Righting the Ship: Building a Relevant US Navy Fleet for Twenty-First-Century Deterrence and Combat

Hudson Institute | Bryan Clark, David Byrd, Dan Patt

The United States Navy faces severe operational and fiscal constraints while seeking to expand its battle force to 381 ships by the 2050s. Despite a proposed fiscal year 2027 shipbuilding budget of $82.3 billion, the largest since the early 1960s, shipbuilders are expanding order books rather than yard infrastructure.

Naval manning deficits reached 20,000 gapped sea billets in 2026. Maintaining the planned traditional fleet would require annual sustaining budgets exceeding $100 billion by 2045. Industrial capacity remains constrained. A proposed alternative fleet architecture replaces heavy surface combatants, including a planned nuclear-powered battleship, with guided missile cruisers, enhanced logistics vessels, and nearly 1,600 robotic and autonomous systems. Supported by more than $4 billion appropriated in 2026 for unmanned systems, this rebalanced force cuts 50,000 sailor positions and relies on tailored operational hedge forces. The restructured model aligns procurement expenditure with real-world shipbuilding capacity while sustaining long-term deterrence across contested maritime operational theaters.

Comment

Capital allocation trends across major US shipyards like Huntington Ingalls Industries show that capital expenditure rates remain disconnected from elevated procurement budgets. Structural capacity limitations in dry dock facilities and specialized steel fabrication prevent rapid throughput increases for large surface combatants such as the proposed Trump-class BBGN. The resulting backlogs extend delivery schedules and multiply financial risk across multi-year procurement programs.

This bottleneck stems from severe labor retention shortfalls and sub-tier supplier fragilities within the marine engineering base. Small-scale component suppliers for specialized propulsion systems cannot absorb abrupt funding expansions without long-term demand guarantees. Conversely, modular platforms such as the Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicle bypass traditional shipbuilding slipways by leveraging commercial assembly lines.

Strategic Question for Discussion

Which factor presents the greater constraint on US naval expansion — sub-tier supplier fragilities affecting large combatants like the Trump-class BBGN, or the integration of autonomous platforms like the Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicle into legacy fleet architectures?

The evidence points toward sub-tier supplier bottlenecks as the more immediate constraint, because specialized component manufacturing for capital ships like the Trump-class BBGN requires years to scale up production lines. While autonomous systems like the Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicle leverage commercial manufacturing speed, their operational utility remains limited until command-and-control software achieves battlefield maturity. Consequently, industrial throughput for nuclear-capable hulls will remain the primary pacing variable for naval force generation through the 2030s.

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