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). 

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)

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)