By Bruce Stubbs

I. Introduction

“Whether you build a Navy for high consequence, low probability or low consequence, high probability scenarios — in either case you’re left with an over or undersubscribed force that’s sub-optimized to address specific use cases which may never come to bear.” —Admiral Daryl Caudle, Chief of Naval Operations, 2026

Professor Derek Reveron’s March 2026 CIMSEC essay, “Why America Needs a Four-Ocean Navy,” is the kind of grand strategic thinking the naval profession needs more of — clear, historically grounded, and bracingly ambitious. His diagnosis of the Navy’s central problem is essentially correct: a globally dispersed force trying to do everything with a shrinking number of expensive multi-mission ships is a formula for strategic incoherence and operational exhaustion. On that point, there is little to dispute.

Reveron’s prescription is a two-part proposal: a command and control (C2) organizational redesign and a tailored forces program. On the organizational side, he proposes replacing the Navy’s current theater-oriented fleet structure with four ocean-based fleet commands — the Atlantic Ocean Fleet Command, Pacific Ocean Fleet Command, Arctic Ocean Fleet Command, and Indian Ocean Fleet Command — each with its own commander, budget, and procurement priorities. On the forces side, he proposes tailoring each fleet’s composition to its specific threat environment: frigates, destroyers, attack submarines, maritime patrol aircraft, small surface combatants, unmanned systems, and diesel-electric submarines sourced from allied yards for the Atlantic and Arctic; logistics ships, replenishment oilers, mobile bases, amphibious ships, destroyers, and patrol craft for the Indian Ocean Fleet Command; and the Navy’s most advanced combat-ready platforms — aircraft carriers, nuclear attack submarines, and Aegis-equipped destroyers interoperable with Japan and South Korea — for the Pacific Ocean Fleet Command. To authorize and fund this differentiated structure, he invokes the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940 as his legislative model, proposing a Four-Ocean Navy Act of 2026.

The organizational and forces logic is strategically intuitive. But both elements of Reveron’s proposal rest on a foundation that is missing its first and most essential element: a strategy that disciplines the demand for naval forces before it designs the force to meet that demand. Without that prior strategic work, force design becomes institutional preference rather than strategic requirement — and no organizational architecture survives contact with a political system that treats naval power as its primary instrument of coercive statecraft. Five arguments establish why. Before examining those arguments, however, it is worth establishing what Reveron gets right — because he gets a great deal right, and the critique that follows is stronger for acknowledging it.

II. What Reveron Gets Right — The Strategic Case for Differentiation

In World War II, the Navy that fought in the Pacific was structurally different from the Navy that fought in the Atlantic — not accidentally, but by deliberate strategic design. The Pacific Fleet was organized around fast carriers, submarines, and amphibious assault capability, sustained by a massive mobile logistics force — Service Squadron Ten and its predecessors — across the vast distances of the Pacific. The Atlantic Fleet was organized principally around escort destroyers, anti-submarine warfare vessels, and convoy protection against the German U-boat threat, though it also mounted major amphibious operations in North Africa, Sicily, Salerno, Southern France, and Normandy. One strategy and one force design did not fit both theaters.

It is worth being precise about what the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940 was and was not. Congress authorized an unprecedented industrial expansion to build enough warships for two oceans. It was the strategic situation — the fall of France, the prospect of fighting Germany and Japan simultaneously without European allies — and the Roosevelt administration’s Germany-first policy that determined the different force compositions each theater required. The Act was the industrial means to execute a prior strategic judgment; it was not the strategic judgment itself.

That historical lesson translates directly to Reveron’s present argument. In the Pacific, China’s navy — now the world’s largest by hull count — operates along interior lines within its near seas, supported by land-based anti-ship missiles, a sophisticated air defense envelope, and a clear strategic objective: controlling the first island chain and deterring or defeating American intervention over Taiwan. The tyranny of distance favors China in its own near seas; the United States must project power across thousands of miles of open ocean to contest it. In the Atlantic, Russia’s rebuilt and modernized submarine fleet represents the most capable undersea threat the NATO alliance has faced since the 1980s — and Russian submarines can also launch long-range precision cruise missiles against targets in Europe and against critical military infrastructure along the American eastern seaboard, raising important questions about whether the Atlantic Ocean Fleet Command’s operational concept should be containment in the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap or forward operations in the Barents Sea. In the Indian Ocean, China’s port access agreements stretching from Sri Lanka to Djibouti and Iran’s threats to critical chokepoints create distinct maritime competition and security challenges. In the Western Hemisphere and Caribbean, the challenge is lower-end maritime security that demands small combatants and unmanned systems rather than Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.

CNO Caudle confirmed the operational consequence of failing to match force to threat at the Paris Naval Conference in February 2026: “What I find now is I end up having to use carrier strike groups and amphibious readiness groups in places where I believe I could tailor a force package and be more suited to the threat.” The structural mismatch Reveron identifies is real, and his geographic and threat analysis is sound. The question is not whether his diagnosis is correct. It is. The question is whether his C2 organizational redesign and tailored forces program can be built and sustained without the prior strategic work that makes force design accountable rather than aspirational.

III. Five Arguments Against the Prescription

1. A Strategy-Free Force Design

“While the right organization might not guarantee success, the wrong one will likely guarantee failure.”—President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Reveron’s proposal is a strategy-free force design. He identifies what each ocean fleet would do — anti-submarine warfare and escort in the Atlantic, sea lines of communication protection in the Indian Ocean, power projection in the Pacific. He does not identify what winning looks like against a named adversary, by when, under what theory of victory, or how his proposed C2 structure and tailored forces connect to a national strategy for prevailing. Without those answers, force design becomes preference rather than requirement.

The prime criteria for designing any C2 organization require a clearly defined mission and a stated objective before force design, geographic assignment, or threat analysis can follow. Reveron’s proposal begins with the latter and leaves the former unstated.

Consider the Atlantic Ocean Fleet Command. Reveron proposes diesel-electric submarines sourced from allied yards — a reasonable inference from the Russian submarine threat in the North Atlantic. But Russian submarines can also threaten Europe and the American eastern seaboard with precision cruise missiles. Does the Atlantic Ocean Fleet Command’s mission require containment in the GIUK Gap or offensive operations in the Barents Sea to threaten Russia’s submarine bastions, as the 1980s Maritime Strategy proposed? The answer determines whether the right submarine is a diesel-electric boat, a nuclear attack submarine, or both. Reveron’s proposal cannot answer this question because it has not asked it. The same gap exists in the Pacific: whether the objective is deterrence, denial, or decisive defeat of China’s naval forces determines fleet size, composition, and basing in ways his mission lists do not resolve.

Reveron’s Four-Ocean Navy Act invokes the legislative mechanism of the 1940 Two-Ocean Navy Act without supplying its prerequisite: the strategic assessment that determined what needed to be built and why. Without that assessment, the four constraints that follow cannot be resolved. They can only be compounded.

2. The Demand Signal Is Politically Irresistible

“In case we don’t make a deal, we’ll need it.”— President Donald Trump, on ordering the USS ⁠Gerald R. Ford ⁠Carrier Strike Group to the Middle East, February 2026

Reveron’s organizational redesign assumes that assigning specific forces to specific ocean fleet commands will concentrate those forces on their assigned missions. This assumption has never survived contact with the actual source of naval demand. The demand signal for naval forces is not generated by fleet commanders or strategic plans. It is generated by a President who reaches for his most powerful coercive instrument when a crisis erupts, by combatant commanders who request forces with no incentive to be sparing and no accountability for the readiness costs their requests impose, and by secretaries of defense who approve those requests because the political cost of not having a carrier forward is always calculated as higher than the readiness cost of deploying one. The only person in the chain who understands what saying yes does to long-term readiness is the CNO — and the CNO has no authority to refuse.

Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work documented this pathology in a 2021 USNI Proceedings essay: after the Cold War, the Navy adopted forward presence as its strategic concept and its budget justification, combatant commanders began generating unconstrained demands the Navy felt compelled to satisfy, and the result was a shift from a readiness-centric to a deployment-centric culture and the beginning of a long, inexorable decline in material readiness. Work cited Mackenzie Eaglen’s finding that in 2015 the Navy met only 44 percent of combatant commander requests — and would have needed 150 more ships to satisfy all of them. The Center for Naval Analyses’ 2010 Tipping Point study documented that despite an 18 percent reduction in battle force ships between 1999 and 2009, the number of ships on deployment remained essentially constant, sustained by longer deployments and a doubling of the forward-deployed naval force. The consequence was not abstract: the relentless forward presence tempo contributed to four Seventh Fleet accidents in 2017 that claimed the lives of 17 sailors.

The current administration has demonstrated this dynamic with unusual clarity. The 2025 National Security Strategy explicitly warned against overcommitment and overextension, declaring that prior administrations had defined national interests too broadly. Within fifteen months of that declaration, President Trump had ordered major carrier strike group deployments to four contingencies: Operation Rough Rider against the Houthis in early 2025, at a cost exceeding $1 billion and the loss of two fighter aircraft at sea; Operation Southern Spear in the Caribbean, consuming 38 percent of available Navy warships; the Ford Carrier Strike Group pulled directly from the Caribbean to the Middle East for operations against Iran in February 2026; and as of this writing, a third carrier strike group ordered to enforce a presidential blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. That is the demand signal in its purest form — not a combatant commander’s request, not a strategic plan, but a president reaching for his most powerful coercive instrument because it is available and because the political cost of not having it forward is always higher than the readiness cost of deploying it.

Reveron’s Four-Ocean Navy gives each ocean fleet commander a theater, a headquarters, forces, and — inevitably — a stream of presence requirements with genuine strategic justification behind every one. It does not give the CNO the authority to say no to the combatant commander requests and presidential orders that consume fleet readiness. It does not constrain a president who views carriers as instruments of coercive diplomacy. The Navy today already has numbered fleet commanders generating competing presence demands — and still cannot satisfy them. Reveron’s Four-Ocean Navy replaces them with four ocean fleet commanders, each with broader geographic scope, deeper strategic justification, and stronger institutional standing to press their requirements. The demand does not decrease. Its strategic defensibility increases. As retired Navy Commander Phillip Pournelle documented in a 2017 War on the Rocks analysis, the average gap between consecutive U.S. Navy ship presence periods in the South China Sea ran between 95 and 105 days — and sometimes up to 164 days — illustrating that even in the Pacific, persistent global demand prevents the Navy from maintaining the continuous presence its own strategy requires. The pattern has not merely resisted organizational remedies. It has survived them, grown in spite of them, and exacted lethal costs in the process.

3. Optimization in Peace Creates Rigidity in War

“If the Navy hoped that reductions in the demand signal would give it breathing room to reset the force, its hopes have proved to be false.”— Center for Naval Analyses, The Navy at a Tipping Point, 2010.

Forces optimized for specific theaters in peacetime cannot be rapidly reallocated in general war. The Navy fights globally when it matters most, not theater by theater in neat sequence. Theater-bound forces reduce strategic flexibility precisely when that flexibility is most needed.

The World War II model Reveron invokes illustrates both sides of this argument. Theater differentiation worked because the industrial base produced ships in quantities sufficient to fully equip both fleets simultaneously and retain surplus for redeployment as the strategic situation evolved. The nation produced 1,051 destroyer escorts for the Battle of the Atlantic — enough to equip the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and transfer significant numbers to the U.S. Pacific Fleet as the German threat diminished. Both fleets, though differently optimized, were built to standards that allowed cross-theater redeployment when the strategic situation demanded.

Today, neither condition exists. The threats are no longer geographically bounded: China operates in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean simultaneously; Russia’s submarines operate in the North Atlantic, the Arctic, and the Mediterranean; Iran threatens the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. A strategy that has thought through the redeployment problem — which theaters are primary, which are economy of force, how forces shift as the situation evolves — is the prerequisite for theater-specific optimization. Without it, optimization in peace becomes rigidity in war. Diesel-electric submarines, optimized for the acoustic conditions of the North Atlantic and the GIUK Gap, lack the range and endurance to sustain operations across the Indo-Pacific. If a Pacific Ocean Fleet Command crisis requires every available submarine, the Atlantic Ocean Fleet Command’s diesel boats contribute little. As August Cole and Peter Singer documented in a March 2026 Proceedings analysis, a Pacific conflict risks being lost in part because theater-specialized forces arrive too late, run short of fuel when allied port access is denied, and fail to simultaneously cover the GIUK Gap and surge to the Indo-Pacific. Reveron’s proposal institutionalizes exactly this rigidity. It is, in its operational reality, the Shrinking Status Quo with a new organizational framework — it does not add ships, money, or industrial capacity. It reorganizes existing and insufficient assets into four specialized formations, each weaker than a coherent two-theater strategy requires.

4. You Cannot Build the Fleet You Imagine

“When we run wargames, the red team goes for the Combat Logistics Force every single time.”—Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet, February 2024

The United States lacks the shipbuilding capacity, workforce, and sustained funding to build multiple differentiated fleets given that it is already unable to produce a single adequate one. This is not a marginal constraint. On current trajectories, it is the defining industrial reality of American naval power.

The Heritage Foundation’s 2026 Index of U.S. Military Strength found the Navy operating with more than $1.32 trillion in deferred investment, a fleet rated “weak,” and a force 110 ships below the 400-ship two-war standard. The International Institute for Strategic Studies December 2025 Strategic Comments found that 37 of the 45 battle-force ships under construction face delays, and in 2024 only 41 percent of surface-ship maintenance was completed on time. The GAO documents that despite nearly doubling its shipbuilding budget over two decades, the Navy has not increased its number of ships. Virginia-class submarine Block V production runs at 60 percent of its two-per-year goal. The Columbia-class first boat will be at least a year late. The Pentagon appointed its first-ever submarine “czar” — Vice Admiral Robert Gaucher — in February 2026 specifically to manage those delays. The Navy is managing an industrial crisis in its existing programs. Reveron’s proposal adds new ones.

In fiscal year 2023 the Navy delivered only 7 of the 13 ships required to maintain its annual force structure objective — a failure the GAO attributes to cost overruns, design changes during construction, and immature program baselines that have persisted across multiple ship classes and multiple administrations. The shipbuilding budget has nearly doubled over two decades; the fleet has not grown. Reveron’s Four-Ocean Navy requires adding new ship types on top of a procurement system that cannot deliver the ships it is already contracted to build.

Stephen Biddle and Eric Labs documented in Foreign Affairs in March 2025 that China’s shipbuilding capacity exceeds that of the United States by a factor of more than 200 — and that it now takes eleven years to build an aircraft carrier and nine years to build a nuclear attack submarine or destroyer in the United States. During World War II, an aircraft carrier could be built in just over a year and a submarine in a matter of months; the U.S. fleet grew more than twenty times during that war. Those conditions no longer exist. As Biddle and Labs concluded, if an aircraft carrier were lost in battle today, it may not be replaced for decades — or ever. China, by contrast, is now building carriers and nuclear submarines in roughly half the time American yards require. Reveron’s Four-Ocean Navy requires building new ship types — among them diesel-electric submarines not produced by an American yard since World War II — on top of a shipbuilding base already failing to meet existing commitments.

The industrial base needed to execute this program has been contracting, not expanding. Over the past fifty years, seventeen private shipyards that built ships for the defense industry have either closed or left the sector entirely — leaving the Navy dependent on a handful of yards at precisely the moment demand is rising. Reveron’s proposal requires standing up diesel-electric submarine production at an American yard for the first time since World War II. There is no yard equipped to stand up.

What his Four-Ocean Navy would require on top of this crisis is substantial and, in key respects, cannot realistically be delivered on any strategically relevant timeline. Arctic icebreakers remain Coast Guard multi-mission cutters, not Navy combat vessels, and the lead ship of that program is already six years behind schedule. No administration since President Ronald Reagan has sustained naval investment at the levels the Navy’s own planning documents require. A Four-Ocean Navy Act can be legislated. The appropriations to build it, in a nation that has not sustained naval investment for three decades and lacks a public strategy establishing clear priorities, cannot be assumed.

The Combat Logistics Force (CLF) compounds every other industrial constraint. Secretary Phelan stated the problem plainly in January 2026: “Logistics and auxiliaries form the backbone that sustains operations across distance. A world-class combat fleet without a modern auxiliary force is a fleet that cannot stay in the fight. The logistics tail wags the operational dog and right now our tail is too short for our ambitions.” The Heritage Foundation’s January 2026 Tidal Wave Project found that the entire CLF can sustain a maximum at-sea fuel delivery throughput of approximately 265,000 to 280,000 barrels per day to naval end-users in the Western Pacific — a figure that would degrade rapidly under sustained Chinese strikes.

While twenty John Lewis-class replacement oilers were planned, only four had been delivered as of late 2024 at unit costs exceeding $900 million each. Reveron adds logistics ships as a line item for the Indian Ocean Fleet Command. He does not address the systemic CLF recapitalization that must precede any serious differentiated fleet strategy. As Rear Admiral L.D. McCormick observed in 1944, “Logistics is all of war-making except shooting the guns, releasing the bombs, and firing the torpedoes.” China already knows where that seam is — and in Admiral Paparo’s wargames, they exploit it every time.

5. The Navy Will Over-Specify the Fleet You Design

“We are first and foremost a fighting, sea-going service.”—Admiral Mike Mullen, Chief of Naval Operations, CNO Guidance for 2006.

The Navy’s institutional culture drives every platform toward high-end, multi-mission capability. This dynamic has defeated similar efforts repeatedly — the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the Constellation-class frigate — and it will override any Four-Ocean construct. The reason is worth stating precisely: the Navy pursues exquisite capabilities because it — not Congress, not the Secretary — carries the operational risk when its ships prove inadequate in combat. That logic is not irrational. It is, however, incompatible with the affordable, differentiated fleet Reveron envisions.

The documented pattern is consistent. The LCS was conceived as fast, agile, and modular — affordable in quantity and flexible in mission. Its mission modules never matured, its survivability was questioned, and procurement was truncated. The Constellation-class was based on the proven Fregata Europea Multi-Missione hull — already built, already proven, already affordable. Five years of Navy-driven requirement additions produced a ship with only approximately 15 percent commonality with its predecessor, approaching destroyer cost. It was cancelled in November 2025. Secretary Phelan’s selection of the Legend-class FF(X) — a hull that already exists, from yards that already build it — represents the most honest acknowledgment in a generation that the Navy must accept what the industrial base can produce rather than specify what strategists wish it could. As Phelan stated at the Reagan National Defense Forum: “We are going to take our warfighters’ requirements, translate them into stable, producible designs, and stick with them once they’re set.”

Reveron’s four ocean fleet structures would each face a real and distinct threat environment providing genuine strategic justification for the most capable ships available. The Pacific Ocean Fleet Command faces China’s advanced surface combatants and submarines. The Atlantic Ocean Fleet Command faces Russia’s modernized submarine force. Unlike the Constellation-class, where the strategic justification was always somewhat arguable, each ocean fleet’s requirement growth would be strategically defensible — which makes it harder to stop, not easier.

What stopped it with the Constellation-class was not a change in institutional culture. It was a Secretary of the Navy who intervened personally, cancelled the program, selected the Legend-class, named it a “low-end workhorse” without apology, and reserved Fridays at 5:00 p.m. for change-order accountability. That kind of top-down override is the only thing that has ever worked. It is difficult with one procurement pipeline. With four ocean fleet pipelines — each backed by genuine strategic requirements and championed by a fleet commander carrying real operational risk — it becomes structurally improbable.

The arithmetic is unsparing: U.S. surface combatants currently field roughly 1,344 vertical launch system cells against China’s Type 055 cruisers and Type 052D destroyers alone, which provide approximately 2,944 — a ratio of better than two-to-one before counting PLA Rocket Force land-based anti-ship missiles. Four ocean fleets do not solve this firepower disadvantage. They distribute an already insufficient force across four commands, each demanding the most capable platforms available, none able to close the gap.

IV. Conclusion

Professor Reveron has identified a genuine strategic problem and proposed a historically grounded solution. His geographic differentiation is the correct starting point for the analysis the nation needs. The problem is that he skips that analysis and proceeds directly to organizational and industrial solutions — giving us the Four-Ocean Navy Act before the strategy that would justify it.

The historical model he invokes teaches a different lesson than he draws from it. The Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940 did not create the strategy. It funded one. The Roosevelt administration’s Germany-first decision, the fall of France, and the prospect of simultaneous war against Germany and Japan — those were the prior strategic judgments that determined what each theater needed and what could move between them. The Act was the industrial means to execute that judgment. Four decades later, the Reagan-era Maritime Strategy worked the same way: it named the adversary, defined a theory of victory — taking the fight to Soviet home waters, threatening Soviet ballistic missile submarines, collapsing the Soviet defensive perimeter — and derived the force requirements from that analysis. The 600-ship Navy followed the strategy. Reveron wants to reverse the sequence. He proposes a Four-Ocean Navy Act first and leaves the strategy that would justify it for later. It has never worked in that order.

Reveron is solving the wrong problem at the wrong level. His diagnosis is correct: a globally dispersed force trying to do everything with a shrinking number of expensive multi-mission ships cannot be sustained — but his organizational and industrial prescription does not address why it is being asked to. The causation is a political system in which no President, no Secretary of Defense, and no combatant commander wants to carry the risk of not having a carrier strike group available when a crisis erupts — and in which the CNO, the one person who understands what saying yes does to long-term readiness, has no authority to say no. No force design has ever solved a demand problem where the demand is generated by actors with no incentive to restrain themselves and no accountability for the costs they impose.

The right answer is to first do the strategic work the Maritime Strategy did: name the adversaries in priority order, define the end states in each theater, state the theory of victory, and derive force requirements from that analysis. Until that work is done, no fleet architecture — two oceans or four — can be evaluated as right or wrong. It can only be attempted. And no force design, however well-organized and however well-funded, has ever survived contact with a political system that treats naval power as its primary coercive instrument without first establishing the strategic discipline to govern its use.

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: PHILIPPINE SEA (June 23, 2020) The Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group transits in formation with the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group while conducting dual carrier and airwing operations in the Philippine Sea. (U.S. Navy photo)

By Captain George Galdorisi

The U. S. Navy stands at the precipice of a new era of technology advancement. In an address at a military-industry conference, the then-U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, revealed the Navy’s goal to grow to 500 ships, to include 350 crewed ships and 150 uncrewed maritime vessels. This plan has been dubbed the “hybrid fleet.” In an address at the Reagan National Defense Forum, his successor, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, cited the work of the Navy’s Unmanned Task Force, as well numerous exercises, experiments and demonstrations where uncrewed surface vessels were put in the hands of Sailors and Marines, all designed to advance the journey to achieve the Navy’s hybrid fleet.

More recently, other speeches and interviews addressing the number of uncrewed surface vessels the Navy intends to field culminated in the issuance of the Chief of Naval Operations Force Design 2045, and subsequently the Chief of Naval Operations Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy, both of which call for 350 crewed ships and 150 large uncrewed maritime vessels. These documents provide the clearest indication yet of the Navy’s plans for a future fleet populated by large numbers of uncrewed surface vessels (USVs).

The reason for this commitment to uncrewed maritime vessels is clear. During the height of the Reagan Defense Buildup in the mid-1980s, the U.S. Navy evolved a strategy to build a “600-ship Navy.” That effort resulted in a total number of Navy ships that reached 594 in 1987. That number has declined steadily during the past three-and-one-half decades, and today the Navy has less than half the number of ships than it had then. However, the rapid growth of the technologies that make uncrewed surface vessels increasingly capable and affordable has provided the Navy with a potential way to put more hulls in the water.

However, 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. The Navy has announced plans to procure large numbers of uncrewed systems—especially large and medium uncrewed surface vessels—but a CONOPS, in even the most basic form, has not yet emerged. Additionally, while the composition of the future Navy’s crewed vessels is relatively well understood—based on ships being built and being planned—what those uncrewed maritime vessels will look like, let alone what they will do, has yet to be fully determined.

That said, the Navy has taken several actions to define what uncrewed maritime vessels will do and thus accelerate the journey to have uncrewed platforms populate the fleet. These include publishing an Unmanned Campaign Framework, standing up an Unmanned Task Force, establishing Surface Development Squadron One in San Diego and Surface Vessel Division One in Port Hueneme, CA, and conducting a wide range of exercises, experiments and demonstrations where operators have had the opportunity to evaluate uncrewed maritime vessels.

All these initiatives will serve the Navy well in evolving a convincing CONOPS to describe how these innovative platforms can be leveraged to achieve a hybrid fleet and gain a warfighting advantage over high-end adversaries. Fleshing out how this is to be done will require that the Navy describe how these platforms will get to the operating area where they are needed, as well as what missions they will perform once they arrive there.

A key part of this evolving CONOPS will involve integrating crewed ships and uncrewed maritime vessels. This means that both will need to operate as a synergistic fighting force, not all merely steaming together to perform a mission. This will require leveraging emerging technologies that can connect these platforms in a fashion now called man-machine teaming.

U.S. Navy’s Commitment to Uncrewed Maritime Vessels

 It is beyond the scope of this article to attempt to detail the reasons for the precipitous decline in the number of crewed ships. Indeed, the most recent Navy Long-Range Shipbuilding Plan details 19 ship decommissionings during this fiscal year, more than the number of ships being commissioned. Many—especially the U.S. Congress—have encouraged the Navy to increase the number of ships it fields. Add to this such factors as the increasing cost to build ships, and especially the cost to man these vessels (Seventy percent of the total ownership costs of surface ships is the cost of personnel to operate these vessels over their lifecycle), and the fact that the Navy is literally wearing these ships out more rapidly than anticipated in order to meet the increasing demands of U.S. Combatant Commanders, and it is easy to see why the Navy has difficulty growing the number of crewed surface vessels. 

The rapid growth of the technologies that make uncrewed surface vessels increasingly capable and affordable has provided the Navy with a potential way to put more hulls in the water. To support these goals regarding large numbers of uncrewed maritime platforms populating the Fleet, the Navy established an Unmanned Task Force to provide stewardship for Navy-wide efforts to accelerate efforts regarding uncrewed systems. From all indications, it seems that for the U.S. Navy, the intent is to go all-in on uncrewed maritime vessels and field a hybrid force of crewed ships and uncrewed maritime systems. Importantly, the intent is to have these uncrewed systems work in conjunction with manned platforms and achieve the goal of manned-unmanned teaming.

In a presentation at a Center for Strategic and International Studies/U.S. Naval Institute forum, Vice Admiral Jimmy Pitts, deputy chief of naval operations for warfighting requirements and capabilities (N9), put the focus on uncrewed maritime systems in these terms: “We are leading the way with unmanned systems. We are leveraging the success of the Navy’s unmanned task force as well as the disruptive capabilities office. Our goal is to get unmanned surface system solutions to the Fleet within the next two years.” Admiral Pitts went on to ask the questions: “What will unmanned systems do operationally? How will they get to the war at sea and littoral operating areas? How will they stay in those areas and remain ready for conflict?”

In an article in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Commander, Admiral Samuel Paparo, put the emphasis on scaling robotic and autonomous systems in an operational context, noting:

The CNO is focusing on rapidly developing, fielding, and integrating UxSs. These systems will augment the multi-mission conventional force to increase lethality, sensing, and survivability. Project 33 [part of the Navigation Plan] will allow the Navy to operate in more areas with greater capability. Unmanned systems provide the ability to project fires and effects dynamically, at any time, from multiple axes, and with mass.

Recognizing that the United States is in an “AI arms-race” with our peer adversaries, a report by the Navy’s Science and Technology Board: The Path Forward on Unmanned Systems, advises the Navy to fully leverage AI-technologies, noting: “As they design, develop and acquire new systems, DON will want to take advantage of rapidly changing technology such as AI and autonomy.” This builds on the Navy’s desire to lower total operating costs by moving beyond the current “one UxS, multiple joysticks, multiple operators” paradigm module that exists today.

A Concept of Operations for Getting Uncrewed Surface Vessels to the Fight

The concept of operations proposed is to marry various size surface, subsurface and aerial uncrewed vehicles to perform missions that the U.S. Navy has—and will continue to have—as the Hybrid Fleet evolves. The Navy can use evolving large uncrewed surface vessels as a “truck” to move smaller USVs, UUVs and UAVs into the battle space in the increasingly contested littoral environment. The Navy has several alternatives for this platform:

• The Navy’s program of record LUSV. The Navy envisions these LUSVs as being 200 feet to 300 feet in length and having full load displacements of 1,000 tons to 2,000 tons, which would make them the size of a corvette.
• Unmanned Surface Vessel Division One (USVDIV-1) has stewardship for two surrogates for LUSVs, the Ranger and Nomad, as well as two MUSV prototypes, Sea Hunter and Seahawk. The Navy was sufficiently confident in the operation of its LUSV and MUSV prototypes to deploy them to a recent international Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise.
• The MARTAC T82 Leviathan, a scaled-up version of the T38 Devil Ray, is an MUSV capable of either carrying an approximately 35,000-pound payload or, alternatively, carrying smaller craft and launching them toward the objective area.

While there are a plethora of important Navy missions this integrated combination of uncrewed platforms can accomplish, this article will focus on two: intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and mine countermeasures (MCM). There are many large, medium, small and ultra-small uncrewed systems that can be adopted for these missions. The technical challenge remains that they must be designed to ensure that the multiple sized UxSs associated with these missions can be adapted to work together in a common mission goal. 

Rather than speaking in hypotheticals as to how uncrewed vessels might be employed for these two missions, this article will offer concrete examples, using COTS uncrewed systems that have been employed in recent Navy and Marine Corps events. In each case, these systems not only demonstrated mission accomplishment, but also the hull, mechanical and electrical (HME) attributes and maturity that Congress is demanding.

While there are a wide range of medium uncrewed surface vessels (MUSVs) that can potentially meet the U.S. Navy’s needs, there are three that are furthest along in the development cycle. These MUSVs cover a range of sizes, hull types and capabilities. They are:

• The Leidos Sea Hunter is the largest of the three. The Sea Hunter is a 132-foot-long trimaran (a central hull with two outriggers). 
• The Textron monohull Common Unmanned Surface Vessel (CUSV), now renamed MCM-USV, features a modular, open architecture design.
• The Maritime Tactical Systems Inc. (MARTAC), catamaran hull uncrewed surface vessels (USV) include the Devil Ray T24 and T38 craft. The two Devil Ray USVs, along with their smaller MANTAS T12 USV, all feature a modular and open architecture design. 

All of these MUSVs are viable candidates to be part of an integrated uncrewed solution CONOPS. I will use the MANTAS, Devil Ray and Leviathan craft for a number of reasons. First, they come in different sizes with the same HME attributes. Second, the Sea Hunter is simply too large to fit into the LUSVs the Navy is currently considering. Third, the MCM-USV is the MUSV of choice for the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Mine-Countermeasures Mission Package, and all MCM-USVs scheduled to be procured are committed to this program.

If the U.S. Navy wants to keep its multi-billion-dollar capital ships out of harm’s way, it will need to surge uncrewed maritime vessels into the contested battlespace while its crewed ships stay out of range of adversary anti-access (A2/AD) systems. This will require robust command and control systems,

Depending on the size that is ultimately procured, the LUSV can carry several T38 Devil Ray uncrewed surface vessels and deliver them, largely covertly, to a point near the intended area of operations. The T38 can then be sent independently to perform the ISR mission, or alternatively, can launch one or more T12 MANTAS USVs to perform that mission. Building on work conducted by the Navy laboratory community and sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, the T38 or T12 will have the ability to launch unmanned aerial vessels to conduct overhead ISR. 

For the MCM mission, the LUSV can deliver several T38s equipped with mine-hunting and mine-clearing systems (all of which are COTS platforms tested extensively in Navy exercises). These vessels can then undertake the “dull, dirty and dangerous” work previously conducted by Sailors who had to operate in the minefield. Given the large mine inventory of peer and near-peer adversaries, this methodology may well be the only way to clear mines safely.

Operational Scenario for an Integrated Crewed-Uncrewed Mission

This scenario and CONOPS are built around an Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG) that is underway in the Western Pacific. The ESG is on routine patrol five hundred nautical miles from the nearest landfall. An incident occurs in their operating area and the strike group is requested to (1) obtain reconnaissance of a near-shore littoral area, and (2) determine if the entrance to a specific bay has been mined to prevent ingress. The littoral coastline covers two hundred nautical miles. This area must be reconnoitered within twenty-four hours without the use of air assets.

Command staff decides to dispatch the three LUSVs for the mission. Two LUSVs are each configured with four T38-ISR craft and the third LUSV is configured with four T38-MCM vessels. The single supervisory control station for the three LUSVs is manned in the mothership.

The three LUSV depart the strike group steaming together in a preset autonomous pattern for two hundred and fifty nautical miles to a waypoint that is central to the two hundred nautical mile ISR scan area, two hundred and fifty nautical miles from the shore. At this waypoint, the LUSV will stop and dispatch the smaller T38 craft and then wait at this location for their return. Steaming at a cruise speed of twenty-five knots, the waypoint is reached in about ten hours.

• Two T38-ISR craft are launched from each of the two LUSVs. The autonomous mission previously downloaded specifies a waypoint location along the coast for each of the four craft. These waypoints are fifty nautical miles apart from each other, indicating that each of the four T38 craft will have an ISR mission of fifty nautical miles to cover.
• Two T38-MCM craft are launched from the third LUSV. The autonomous mission previously downloaded has them transit independently along different routes to two independent waypoints just offshore of the suspected mine presence area where they will commence mine-like object detection operations.
• In this manner, each of the six craft will transit independently and autonomously to their next waypoint which will be their mission execution starting point.
• Transit from the LUSV launch point, depending on route, will be about two hundred and fifty to three hundred nautical miles to their near-shore waypoints. Transit will be at seventy to eighty knots to their mission start waypoint near the coast. Transit time is between four and five hours.
• The plan is for each of the T38-ISR craft to complete their ISR scan in four to five hours each and for the two T38-MCM craft to jointly scan the bottom and the water column for the presence of mine-like objects in four to five hours at a scan speed of six to eight knots.

The MANTAS and Devil Ray craft transit to the objective area and conduct their ISR and MCM missions. The timeline for the entire mission is as follows:

• LUSV detach strike group to T38 launch point and launch six T38: – 10-12 hours.
• T38 transit from launch point to mission ISR/MCM start waypoints: – 4-5 hours.
• ISR Mission and MCM mission time from start to complete: – 4-5 hours.
• T38 transit from mission completion point back to LUSV for recovery: – 4-5 hours.
• LUSV recover T38s and return to strike group formation – 10-12 hours.

Even with the ESG five hundred nautical miles from shore, the strike group commander has the results of the ISR and MCM scan of the shoreline littoral area within approximately twenty-four hours after the departure of the LUSVs from the strike group. 

A Bright Future for Uncrewed Surface Vessels

This is not a platform-specific solution, but rather a concept. When Navy operators see a capability with different size uncrewed COTS platforms in the water successfully performing the missions presented in this article, they will likely press industry to produce even more-capable platforms to perform these tasks. This, in turn, will enable the Navy to field a capable Hybrid Fleet that will be the Navy’s Future Force.

While evolutionary in nature, this disruptive capability delivered using emerging technologies can provide the U.S. Navy with near-term solutions to vexing operational challenges, while demonstrating to a skeptical Congress that the Navy does have a concept-of-operations for the uncrewed systems it wants to procure. 

Captain George Galdorisi (U.S. Navy – retired) 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 for five years. 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 New York Times bestsellers. His most recent novel, Fire and Ice, was eerily prescient as it foresaw Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Featured Image: T38 Devil Ray USV (Martac photo)