By Greg Malandrino and Aaron Marchant

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

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

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

Why Singular Emphasis on Denial Is Problematic

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

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

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

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

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

Punishment as a Force Employment Option for High-End Platforms

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

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

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

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

Dialing in To Defend Taiwan: Customized Denial

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

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

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

Worldwide Maritime Cost Imposition and Customized Regional Denial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Derek S. Reveron

Rethinking America’s Strategic Map

When Americans think about how the United States engages the world, we instinctively reach for maps. Our government bureaucracies are organized this way: regional bureaus at the State Department, unified commands at the Department of Defense, and component commands within the Navy. We have neatly drawn boundaries that shape policy debates, strategy, and force development decisions.¹

But the world does not organize itself along U.S. bureaucratic seams. Commerce, data, and adversaries cut across regions. Revising the Unified Command Plan (the classified document that assigns missions, responsibilities, and geographic areas to U.S. combatant commands), empowering commands as global integrators, or giving commands global authorities does not change reality. Warships, commercial shipping, and fishing fleets operate across oceans. Yet, warships face different threats across different regions and are assigned different missions. The modern Caribbean is relatively benign with a focus on targeting small fast craft, the Indian Ocean can be non-permissive with a focus on major combat operations, and the Mediterranean is close to allies with ships focused on high-end ballistic missile defense and land attack.

For part of the twentieth century, the United States solved this problem by building what Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 called a “two-ocean Navy,” providing enough ships to operate within the Atlantic and the Pacific.² Beginning in the 1930s and culminating in 1940, Congress passed the Two-Ocean Navy Act, which authorized an unprecedented expansion of shipyards that enabled the Navy to innovate and scale up to equip a fleet for each ocean.³ While it was a historically large naval expansion, it also provides a contemporary lens to inform fleet design.

Given the scope of national security today, the U.S. cannot afford to build enough warships, the industrial base could not build said warships even if resources were available, and a globe-oriented fleet would be inadequate. Multi-purpose ships ready to operate everywhere leads to overmatch when destroyers interdict dhows in the Gulf of Aden or drug boats in the Caribbean and undermatch when contemplating the defense of Taiwan. Simply, today’s approach to fleet design does not work. A globally dispersed Navy deprives the Pacific Ocean region of needed forces while increasing strain on ships and crews, reducing service life, and undermining needed investment in the Pacific theater that defines future high-end naval warfare.

History points toward a solution but reverting to a two-ocean fleet is not adequate. The Indian Ocean has emerged as a third, distinct ocean of operations and the Arctic Ocean is a growing fourth ocean.⁴ Further, the challenges in the Atlantic and the Pacific are not the same. It is time to expand our map and update our concept of the prevailing strategic framework for naval power. A four-ocean Navy organized around the Atlantic, Arctic, Indian, and Pacific oceans offers a clearer way to think about America’s role in the world, aligns missions with geography, takes advantage of the partner network that can contribute to U.S. national security, clarifies force design requirements, and buys the right kinds of ships optimized for each theater.

Why an Ocean Lens?

Oceans are the connective tissue of the international system. The global economy floats on tankers and moves by container, pulses through fiber optic cables laid on the seafloor, and depends on freedom of navigation across the oceans. Hydrocarbons, rare earths, and manufactured goods cross oceans daily. The coffee we drink, the shoes we wear, and the computers we use arrive by sea.

Oceans are also the medium through which rivals project power. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has an unmistakably maritime dimension with port access across the Indian Ocean to the Horn of Africa, creating a new maritime silk road.⁵ China and Russia seek access routes through the Arctic to link the Atlantic and Pacific. Iran and non-state actors routinely threaten shipping transiting critical maritime chokepoints affecting Indian Ocean commerce.

However, American bureaucracies and strategies often obscure these realities. The Indian Ocean, for example, is carved up among three different combatant commands and multiple State Department bureaus. No single U.S. commander or policymaker has full responsibility. Ships chop across theaters, but the planners inadvertently create blind spots and miss opportunities. By contrast, an oceanic lens forces planners to look at connectivity through maritime missions rather than administrative boundaries.

An oceanic lens provides clarity and simplicity since it reflects how the world works. It is also a way to optimize the fleet for the missions it conducts since equipping the Navy with enough high-end, multi-purpose ships has proven to be impossible. For example, using an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer for every mission, regardless of threat environment, creates costly inefficiencies. Deploying one of the Navy’s most advanced warships to conduct counter-drug patrols in the benign Caribbean, maritime security operations in the permissive Mediterranean, and air defense missions in the contested Indian Ocean misaligns capabilities and requirements.

The most sophisticated warships are not needed everywhere; using them for low-threat operations accelerates wear, drains resources, and reduces availability for missions where their advanced systems are essential. Unmanned systems and partnering with capable allies can perform many of the lower-end tasks more effectively and at a far lower cost. Reframing our force design through the lens of a four-ocean Navy clarifies where to concentrate high-end capabilities and sets priorities for industry that has not been able to adapt when futuristic warships do not align with an assumed future.

Warship acquisition is a wager on the character of future operations, and when strategic assumptions shift, production plans fail. The Seawolf-class submarine was designed for sustained Cold War undersea competition, but the Soviet collapse reduced the program to three hulls. The Zumwalt-class destroyer, built around expectations of land-attack dominance and technological overmatch, fell from thirty-two planned ships to three amid cost growth and changing operational priorities. The Littoral Combat Ship reflected post-9/11 assumptions about modularity and irregular warfare in littoral environments, yet survivability concerns led to truncated procurement and decommissioning. The Constellation-class frigate was also cancelled in favor of “more readily producible ships.”⁶

The Missions of a Four-Ocean Navy

A four-ocean Navy begins with understanding missions the President expects the Navy to conduct. Each ocean represents a distinct strategic environment with its own geography, chokepoints, threats, and partner networks. The Atlantic and Arctic Oceans are primarily anti-submarine warfare (ASW), missile defense, and maritime security theaters to protect the homeland. The Indian Ocean is primarily a sea lines of communication (SLOC) protection and maritime interdiction theater to secure global trade, and land attack in support of U.S. Central Command. The Pacific Ocean is primarily a combined operations and power projection theater to deter or defeat Chinese and North Korean aggression.

Defending the Homeland

The Atlantic Ocean links the United States to its European allies. During the Cold War, U.S. naval strategy emphasized transatlantic reinforcement through convoys. Anti-submarine warfare was a critical Navy mission to protect convoys and to check Soviet submarines. ASW capabilities atrophied in the wake of Soviet collapse, but Russia’s submarine fleet is back and represents a formidable challenge in the North Atlantic.⁷ The Arctic also opens new avenues for Russia to pressure North America, which helps explain the administration’s interest in stronger links with allies Denmark and Canada.

However, the Atlantic is not just about Europe and Russia. To the south, the Caribbean and South Atlantic generate unique missions. The Navy and Coast Guard patrol the Caribbean to disrupt illicit trafficking networks that move drugs, weapons, and people. These missions support partner governments in Central America and the Caribbean who have a shared interest in reducing illicit trafficking. In the South Atlantic, the Navy works with its Brazilian, Argentine, and other partners to build maritime capacity, deter illegal fishing and trafficking, and reinforce hemispheric stability.

With these missions in mind, the Atlantic Fleet requires ships specialized for ASW and escort missions as well as smaller ships for maritime interdiction operations. Frigates, destroyers, and attack submarines matter most in the North Atlantic and can take advantage of American and Canadian ports for logistics. Maritime patrol aircraft complement these surface and subsurface forces. The Arctic requires persistent presence, cold-weather hardening, and under-ice capabilities.

For the Caribbean and South Atlantic, small surface combatants and unmanned systems provide affordable and effective presence that can interface with partners who operate similar platforms. Given the friendly logistics environment, cheaper diesel submarines can also operate in the Western Hemisphere, freeing up more expensive nuclear submarines for the Pacific, and can be sourced from U.S. allies who excel in building modern diesel-electric submarines.⁸

Securing the Arteries of Global Trade

The Indian Ocean is busy maritime space.⁹ It carries energy from the Arabian Gulf to Asia and manufactured goods from Asia to Europe. It is also the ocean where China’s maritime presence is expanding most rapidly, with port agreements stretching from Sri Lanka to East Africa.¹⁰ China’s state-owned enterprises have been building commercial connections in the Middle East and Africa with its Navy following its trade.

The Indian Ocean is also a frequent site of natural disasters and humanitarian crises. Amphibious ships and logistics vessels are uniquely capable of delivering rapid aid, supporting stability, and showcasing American goodwill. The demise of the Agency of International Development portends increased calls for Navy assistance as these missions reinforce alliances and prevent adversaries from filling vacuums when governments teeter.

The Indian Ocean Fleet requires ships optimized for endurance, presence, and rapid response. Logistics ships, replenishment oilers, and mobile bases are essential to support power projection in the Middle East. Amphibious ships, destroyers, and patrol craft support diverse missions from humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HA/DR) to counter-piracy. Coalition operations with India, Australia, France, and Gulf states amplify presence.

Deterring a Peer Competitor with Allied Multipliers

The Pacific Ocean remains the most likely theater for high-end naval warfare. For the last eighty years, the Navy has deterred major war in this region. While tensions subsided in the 1990s, China’s navy is now the largest in the world and supports an aggressive national security policy. Beijing is expanding its reach into the South China Sea and pressing its claims against U.S. allies. Taiwan remains the most acute flashpoint, but Chinese harassment of Japan and the Philippines also create demands on the Navy. North Korea adds volatility to the region, and Russia maintains a Pacific fleet presence able to reinforce the PLA Navy.

To be sure, the Pacific Ocean Fleet requires the Navy’s most advanced and combat-ready platforms. Aircraft carriers remain indispensable for forward strike and achieving air superiority when needed. Nuclear attack submarines provide unique capabilities, and as William Toti emphasized, “you can’t win without (more) submarines.”¹¹ Amphibious assault ships also enable Marine operations, which are fielding missile systems to hold PLAN assets at risk. This forward posture maximizes combat power where it matters most—maintaining balance against China’s growing maritime capabilities.

Crucially, the United States is not alone in this mission. Japan and South Korea field their own Aegis-equipped destroyers, which are interoperable with U.S. platforms. This creates a force multiplier of shared sensors, integrated missile defense networks, and combined fleet operations. Together, the allies can pool capabilities to defend against North Korean and Chinese missiles, share intelligence to track and engage China’s surface ships, and coordinate operations across the region. This allied integration makes the Pacific Ocean Fleet stronger than the sum of its parts.

A central virtue of the four-ocean Navy is that it saves money while improving readiness by considering operating environments that vary from the relatively benign Caribbean to the potentially hostile Pacific. This conceptual lens aligns missions and force structure, allocates resources efficiently, and takes advantage of allies’ support and technology. Not every mission requires a $13-billion aircraft carrier and not every region needs a $4.5 billion nuclear submarine. By tailoring fleets to ocean missions, we can prioritize platforms and crews for deployment to one of four oceans. In short, the four-ocean Navy avoids the trap of being everywhere with everything while preserving global reach.

Congress and the Four-Ocean Navy Act of 2026

Congress is an essential partner in Navy force development through appropriations and promotes continuity across administrations through members’ longevity and their staffs. In 1940, Congress passed the Two-Ocean Navy Act with remarkable strategic foresight that delivered the Navy that won World War II. Today, we face a similar inflection point. Just as 1940 demanded a new framework, the 250th anniversary of independence in 2026 offers an opportunity to legislate a Four-Ocean Navy Act. Congress can reaffirm America’s global maritime leadership by anchoring naval strategy in all four oceans. By disaggregating the global Navy concept to four oceans, it also offers a fair chance to build fleets that can meet mission requirements.

Such an act would:

• Formally recognize the Atlantic, Arctic, Indian, and Pacific as co-equal theaters of American naval strategy.
• Direct the Department of Navy to structure fleets, budgets, and procurement with oceanic missions in mind.
• Authorize balanced procurement of frigates and diesel-electric submarines for the Atlantic Ocean, icebreakers and underwater capabilities for the Arctic, amphibious and logistics ships for the Indian Ocean, and sustained investment in carriers and nuclear submarines for the Pacific Ocean.
• Signal to allies and adversaries that the US intends to remain the world’s leading maritime power through optimized ships it can build and Sailors it can train.

In short, a Four-Ocean Navy Act would demonstrate that America’s 250th birthday is not only about reflecting on history, but about charting a confident course for the next century. As BJ Armstrong wrote, “U.S. naval power—and its strength relative to other nations or navies—is instead a choice to be made by the American people through the actions of their elected representatives.”¹² This is a maritime century, but to thrive in it, America must choose to participate.

America’s strategic map must change. The two-ocean Navy of the past secured victory in World War II and sustained deterrence preventing great power conflict throughout the Cold War. With the inability to field high-end, multipurpose warships globally, we need a four-ocean Navy that recognizes the Atlantic, Arctic, Indian, and Pacific as distinct theaters with unique requirements. This is a call for clarity: matching missions to oceans and tailoring warships with crews to oceans.

Derek S. Reveron is Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and Faculty Affiliate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense or its components, to include the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College. 

References

1. Gvosdev, Nikolas K. and Derek S. Reveron, “Geography, Bureaucracy, and National Security: The New Map,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, July 20, 2023.

2. Curzon, Daniel, Eric Perinovic, Tyler Pitrof, and Shawn Woodford, Navy Force Planning and Design, 1933-2019, Naval History and Heritage Command, 2025.

3. Symonds, Craig L., American Naval History: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (New York, 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic, 24 May 2018).

4. Baruah, Darshana M. The Contest for the Indian Ocean: And the Making of a New World Order. Yale University Press, 2024.

5. Funaiole, Michael P. and Jonathan E. Hillman, “China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative: Economic Drivers and Challenges,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), April 2, 2018

6. Sam LaGrone,” Navy Cancels Constellation-class Frigate Program, Considering New Small Surface Combatants,” November 25, 2025. https://news.usni.org/2025/11/25/navy-cancels-constellation-class-frigate-program-considering-new-small-surface-combatants

7. Foggo III, James, and Alarik Fritz. 2016. “The Fourth Battle of the Atlantic.” United States Naval Institute. Proceedings 142 (6): 18.

8. Spector, Jordan A. “The Path to a Bigger Submarine Fleet Includes Diesels.” Proceedings 151, no. 10, October 2025.

9. Shrikhande, Sudarshan. 2025. “Another Turbulent Year in the Indian Ocean.” United States Naval Institute. Proceedings 151 (5): 1.

10. Kardon, Isaac (2021) “Research & Debate—Pier Competitor: Testimony on China’s Global Ports,” Naval War College Review: Vol. 74: No. 1, Article 11.

11. Toti, William. 2023. “You Can’t Win Without (More) Submarines.” United States Naval Institute. Proceedings 149 (12).

12. Armstrong, Benjamin. 2021. “American Naval Dominance Is Not a Birthright.” United States Naval Institute. Proceedings 147 (9).

Featured Image: USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) transits the Atlantic Ocean in its final rounds of exercises prior to deployment, Feb. 15, 2026. (U.S. Navy photo)

By Steve Brock and Hunter Stires

With shipping and shipbuilding receiving high-level political and diplomatic attention across two administrations after decades of neglect, the United States has the chance to realize a much-needed maritime revival. Having initiated a change in course from the past forty years of stagnation, Washington should double down on its winning bipartisan strategy to build maritime power through allied investments in U.S. shipping and shipbuilding—and keep off the rocks and shoals that could run the nascent American maritime renaissance aground.

History demonstrates that no great naval power has long endured without also being a great commercial maritime power. Yet for the past four decades, America has attempted to defy this maxim, starting in 1981 with the choice to cut off government support for American commercial shipping and shipbuilding, allowing those industries to wither at home and ultimately move abroad. Since that decision, successive administrations of both parties have lulled themselves into the false reassurance that in this latest era of globalization the United States did not need a vibrant commercial maritime industry, and that America would still be able to affordably field a dominant Navy without one. Similarly, the outcome of the Cold War seemed to have rendered a conclusive verdict that the American-style capitalist economy—one characterized by robust marketplace competition—was superior to the Soviet-style planned economy. Yet starting with the infamous “Last Supper” in 1993, the U.S. government and industry have effectively engineered competition out of the defense industrial base. Successive administrations of both parties have since assured themselves that real competition is unnecessary and even counterproductive to national defense, and that monopolies across most individual ship classes, aircraft types, and weapon systems would in fact be more efficient for the government to manage than a competitive business environment with multiple rival vendors.

It is now clear that these two calculations were wrong. The past thirty years of ballooning costs and delays in Navy shipbuilding programs, the growing gaps in the U.S. Merchant Marine’s capacity to support wartime contingencies, and the domestic industrial base’s inability to affordably recapitalize the reserve sealift fleet all point to the same conclusion. The twin experiments in attempting to field a blue water Navy without a commercial maritime industry to support it, and concurrently eliminating competition from the defense procurement landscape, have failed. As Colin Gray writes, “tactical mistakes may kill you today, while operational error may prove fatal in days or perhaps weeks…. A strategic error in statecraft or strategy may take years to reveal itself in its full horror.” Today the United States is experiencing the compounding consequences of two such strategic errors committed decades ago.

Over the same period that the sinews of American seapower have atrophied, China has systematically expanded its own seapower, creating globally dominant, state-backed commercial shipping and shipbuilding industries. China has used this industrial base to rapidly build the People’s Liberation Army Navy from humble coastal origins into a blue water force capable of credibly threatening the U.S. Navy at sea. Those concerned by China’s rapidly expanding navy should be even more alarmed by its ability to set the terms for the global movement of goods in peacetime or crisis using its levers in global maritime finance, shipbuilding, shipping, bunkering, port ownership, and shoreside logistics.

Washington’s decades-long run of political seablindness has not changed America’s immutable geographic relationship to the world’s oceans. The United States remains inherently dependent on the sea for political, economic, and military access to the world’s population and markets, the overwhelming majority of which reside outside North America. China’s emergence as a full spectrum maritime power – and not just a naval power – means that the United States can no longer indulge its longstanding strategic errors to mortgage its maritime future.

To address this critical national strategic vulnerability, the authors formulated and began implementing under the leadership of Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro an innovative new strategy to build and apply American seapower. This approach, now known as Maritime Statecraft, begins from the recognition that naval shipbuilding, commercial shipbuilding, and commercial shipping are not distinct problem sets as they have been treated for many years, but are in fact inextricably linked parts of a national seapower ecosystem. Many of the solutions to the Navy’s most pressing challenges lie outside the Department’s own lifelines, demanding a creative, multi-pronged approach to solve them, leveraging the unique position of the Secretary of the Navy to drive results only possible through collaboration at the highest levels of government and industry. Maritime Statecraft has proven durable, with notable bipartisan continuity through the transition into the new administration.

From the perspective of naval shipbuilding, the primary objective of the Maritime Statecraft strategy is to disrupt the current broken paradigm by reinjecting real competition and best-in-class practices into the U.S. naval shipbuilding marketplace. The most effective way of doing this is to attract new market entrants in the form of world-class shipbuilders from overseas allies, incentivizing these firms to open modern dual-use commercial and naval shipyards in the United States. Introducing the integrated naval and commercial model which has proven so successful abroad necessitates creating demand among global shipping firms for U.S.-built commercial ships. Accordingly, the architects of the Maritime Statecraft strategy worked extensively with partners across the Executive Branch and in Congress to broaden government support of U.S. commercial shipping and shipbuilding on the basis of economic security rather than strictly national defense, structuring this government support to make the U.S. shipbuilding industry and the U.S. Merchant Marine economically competitive on the open international market. This expanded approach will create a broader market demand and order volume that will increase overall capacity and health across the industrial base and design enterprise. Re-creating a vibrant commercial shipbuilding industry in America will accrue significant direct benefits to the Navy, driving long term improvement and lower costs across the Naval shipbuilding portfolio. This will create an opening to invigorate and reimagine key alliance relationships at a moment of strain, offering new opportunities to strengthen the common defense while rebalancing the burdens of its maintenance to a more politically sustainable equilibrium.

Standing Into Danger

In a healthy seapower ecosystem, a national navy draws on a relatively small portion of a nation’s overall physical and human maritime resources—shipyards, suppliers, industry workers, and mariners. The majority of those resources are typically devoted to building prosperity through domestic and overseas commerce, creating both the taxable wealth and competitive industrial base that also pays for and builds the Navy. From the Navy’s perspective, such a healthy system enables construction and maintenance of warships at much lower cost, since shipyards and suppliers would distribute their overhead costs to both civilian and government customers, as opposed to just the government.

At present, the American seapower ecosystem is out of balance. The U.S. Navy is the nation’s primary buyer of large ships, with a fleet of 297 battle force warships plus another 130 Military Sealift Command auxiliaries. By contrast, the U.S. Merchant Marine has just 177 commercial ships out of more than 60,000 merchant ships on the world’s oceans today. This reduces the United States to being a strictly naval power and a maritime consumer—dependent on foreign-built and foreign-controlled commercial fleets to move American trade.

A key factor in creating these conditions has been the elimination of internationally competitive U.S.-built and U.S.-flagged commercial shipping over the past forty years. While it has long been more expensive to build commercial ships in the United States and operate them under the U.S. flag, for most of the 20^th century an interlocking system of imperfect but intelligent government interventions in the commercial shipping and shipbuilding sectors served to fully offset the higher cost of U.S. ships and mariners relative to foreign counterparts, either through construction and operational differentials in peacetime, or direct government construction of standardized commercial ships during the World Wars. These measures enabled U.S. shipping companies to compete for cargo on the international market at prevailing rates.

Unfortunately, flaws in the subsidy system’s structure, particularly its lack of competitive incentives and its reliance on inaccurate government estimates of foreign ship construction and operating costs, contributed to a loss of effectiveness, and eventually a collapse in political support for the program. In 1981, the Reagan Administration repealed the Operational Differential Subsidy and defunded the Construction Differential Subsidy under the belief that a free-market approach would produce better results and inspire other nations to drop their subsidies. No other country followed suit, and so this policy choice led most of the U.S. commercial shipping sector to either close or move abroad, particularly to countries which continued subsidizing their shipping and shipbuilding industries. This in turn resulted in a wholesale collapse of demand for the U.S. shipbuilding industry, apart from the naval and relatively small domestic commercial Jones Act markets.

While the Clinton Administration created the Maritime Security Program (MSP) in the 1990s to provide a stopgap source of militarily useful commercial sealift in international trade, this program has proved a poor substitute for the prior method of fostering development of a healthy U.S. Merchant Marine. MSP supports a hodgepodge of used, foreign-built ships lacking fleetwide standardization, with the fleet sized to support strictly military requirements for a 1990s-era regional contingency in a permissive maritime environment. MSP’s model of a partial operational subsidy supplemented in peacetime by government preference cargo effectively caps the size of the U.S.-flag merchant fleet at however many ships U.S. government preference and military cargo can economically support in peacetime. It does not factor in the larger requirements for assured sealift for U.S. economic security in either peace or war. MSP is not structured to incentivize U.S. shipping firms to become more competitive over time and, most damaging of all, does nothing to create demand for a competitive U.S. shipbuilding industry.

The resulting situation presents a number of troubling implications for Navy shipbuilding. To begin with, the Navy bears the brunt of virtually all the overhead costs of the shipyards that build and maintain warships, since the Navy is those companies’ primary, if not only customer. Accordingly, the remaining naval-focused shipbuilding industry has sized itself based on what the Navy’s peacetime steady-state procurement budget can economically support. As a result, even though threat-informed studies and Congress consistently signal support for a bigger Navy, the national industrial base lacks the commercial capacity that a healthier ecosystem would be able to draw upon to surge to meet an influx of new naval demand.

The loss of the commercial shipbuilding sector has been compounded by the consolidation of the defense industrial base after the Cold War. These two developments have had the combined effect of all but eliminating real competition between shipyards. The U.S. naval shipbuilding sector has become an uncompetitive series of monopoly-monopsony relationships, with only one yard building a given ship class (the sole exceptions being destroyers and attack submarines, which have duopolies) and the U.S. government as their sole customer. This lack of competition allows shipyards to drive up the prices they charge the Navy while also reducing those companies’ incentives to find efficiencies or make needed capital investments, such as facility modernization.

“We Must Bring Our Shipbuilding Allies to us”

By contrast, South Korean and Japanese yards are engaged in a commercial deathmatch with China’s state-backed juggernaut for control of the global commercial shipbuilding market. This unrelenting competitive environment forces yards to invest in state-of-the-art technology and production processes. Intense commercial competition has compelled such a high degree of effectiveness that these three countries now produce 90 percent of the world’s commercial ships. Importantly, their broad international customer bases and integrated naval and commercial facilities allow Chinese, South Korean, and Japanese shipbuilders to effectively subsidize their national naval production with the profits from their commercial work, increasing the purchasing power of their respective national navies. Using their robust dual-use yards, Korean and Japanese shipbuilders are able to construct high-end Aegis surface combatants of respected quality for a fraction of the cost of U.S. equivalents.

The competition in Asia has technological implications as well. Many U.S. shipyards are decades behind the global technological standard set by Korean and Japanese shipbuilders, which was clearly evidenced during a firsthand visit to the facilities of HD Hyundai and Hanwha Ocean by Secretary Del Toro in February 2024. The highly automated shipbuilding and sea trial technologies in use at these facilities are more advanced than anything now in operation in the United States. Unlike their American counterparts, these yards also consistently make substantial, self-funded investments in both production processes and worker quality of life, including housing and training facilities for employees and the crews of visiting ships. Both Hyundai and Hanwha reported near-perfect on-time performance—even during COVID—and can tell customers when their ships will be delivered to the day. This is a far cry from the PowerPoint slides that American shipbuilders often present in the Pentagon, explaining that a given vessel is going to be somewhere between one and three years late.

Given the cutthroat competition among shipbuilders in Asia and the lack of a competitive shipbuilding marketplace in the United States, this result should be unsurprising. At its best, capitalism demands that firms continually invest in innovation and adaptation to find a new competitive edge over their opponents in a Darwinian evolutionary arms race. In the U.S. shipbuilding sector, that process of rivalry, adaptation, and renewal has mostly ground to a halt. U.S. shipbuilders demand the government pay for new infrastructure investments and workforce salary increases—while too often investing their profits into stock buybacks and dividends rather than into improving their core businesses, which are falling behind on their contractual obligations to the Navy. Building the world’s best warships in 1960s-era shipyards is unaffordable and slow, and is unacceptable if the United States is to prevail in the increasingly tense geopolitical competition for the 21^st century.

It should be emphasized that outsourcing U.S. government shipbuilding overseas remains—and should remain—a non-starter. Beyond the legal requirement and political imperative to build U.S. government ships in U.S. shipyards, outsourcing new construction to yards in East Asia would be strategic malpractice, not least because the Korean and Japanese shipyards capable of producing U.S.-equivalent combatants are ranged by thousands of Chinese short and medium range missiles. In the course of the implementation of the Maritime Statecraft strategy, Asian shipbuilders and their customers around the world have increasingly come to recognize the value of “defense in depth” and geostrategic diversification of ship production and repair provided by the strategic sanctuary of the United States. One cannot discount the possibility that China could destroy the shipbuilding infrastructure of U.S. allies during a Pacific war to set the stage for even greater PRC maritime dominance in the postwar world.

Additionally, suggestions that the U.S. government might outsource shipbuilding overseas in the future—even temporarily while U.S. production ramps up—surrenders valuable negotiating leverage with major shipbuilders, reducing their incentive to open critically needed shipyards in America, which is a primary objective of the strategy. This led us to a similar approach as drove the inception of the Mulberry Harbors used in the Allied landings at Normandy in World War II. Just as the chief naval planner of D-Day recognized that “if we cannot capture a port, we must take one with us,” the Maritime Statecraft strategy is derived from the similar insight that “if we cannot build ships in the world-class shipyards of our allies, then we must bring our allies to us.” An American maritime revival requires the help of allies, but is only possible if they invest in the alliance by investing in America.

Creating a Better Paradigm

After Secretary Del Toro articulated the vision of Maritime Statecraft in a series of speeches at Columbia, Harvard, and several major naval conferences, the first step in executing this new strategy to restart competition in U.S. shipbuilding was to make contact with the leaders of the foremost Korean and Japanese shipbuilders who build both commercial and naval vessels. This began in February 2024 via meetings in Seoul led by Secretary Del Toro with the Vice Chairmen and CEOs of Hanwha and HD Hyundai, followed by tours of their respective shipyards. Our central message going into each of these engagements in Seoul and Tokyo was a simple, yet profound opportunity – invest in America.

The response has been remarkable and swift. Just over three months after engaging with the Secretary in South Korea, Hanwha announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the Philly Shipyard, a former naval facility now building commercial ships, and successfully closed this transaction in December 2024. Hanwha has since announced plans to invest $5 billion to expand the yard’s facilities, update its technology and production processes, and create more than 7,000 new jobs in order to multiply output tenfold over the next decade and compete for both commercial and naval shipbuilding contracts. Since the Philly Shipyard has not built a naval vessel since 1970, restoring this facility to the naval-facing industrial base will be a significant capacity expansion and value-add for Navy shipbuilding.

HD Hyundai has also taken steps to engage. A major accomplishment was brokering a partnership between HD Hyundai, Seoul National University, and the University of Michigan to create academic and professional exchange opportunities in the education of naval architects, a foundational element of a healthy white collar shipbuilding workforce. HD Hyundai has since signed agreements to collaborate with several U.S. shipyards serving both the naval and commercial markets, and has now publicly announced its intent to acquire of a U.S. yard of its own. Seeing the growing momentum and opportunity of Maritime Statecraft, Davie Shipbuilding of Canada and Finland reached out and met with Secretary Del Toro on multiple occasions, and in July 2024 announced intentions to purchase a U.S. shipyard (subsequently announced to be Gulf Copper and Manufacturing Corporation in Texas) to bring the firm’s world-class icebreaker capabilities to bear on U.S. government programs. Bringing the advanced technologies, production processes, and dual-use commercial and naval business model that have been so successful abroad to American shores heralds a paradigm shift that will transform the U.S. competitive marketplace and incentivize modernization investments by legacy players.

Creating a business case for dual-use shipbuilding in the United States also requires incentivizing commercial demand. The first step on this line of effort was to leverage existing government programs to create favorable options both for dual-use shipbuilders looking to finance investments in their businesses as well as prospective ship buyers looking to finance purchases of U.S.-built vessels. In the spring of 2024, after a year of collaborative engagement and negotiation, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office expanded the eligibility of its multibillion-dollar Title 17 Clean Energy Financing and Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Programs to include the maritime industry. Title 17 Clean Energy Financing allows for commercial ship buyers to secure Treasury rate loans and loan guarantees to purchase U.S.-built ships that achieve a 10 percent improvement in carbon emissions over legacy single-fuel diesel ships. The Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program enables dual-use shipbuilders and secondary suppliers to secure financing at Treasury rates for technology improvements, plant expansions, and other investments in their production facilities.

At home, another important line of effort was recruiting unions as critical partners and stakeholders to advance the strategy across multiple lines of effort. The United Steelworkers led the way in catalyzing the Section 301 investigation of anticompetitive Chinese shipbuilding practices, a key offensive step to push back directly on Chinese dominance of the global maritime industry while also stimulating demand for American steel at a moment when most U.S. steel plate facilities are producing at less than 50 percent of their designed capacity. Domestically, unions have also championed innovative solutions to fill blue collar workforce gaps in many American shipyards. An illustrative example is a partnership with the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers which recruits itinerant welders in the construction trades and provides them with the requisite training and certification to work on Navy shipbuilding programs during lulls in construction demand ashore. After launching a pilot program recruiting skilled welders across five midwestern states in 2024, this rotational expeditionary workforce program was quickly oversubscribed, and cohorts are now working in Newport News to deliver new aircraft carriers.

On the legislative front, the Maritime Statecraft strategy’s implementation took the form of significant technical assistance on the SHIPS for America Act co-sponsored by Senator Mark Kelly, Senator Todd Young, Representative John Garamendi, and Representative Trent Kelly, with Representative Mike Waltz and a large cross-functional working group from government, industry, and academia providing invaluable input to the drafting process. This legislation revitalizes the Title 46 authority for the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Transportation to grant shipbuilding construction differentials on a competitive basis. The bill also creates a new Strategic Commercial Fleet of 250 U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged, U.S.-crewed ships in international trade that would compete for a stipend that would fully offset the higher cost of U.S. construction and operation, to be resourced through a dedicated new Maritime Trust Fund. These and other measures will help prime the pump to incentivize shipping firms to begin buying U.S. ships built by world-class shipbuilders in U.S. yards.

The next phase of the strategy was to directly engage the leaders of the world’s foremost shipowners, beginning with Secretary Del Toro’s visit to the CEO of A.P. Moller-Maersk in Copenhagen. Going into this meeting, we were aware that Maersk and a number of its European peers were discounting the strategic risk of dependence on Chinese shipbuilding and were directing disproportionate shares of their newbuild orderbooks to Chinese shipyards, which continually seek to undercut their Korean and Japanese rivals on price. At the same time, we were aware that European shipping giants were beginning to find themselves under increasing direct pressure from Chinese competitors in the shipping market, with Chinese lines the fastest growing players in the global container trade.

A key objective of our engagements with the European shipping firms was to help them better understand the connection between these two phenomena: whatever discount Chinese yards offer a European ship buyer relative to Korean and Japanese builders, Chinese yards almost certainly offer Chinese shipping firms a far steeper discount. With every new order the European firms place with Chinese shipyards, they directly subsidize the growth of their new biggest competitor in the global shipping market while placing their own companies at geopolitical risk without a fallback shipbuilding alternative outside Northeast Asia. This message is resonating. Indeed, within days of the Secretary’s meeting with Maersk, the CEO of France’s CMA CGM, the world’s third largest shipping firm, reached out to discuss expanding their U.S. footprint, beginning months of productive discussion and collaboration. In March, CMA CGM announced that they would be investing $20 billion into the United States, tripling the size of their U.S.-flag commercial fleet, and creating 10,000 new jobs.

What Must Happen Next

Maritime Statecraft has demonstrated remarkable intellectual staying power through the political transition, with its central pillars publicly embraced by President Trump, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, and the new White House Office of Shipbuilding in engagements with South Korea and in the April 2025 executive order on Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance. The new administration’s focus on expanding on the blueprint created by its predecessor presages a lasting commitment to a long-overdue national maritime revival that will endure across future administrations of either party.

Going forward, Washington should focus its efforts on supporting and expanding the U.S. investments and commitments already made by players like Hanwha and CMA CGM, and encouraging additional dual-use shipbuilders from Korea, Japan, and Europe to follow through on contemplated U.S. investments. Congressional approval of the SHIPS for America Act and appropriations for the Strategic Commercial Fleet and the Maritime Trust Fund will provide a concrete demand signal for the long-term development of internationally competitive U.S. commercial shipping and shipbuilding. This Fall, the United States Trade Representative and the Department of Commerce must ensure effective and timely enforcement of Section 301 remedies levied on Chinese vessels calling on U.S. ports and must work to ensure that these proceeds directly accrue to U.S. shipbuilding investment needs. Once passed into law, the Maritime Trust Fund should serve as the primary vehicle for transferring the Chinese 301 duties to the build-out of U.S maritime power.

Maritime Statecraft presents an opening for the United States and its maritime partners to strengthen the foundations of coalition seapower and rebalance defense burden sharing at the same time. Investments by allies in shipbuilding in the United States is one now-proven avenue. The South Korean government in particular leveraged our engagement with its shipbuilders and trade ministry to develop its Make American Shipbuilding Great Again proposal, which proved instrumental to Seoul’s success in recent tariff negotiations. The Asia Pacific Economic Community (APEC) summit in Korea this year presents further opportunity to build on the accomplishments to date through deeper investment in shipyards and secondary shipbuilding suppliers in the United States, translating the Korea Development Bank’s promised $150 billion in shipbuilding loans and loan guarantees from paper promises into steel and concrete on American waterfronts. A presidential visit to a shipyard in Korea on the sidelines of APEC, like President Lee’s visit to the Hanwha Philly Shipyard in July, would offer a firsthand view of what Korean investment can do to revitalize the U.S. shipbuilding industry and workforce. It would also showcase the tremendous talent that the United States should incentivize to come to American shipyards with their skills and best practices. There are several steps the administration can take on devising more effective and collaborative visa and immigration programs to facilitate the entry of the managers and technical experts needed to train the U.S. shipbuilding workforce.

Beware the Rocks and Shoals

There are nevertheless challenges ahead. The biggest immediate risk is the continuing allure of foreign outsourcing that some in the national security establishment see as a quick fix to the nation’s naval shipbuilding woes. An attempt by the administration to go around Congress’s clear wishes, either now or in the future, would derail a shipbuilding strategy embraced by both political parties and instead put a restoration of American seapower out of reach. Outsourcing U.S. government shipbuilding abroad, even temporarily, as the administration has indicated it plans to do with U.S. Coast Guard icebreakers, would surrender the United States’s most powerful source of leverage for a negligible short term gain while undermining the business incentive for world-class shipyards to follow through on investing in America.

A related outsourcing challenge that can be quickly corrected with executive action are the loopholes that allow U.S.-flagged vessels receiving MSP stipends and carrying government preference cargo to be maintained and repaired in China, instead of at underutilized U.S. repair yards. This corrosive practice aids the Chinese maritime industry and introduces a security risk to vessels that the Department of Defense depends on while denying U.S. based shipyards critically needed contracts.

Over the medium to long term, a new and growing risk to the administration’s ability to carry forward the shipbuilding priorities it shares with its predecessor is its increasingly coercive approach to trade and foreign investment, as well as its aggressive immigration enforcement actions. The recent immigration raid on Hyundai Motor’s electric vehicle plant in Georgia could frighten off firms from making new investments in U.S. shipbuilding or completing previously-pledged commitments. Its brusque treatment of South Korean engineers, who had entered the country legally to support domestic American electric car manufacturing, damaged South Korean popular perceptions of the United States as a safe place to work. Indeed, the Hyundai Motor action was starkly incongruous with successful Administration efforts just weeks prior to obtain major South Korean commitments to help revive the American maritime industry. Perceptions matter, as those much needed and welcome commitments will ultimately require the recruitment of large numbers of skilled South Korean managers and engineers to move to the United States.

During our engagements with global shipbuilding executives on investing in America, the Koreans in particular asked whether they would be treated fairly on a level playing field as their prospective U.S. competitors, or if instead they would be regarded as foreigners and treated as second-class citizens. We assured them, as we did others, that by investing in the United States and setting up fully compliant U.S. subsidiaries, they would indeed be treated as any other U.S. company according to the rule of law, with access to the same certifications, security clearances, and opportunities to compete fully and fairly for Navy contracts. This was a key catalyst for their decision to enter the U.S. market as forcefully as they have.

The American tradition of a welcoming business climate under the rule of law that values direct foreign investment and participation must continue. Strategic industries such as the maritime sector must be supported by Administration policies that do not dissuade but rather incentivize world-class corporations, experts, and workers to come to America—particularly from long-standing allies that share our democratic values such as South Korea, Japan, Canada, Italy, Australia and Finland. If the administration can keep off these clearly marked rocks and shoals, it has the opportunity to follow through on achieving the rewards for the U.S. Navy and maritime industry that Maritime Statecraft can make possible.

For too long, policymakers of all political stripes have neglected the cornerstone of American power, which is its seapower. Through diligent effort, Maritime Statecraft has become a bipartisan movement, and has created the largest market opportunity in the U.S. maritime sector in half a century. America’s maritime renaissance is just getting started. Its success depends on a sustained, long-term recognition that for the United States, maritime strategy is grand strategy.

Steven V. Brock was appointed by the White House as the Senior Advisor to the 78^th Secretary of the Navy, where from 2022 to 2025 he served as a chief strategist and key implementor of the Secretary’s highest priorities, including as a principal architect of Maritime Statecraft. A former member of the Senior Executive Service and retired U.S. Navy Captain, he currently is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Del Toro Global Associates.

Hunter Stires served as the Maritime Strategist to the 78^th Secretary of the Navy, where he was recognized for his work as one of the principal architects of the Maritime Statecraft strategy. He serves as the Project Director of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Maritime Counterinsurgency Project, a Non-Resident Fellow with the Navy League’s Center for Maritime Strategy, and the Founder and CEO of The Maritime Strategy Group.

Featured Image: Port of Jakarta, Indonesia. (Photo by Tom Fisk via Pexels)

By Alex Crosby

The 1778 French entry into the American War for Independence imposed several strategic conundrums for the British that fatally impaired chances of victory. First, French entry initiated a pattern of European opportunism to challenge British global hegemony, specifically with the cooperative involvement of France and Spain. Second, peripheral theaters in the West Indies, India, and Europe diffused British naval forces and strained limited manpower, devastating the British capability to conduct land warfare successfully. Finally, French entry bolstered American international legitimacy and domestic determination, which prevented Britain from regaining the strategic initiative. Ultimately, these combined challenges had adverse effects that made any remaining chance of British victory impossible.

European Opportunism

In the years leading up to its entry into the war, France aligned strategic resources to capitalize on opportunities that challenged British hegemony, particularly in the maritime domain. The French Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Vergennes, spearheaded ambitions to restore France to its perceived rightful dominant place in Europe by attacking British influence abroad instead of the historical strategy of targeting Britain itself.¹ Additionally, both the French Director-General of Finance and Secretary of State for the Navy, Jacques Necker and Gabriel de Sartine, respectively, established policy decisions from 1774-1780 that supported France’s ability to pay for domestic war support, including the robust reformation of its naval forces.² This preparation allowed France to be generally well suited to confront British naval forces, a physical representation of British hegemony, and directly contributed to British defeats in the maritime domain.

Following the commencement of the war, France identified the unique opportunity this far-off conflict presented for restoring order and balance to European power dynamics, which would also weaken British military successes. Specifically, the strained state that British forces were in following the Saratoga and Philadelphia campaigns provided the ideal timing for the French to enter the war. While Britain was considering negotiations to cease hostilities after these two campaign failures, France sought to prolong the war for its own benefit.³ France had long desired a revengeful opportunity to damage Britain in a manner that would increase maritime and political superiority in France’s favor.⁴ The tyranny of distance associated with European conflict in North America was capitalized on by France and continued to be a monumental struggle for Britain.

France’s entry into the war placed it in the unique position of being able to leverage American Revolutionary aims for independence as the catalyst for its grand strategy to challenge British hegemony and defeat it when opportunities presented themselves. Although France had expressed genuine interest in the American colonies seeking independence, this disturbance ultimately served France as a lever to restore global colonial balance and French influence.⁵ France embodied its role as a catalyst for challenging British hegemony and, in doing so, spurred Spain and Holland into later cooperation to ensure British victory in the American War for Independence would be impossible.

Motivated by decades of simmering retaliation and individual self-identification as the rightful European hegemon, France’s entry into the war forced Britain into a defensive maritime fight that prevented victory after 1778. Since 1763, the French-led House of Bourbon had been conducting robust shipbuilding efforts with the anticipation of likely conflict with Britain’s notoriously strong naval fleet. Unburdened by any land warfare entanglements in Europe, the House of Bourbon majorly oriented its resources towards increasing its combined maritime power.⁶ By 1775, France and Spain’s relative combined naval power exceeded Britain by approximately 25 percent and continued to grow throughout the remainder of the war.⁷ This prioritization of the maritime domain forced Britain into a strategic defensive posture, with alternating concerns between the North American land campaigns and countering Bourbon maritime threats across the globe.⁸

Peripheral Theaters

French entry into the American War for Independence created pervasive and politically deadly dilemmas for British control of its far-flung naval bases and ports across the globe.⁹ Except for the Spanish-controlled naval shipbuilding port of Havana, overseas locations for European countries were typically resource deficient and required significant garrison forces to maintain order.¹⁰ The vast distances and garrison requirements complicated British efforts to counter French attempts at harassment, isolation, or invasion. Due to French threats to British colonial garrison forces and the maritime sea lines of communication between them, Britain reoriented its forces and resources towards France and decreased allocations to combating the American colonialists.¹¹ Britain eventually further ensured its strategic defeat with its declaration of hostilities on Holland. France capitalized on the resulting Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and gained a critical extension of control into the Indian Ocean and West Indies.¹² This unification of European powers, led by France, signaled a shift in global British control and turned the weight of Britain’s colonial possessions won during the Seven Year’s War in 1763 into an overwhelmingly taxing drain that prevented the British from bringing its full combat potential to bear at the locations of its choosing.¹³

France’s entry also led to the defense of Britain becoming the primary strategic objective when threats of attack from the House of Bourbon culminated between 1778-1780.¹⁴ In particular, the British Admiralty tended to be riveted by fears of potential invasion and over-insured home waters with British naval forces that could have proved decisive elsewhere.¹⁵ This fear was further flamed as Britain entered hostilities without any continental allies.¹⁶ Despite focusing maritime forces in its home waters, the British navy would have had no legitimate chance against a combined Franco-Spanish naval fleet if they had pursued a determined invasion of Britain. Britain’s shift from offensive operations in the American colonies, King George’s original strategic objective, to defensive operations displayed the genuinely destructive nature of French entry into the war.

Due to this refocusing towards Europe, Britain overly fixated on French naval dockyards in their misguided pursuit of a decisive naval engagement.¹⁷ The First Lord of the Admiralty, John Montagu, preferred concentration of the British naval fleet in Europe to force the House of Bourbon alliance to reallocate their respective naval forces from North America and the West Indies. However, the British navy lacked proper military intelligence on the intentions of enemy fleet movements.¹⁸ This intelligence gap resulted in the British fleet predominately failing to locate and engage the House of Bourbon naval forces. Additionally, France exploited its geographical position to facilitate an increasing operation focusing on guerre de course to harass British shipping.¹⁹ This missed opportunity of British naval forces countering France at sea allowed the French to operate with general freedom of action and inflict terminally damaging economic and military costs on Britain.

Bolstered Americanism

American Revolution leaders had framed their political narrative as a legitimate protest movement with traditional values grounded in English law and classical political philosophy to protect against British accusations and attract powerful European political and intellectual elites’ support.²⁰ This political narrative would result in an increasing European acknowledgment of American Revolution legitimacy in the international system, albeit initially limited. Additionally, the radical changes in principles, opinion, sentiments, and affections of people from the republican ideals in the Declaration of Independence improved American legitimacy and furthered domestic determination. The American Revolution leadership hoped that a potential French recognition of an established United States of America would pave the way for other European nations to join the war and understand the long-term economic benefits of a British defeat.²¹ By incorporating principles of English society into their cause, the American revolutionaries had created a brilliant situation where British resentment fueled a growing fire of emboldened Americanism. Having been satisfactorily impressed by the intricate efforts of the American Revolution leadership like Benjamin Franklin, France became the spark that lit the eternal fire of American determination to defeat Britain.²²

American leadership had long depended on France’s entry into the war and recognized the significance it would have on inhibiting Britain’s chance of victory. Even in the darkest moments after conflict initiation, George Washington remained faithfully committed that a French entry would inevitably occur. Specifically, Washington understood that the strategic complication of Britain fighting a land battle in the American colonies and contending with French naval forces across the globe would ensure a British defeat.²³ American leadership hoped that the British failure during the Saratoga Campaign would be a turning point for French war support, which proved valid with France’s entry shortly afterward.²⁴ Further hopes of a more meaningful alliance and a long-awaited desire to decisively defeat the British would come to fruition in August 1781 at the Battle of Yorktown with a sixteen thousand man-strong combined force of French and American troops.²⁵

France’s entry also brought tangible aid to the American colonists that ensured war efforts could continue and drain Britain’s overseas land combat potential. French military leaders identified that the American colonists organically possessed relatively proficient skills with handling weapons and that they maintained the ability to fight in the near-limitless space across the American colonies. Additionally, France perceived the American colonists as being fearless of losing cities as they had no legitimate political, moral, or industrial foundation for military efforts, unlike the cities of Europe.²⁶ This unique degree of American colonial resolve to reach war termination in their favor spurred on French, Spanish, and Dutch military aid in the forms of gunpowder, loans, and various equipment.²⁷ Specific to the French, the first shipment crossed the Atlantic Ocean just after conflict initiation in 1776 clandestinely through a fabricated commercial entity and continued until war termination.²⁸ The tangible aid that came with French entry, combined with the character of American warfighting, sapped British land forces of necessary combat potential.

In addition to tangible military aid, France provided a maritime-based capability to project power shore and inflict military costs on the British. While the American colonists focused almost exclusively on land warfare to drain British military resources, France focused its military efforts at sea.²⁹ This French naval strategy ideally supported land operations and had been doctrinally implemented with the anticipation of a potential war with Britain in the American colonies.³⁰ The September 1779 French fleet bombardment of Savannah displayed this ability against British land targets, and although limited in tactical success, contributed to furthering American determination against Britain.³¹ Following French entry, British naval and land combat potential in North America would never recover to 1776 levels.³²

Although traditional American naval action was limited during the American War for Independence, French entry bolstered American privateering against British shipping and the land pressuring of naval bases, providing morale boosts that kept American colonial determination strong. Before there was a French naval presence on the Atlantic Coast, British sea control was locally uncontested and prevented consistent privateering near the coastal waters.³³ American privateering increased and challenged British maritime security efforts once French naval forces provided limited sea control.³⁴ The presence of Comte d’Estaing’s ships forced Britain to abandon blockade efforts, which dramatically increased opportunities for privateering and the flow of European goods shipments.³⁵ This privateering went practically uncontested by the British for the remainder of the war and highlighted the general decrease in British maritime superiority upon French war entry.³⁶ Additionally, French entry spurred American determination to put pressure on and control the naval hubs of Boston, Narraganset Bay, and New York.³⁷ The threat of privateering and loss of strategically important naval bases in North America, enabled by the French, directly contributed to overall British defeat in the American War for Independence.

Contrarian Viewpoint

Some might argue that the House of Bourbon alliance was fragmented between drastically different political objectives, leading to opportunities for Britain’s exploitation and regaining the initiative towards achieving favorable war termination. This fragmentation is supported by French awareness of the necessity for Spain to provide resources for a combined naval force to place the British naval fleet at risk. Likewise, Spain was exceptionally aware that France depended on their involvement and actively leveraged this to steer the House of Bourbon alliance to achieve its land seizure objectives. Spain had specific war objectives of seizing Minorca, Gibraltar, and Jamaica from British control but was generally less committed to holistically orienting strategic resources towards successful operational execution.³⁸ Additionally, Spain contrasted France in that it had no intentions of supporting the Americans or recognizing their moves towards independence.³⁹ Finally, Spanish political resolve for conflict was limited and nearly led to withdrawal from the war following Spanish failure at Gibraltar.⁴⁰ This vulnerable situation required France to direct resources to maintain a particular strategic objective of preventing Spanish capitulation from hindering French benefit or enabling a British victory.⁴¹

Despite these contrary views, these opposing objectives were overcome by an overall common unity to challenge British hegemony and cause culminating burdens. Neither France nor Spain were aggressively opposed to each other’s objectives and successfully found compromise to leverage each other’s military advantages. In particular, Spanish renewed efforts to pressure Britain in the West Indies allowed France to increase maritime and power projection operations in North America.⁴² France and Spain were deeply bound by desires for reprisal against British actions several decades prior and held sentiments of European rightfulness to supersede British hegemony.⁴³

Additionally, others might argue that British naval forces were doctrinally and capability superior to their French equivalents, which could have led to a British victory. In general, British naval forces were able to maintain a degree of local sea control around their sea lines of communication, thus ensuring the strategic sustainment of its North American land forces. Likewise, the British were confident in their naval superiority and assessed that one or two decisive maritime engagements would have terminally altered the threat of the Franco-Spanish naval fleet and regained the complete strategic initiative in British favor.⁴⁴

While this perspective holds some merit, British strategic decisions like those made by George Germaine, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, had severely limited British maritime strategy.⁴⁵ British fears of upsetting France and British taxpayers that response to the American rebellion was a prelude to invading the French West Indies led to limited naval mobilization in 1775. These limitations were also coupled with broad navy funding cuts and rules of engagement additions that dictated there be no interception of French ships carrying munitions and supplies to the American colonies. These measures ultimately negated any possibility of a successful blockade on the Atlantic Coast being effectively implemented.⁴⁶

Additionally, the French recognized the immense risks of becoming involved in a decisive naval battle with the British and instead focused efforts on attacking seaborne trade, launching land assaults against colonial possessions, enhancing French overseas control, and escorting French trade.⁴⁷ Compounding the problem of France not being a cooperative target set, the British failed to internally coordinate intelligence of French and Spanish naval dockyards, which led to the House of Bourbon operating with near impunity across the Atlantic Ocean.⁴⁸ With French entry pressing Britain into an overly defensive posture, British naval forces became too burdened by global mission tasking to guarantee local sea control of its Atlantic Ocean sea lines of communications.⁴⁹

Finally, the British would have ultimately had to prioritize the North American theater over its other colonies to mitigate the risk posed by the combined French-Spanish naval forces. This prioritization would have suicidally sacrificed British economic priorities in other colonies, such as the West Indies, which had become a focal point of French maritime operations.⁵⁰ Likewise, British naval focus on protecting the homeland was predicated on poor strategic assumptions that France intended to conduct an amphibious landing. Although there were discussions within the House of Bourbon to conduct such an invasion, this strategy was smartly abandoned for a more appropriate increase in maritime trade interdiction that would place Britain at greater strategic risk. Additionally, the British land forces in North America contended with unparalleled exterior lines of communication that measured more than three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean.⁵¹ This vast distance required overseas locations, with corresponding garrison forces, that Britain could not maintain after French entry.⁵² Ultimately, French entry into the American War for Independence in 1778 negated any possibility of Britain achieving victory. 

Lieutenant Commander Alex Crosby, an active duty naval intelligence officer, began his career as a surface warfare officer. His assignments have included the USS Lassen (DDG-82), USS Iwo Jima (LHD-7), U.S. Seventh Fleet, and the Office of Naval Intelligence, with multiple deployments supporting naval expeditionary and special warfare commands. He is a Maritime Advanced Warfighting School–qualified maritime operational planner and an intelligence operations warfare tactics instructor. He holds master’s degrees from the American Military University and the Naval War College.

Endnotes

[1] Pritchard, James. “French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal.” Naval War College Review, vol. 47, no. 4 (Autumn 1994): 86-87.

[2] Ibid., 85.

[3] Ferling, John. Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015: 207.

[4] Mahan, Alfred Thayer. The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1890: 510-513

[5] “French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal.” 88.

[6] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 505.

[7] O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013: 343.

[8] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 508.

[9] Ibid., 511.

[10] Ibid., 520.

[11] Ibid., 520.

[12] Ibid., 521.

[13] Jasanoff, Maya. Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Knopf, 2011: 24.

[14] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 14.

[15] Mackesy, Piers. “British Strategy in the War of American Independence.” Yale Review, vol. 52 (1963): 555.

[16] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 334.

[17] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 526.

[18] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 333-334.

[19] Mahan, Alfred Thayer. “Introductory” and “Discussion of the Elements of Sea Power.” In Mahan on Naval Strategy. John B. Hattendorf, ed. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2015: 33

[20] Genest, Marc. “The Message Heard ‘Round the World.” In Quills to Tweets: How America Communicates about War and Revolution. Andrea J. Dew, Marc A. Genest, S.C.M. Paine, eds. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2019: 10.

[21] Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. 205-206.

[22] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 114.

[23] Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. 205-206.

[24] Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. 40.

[25] Ibid., 52.

[26] British Strategy in the War of American Independence. 541.

[27] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 14.

[28] Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. 205-206.

[29] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 508.

[30] French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal. 91.

[31] Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. 44.

[32] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 14.

[33] Ibid., 333-334.

[34] Ibid., 343.

[35] French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal. 93.

[36] Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. 209.

[37] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 520.

[38] Ibid., 510.

[39] French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal. 87.

[40] Ibid., 94.

[41] Ibid., 96-97.

[42] Ibid., 99.

[43] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 509.

[44] British Strategy in the War of American Independence. 554.

[45] Ibid., 548.

[46] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 13-14.

[47] French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal. 92.

[48] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 346-347.

[49] British Strategy in the War of American Independence. 541.

[50] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 513.

[51] British Strategy in the War of American Independence. 543.

[52] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 515.

Featured Image: Battle of the Virginia Capes, 5 September 1781. Oil on canvas by v. Zveg, 1962, depicting the French fleet (at left), commanded by Vice Admiral the Comte de Grasse, engaging the British fleet (at right) under Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Graves off the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. (Courtesy of the U.S. Navy Art Collection, U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph)