending Taiwan because this is the pacing scenario, with the implied assumption that a high-end maritime force capable of denying an invasion of Taiwan can handle all lesser included cases. This assumption may fail, however, if Beijing seizes Taiwan using other methods, such as an air and maritime blockade coordinated with cyber and sabotage attacks on Taiwan and elsewhere.

Punishment as a Force Employment Option for High-End Platforms

More than just denial, U.S. military planners should offer decision-makers a fuller spectrum of options, specifically maritime punishment, to better prepare for a great power war. In practice, punishment includes deliberate actions designed to diminish an adversary’s defense industrial output and harm its economy to impose costs. These could take the form of kinetic and non-kinetic strikes and blockades that attrit portions of the Chinese economy, curtail its military production capacity, and hold its global infrastructure at risk. The U.S. Navy has historically executed these kinds of operations. It did so during the Second World War when the service executed an unrestricted air and submarine warfare campaign designed to hobble Imperial Japan, and during the Vietnam War, when it offensively mined Haiphong Harbor. The Navy is assuming that role again today in its current blockade of Iranian shipping in support of Operation Epic Fury.

China appears especially vulnerable to global U.S. punitive operations. Since 2013, Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative has expanded the scope of Chinese global investments, including infrastructure projects in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and across South Asia. Components of China’s economy depend heavily on hydrocarbon shipments, which must pass through some of the world’s most vulnerable choke points. Its merchant fleet is one of the world’s largest, providing a target-rich environment on the high seas for a navy willing to pursue a strategy of systematic commerce raiding.

The U.S. Navy’s unrivaled blue-water experience conducting sustained carrier strike group and large surface combatant operations makes it uniquely capable of holding Chinese vulnerabilities at risk worldwide. In contrast, the People’s Liberation Army lacks the capability and capacity to defend China’s assets across the globe. This is an asymmetry that represents a potential U.S. advantage. However, maximizing the effectiveness of these forces for economic warfare requires rethinking operational concepts. Elucidating the details of what makes an effective maritime punishment force component is critical.

Global reach, multi-mission flexibility, and persistence are necessary characteristics of a maritime punishment force, because such a force must be able to hold targets at risk regardless of where they are in the world, using a wide range of capabilities, and operate independently for extended periods. These traits describe the Navy’s contemporary high-end, multi-mission platforms, such as the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers at the center of the Navy’s carrier strike groups and the Aegis-guided missile destroyers that support them. Most importantly, the U.S. Navy has decades of experience operating these platforms globally, from the high seas to the littorals. This combination of traits makes the carrier strike group a high-end, mobile U.S. base capable of independently attacking targets and defending itself, an invaluable maritime punishment tool.

Dialing in To Defend Taiwan: Customized Denial

While punishing China globally offers promise, denying a Chinese assault remains an essential component of Washington’s deterrence strategy. For multiple reasons, the U.S. military requires the capability to deny Beijing its objectives, even if these denial operations are not equated with decisive battle. Unmanned attack systems in development operating in conjunction with undersea assets can serve as a customized denial force to prevent an invasion of Taiwan. By optimizing the sea denial component of its naval force, the U.S. Navy can then lean into global punishment.

Defeating a Chinese amphibious assault requires destroying many targets, some of which will be well defended; thus, an ideal denial force must be able to generate large weapon salvos while concentrating its fires. Perhaps a decade ago, the only U.S. naval units that could do this were multi-mission platforms massed in carrier strike group formations. Today, however, there are alternatives to high-end platforms for denial-specific naval forces. One of these is the one-way attack unmanned surface vessel, like those used by Ukraine to significant effect in the Black Sea. These systems are hybrids, both vessels and munitions, and as their maximum range improves and resilient command-and-control methods are fielded, they are quickly becoming viable options for holding naval forces, particularly amphibious ships, at risk. Massed, attritable aerial systems like the Low-cost, Uncrewed Combat Attack System could add additional short-range and immediate mass to a denial force component. At the high-end in the undersea, U.S. attack submarines will continue to offer an exquisite, stealthy option for sea denial because they are impervious to China’s anti-ship missiles.

The customized denial force we envision would have less striking power than a force that includes carrier strike group assets, but it could still be enough to make it difficult for the Chinese navy to operate freely around Taiwan. Low-cost sea denial systems have proven remarkably effective recently at stifling maritime traffic in the Black Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. submarine force still retains a qualitative quieting advantage that would allow it to hold high-value surface targets at risk. These capabilities would still sow significant doubt about the success of an invasion operation in the minds of Chinese decisionmakers, which is the hallmark of a deterrence by denial strategy. This keeps the customized denial force we propose in-line with U.S. policymakers’ priorities. With high-end assets preserved for simultaneously conducting economic warfare where China is most vulnerable, Chinese leaders would be even less likely to stomach the potential loss that could result from a decision to invade Taiwan.

Worldwide Maritime Cost Imposition and Customized Regional Denial

A naval strategy of global maritime punishment combined with customized denial aligns well with the U.S. Navy’s latest initiatives. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle’s Fighting Instructions drives toward tailored naval “hedge” forces whose functions are optimized for given threat scenarios. Tasking naval forces as we propose is compatible with this intent. Additionally, the Navy’s proposed Golden Fleet envisions new platforms that pair well with a maritime punishment and customized denial concept.

Even with such future forces, however, the U.S. Navy faces several barriers to shifting its thinking toward a maritime punishment-customized denial concept. The first is an acquisition barrier, as the equipment required for customized sea denial does not yet exist. While the U.S. military is employing low-cost aerial systems and the Navy is investing in attritable vessels capable of one-way attacks, the service still has a ways to go before it fields and bases enough assets in theater to deny a Chinese amphibious landing. The Navy must accelerate its efforts to build the doctrine, organization, personnel pipelines, facilities, and equipment required for operating these systems at the scale required for effective sea denial operations. While this will be challenging, it is possible, given Ukraine’s success at using similar systems with an austere budget.

A second barrier to adopting this concept is cultural resistance. Some in the U.S. Navy will shirk at the idea of prioritizing force preservation because it means the service could be deterred from operating in specific theaters. Yet balancing risk to force with risk to mission is a constant necessity, as recent combat against the Houthis and Iran highlights. Appreciating a fuller spectrum of risk and opportunity could help the Navy balance between risk and opportunity and avoid losing irreplaceable naval assets in extreme risk conditions.

There is also a cultural barrier to the idea of punishment itself. The American way of war has excluded punishment operations for some time, as the U.S. military has perfected stunning precision counterforce strikes, shifting away from deliberately targeting its adversaries’ defense industry and economic arteries. But as the conflict in Iran has shown, precision counterforce has its limits. This, plus the fact that the stakes and potential costs in a great power war are enormous, highlights economic warfare’s potential for inflicting pain on China.

Finally, fear of unintended consequences, particularly nuclear escalation and economic blowback, could deter planners from developing the maritime punishment concept for great power war. Eliminating all escalation risk is impossible, but T. X. Hammes points out that deliberate, transparent escalation in conflict is more likely to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation, and maritime punishment can be calibrated and signaled to ensure it does not come as a surprise that could trigger nuclear use. Concurrently, China’s ongoing nuclear modernization may increase strategic nuclear stability between Beijing and Washington, which potentially reduces concerns about Chinese escalation following conventional attacks against military and economic targets.

Targeting Chinese economic assets abroad would indeed have ripple effects on the world economy, as the crisis today around the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates, and neutral states and U.S. allies that trade with Beijing will certainly bear economic pain from U.S. maritime punishment against China. However, information sharing and close coordination between U.S., allied, and perhaps neutral military planners, diplomats, and economists could help limit the unintended secondary economic impacts. This is why it is crucial that the U.S. military establishment articulate a coherent maritime punishment strategy now as opposed to after a great power conflict erupts, so that allies and partners can understand and anticipate U.S. military action and plan accordingly.

While barriers exist and the risks of escalation are real, combined maritime punishment and denial could strengthen Washington’s deterrent. If China perceives the threat of broad punishment, including via blockade, against a host of its worldwide vulnerabilities as graver than the comparatively limited denial of amphibious operations directly against only Chinese military forces, U.S. naval punishment may bolster deterrence.

Conclusion

A great power war against China represents a stark contrast to decades of U.S. conflict experience fighting for limited aims, with partial means, over marginal interests. Considering a fuller set of options focused on economic punishment offers promise for meeting the unprecedentedly high stakes and likely existential nature of great-power war.

As events in Iran and Ukraine have shown, 21st-century war is likely to be protracted, dirty, and attritional rather than quick, precise, and decisive. Over-optimizing for denial in the western Pacific risks winning a battle only to lose the war, especially if the U.S. Navy defeats an initial amphibious invasion but at a great cost. If U.S. planners fail to consider maritime punishment as a viable option in protracted conflict, it is leaving its most dominant advantage—its global reach—on the table and risking long-term strategic failure. Instead, maritime punishment and customized denial should form the two pillars of U.S. maritime strategy. A U.S. Navy able to impose customized denial, while inflicting protracted punishment on the pacing threat, asymmetrically applies U.S. strengths to Chinese weaknesses.

Greg Malandrino is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and is a retired naval aviator.

Aaron Marchant is an active-duty submarine officer in the U.S. Navy. He is currently serving as the U.S. Navy federal executive fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views or policy of the U.S. Defense Department, the Department of the Navy, nor the U.S. government. No federal endorsement is implied or intended.

Featured image: U.S. forces patrol the Arabian Sea near M/V Touska on April 20, 2026, after firing upon the Iranian-flagged vessel that the U.S. accused of attempting to violate the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports near the Strait of Hormuz. (U.S. Navy photo)