Building the Navy-After-Next

The U.S. Navy is at an inflection point. Two curves are moving in the wrong direction: the U.S. Navy’s growing worldwide commitments and the number of commissioned Navy ships (280 compared to China’s 400). This has caused national and naval leaders to put forth various options for the Navy-After-Next.

To be clear, the U.S. Navy is more than ships. It is people, ships, submarines, aircraft, command and control architectures, satellites, naval bases and other assets. That said, the unit of measure for most navies is the number of ships it fields. Recently, many navies, especially the U.S. Navy, have revealed plans to build and deploy uncrewed surface vessels to put more hulls in the water.

Industry would be well-served to watch these developments carefully as companies work to review and balance their manufacturing capabilities, and ideally, be prepared to build a mix of crewed ships and uncrewed surface vessels needed by the U.S. Navy.

As national and naval leaders examine options for the composition of the Navy-After-Next, there are four primary options for fleet composition that have gained purchase within the Navy. They are:

• The U.S. Navy’s current shipbuilding plan as reported by the Congressional Research Service. This includes 381 crewed ships and a number of uncrewed surface vessels. The Congressional Research Service tracks the U.S. Navy’s evolving force structure, with recent reports focusing on the proposed shift from a 355-ship goal to a larger 381-ship fleet (including unmanned vessels) outlined in the FY2025 shipbuilding plan, aiming for fleet growth to over 300 ships by 2032 and 381 by 2042, despite challenges like industrial capacity, inflation, and debates over retirement rates and procurement levels for submarines and other vessels. Key issues for Congress involve funding the plan, balancing new construction versus retirements, and integrating large unmanned systems.

• The second option is called the “hedge fleet.” This envisions a forward-deployed force of robotic autonomous systems and crewed ships to be employed quickly in any crisis. One of the best-known concepts for employing the hedge fleet would be the much-discussed Taiwan Street-focused hellscape project designed to disable a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan. Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Daryl Caudle, has explained the rationale for hedge fleet this way: “What [the] hedge avoids is a brittle single-purpose force that is either overbuilt for high-end fights and then underused day to day, or optimized for low-end crises and then gets overmatched when it counts.”

• The third option is the U.S. Navy‘s “golden fleet,” a recent initiative announced by President Trump in late 2025 to rapidly expand and modernize the fleet. The rationale for this plan is the stark reality that America’s Navy is too small and its armory too thin for a modern Pacific war that seems inevitable with China—a danger explicitly stated in the recent National Security Strategy. It is a war China has been preparing for as detailed in the most recent Congressionally mandated report on military and security developments of China—a doubling of defense spending in just over 10 years, recent nuclear weapons breakout, and a modern navy larger than the U.S fleet. This golden fleet plan focuses heavily on battleships alongside frigates and uncrewed surface vessels. While the news reporting regarding the golden fleet centers primarily on large ships, knowledgeable observers have suggested that the small- and medium-sized uncrewed surface vessels armed with long range strike and missile defense systems will be the most strategically impactful in the near term.

• The final option that has gained traction is called the “hybrid fleet.” This concept was unveiled by then-Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, and endorsed by his successors. This envisions a Navy of 350 crewed ships and 150 uncrewed surface vessels. The idea of a hybrid fleet evolved, in the same way as the three foregoing options, due the U.S. Navy’s ongoing challenge of building enough crewed ships to adequately meet the Navy’s global commitments. The Chief of Naval Operations Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy put it this way: “We cannot manifest a bigger traditional Navy in a few short years.” A report by the Department of the Navy Science and Technology Board entitled The Path Forward on Unmanned Systems, written as a Memorandum to the Secretary of the Navy, promises to help accelerate the path to a hybrid fleet by offering a path forward to design, develop and field unmanned systems—especially unmanned maritime systems—in order to achieve the Navigation Plan’s goal of: “Scaling robotic and autonomous systems to integrate more platforms at speed.”

However, these four “aspirational” fleet size goals run head-on into budget realities. As the most recent Congressional Budget Office shipbuilding report notes: “The Navy’s 2025 plan would cost 46 percent more annually in real terms than the average amount appropriated over the past five years. CBO estimates that total shipbuilding costs would average $40 billion (in 2024 dollars) over the next 30 years, which is about 17 percent more than the Navy estimates.”

Given the enormous cost of crewed ships (The cost of Ford-class aircraft carrier is $13.0B and that an Arleigh Burke destroyer is $2.B), one feature that ties these four options together is the emergence of uncrewed surface vessels as vital assets in the Navy’s plans for a future fleet. Rapid advances in technology that make uncrewed surface vessels a reality and not a dream means that uncrewed surface vessels will result in more hulls in the water in the near future.

The implications for the maritime industry should be clear. While it is expensive, and even risky, to “tool up” to produce new maritime vessels, it is impossible to miss the Navy’s commitment to field substantial numbers of large- and medium-sized uncrewed surface vessels.

An important consideration for industry is that over the past decade-plus the Navy and Marine Corps have conducted a substantial number of exercises, experiments, and demonstrations where industry has brought capable uncrewed surface vessel prototypes and put them in the hands of Sailors are Marines. As just one example of this testing that has gone on for years, MARTAC, a U.S. uncrewed surface vessel builder, has been invited to bring its MANTAS T12 and Devil Ray T24 and T38 USVs vessels to a wide range of Navy and Marine Corps exercises, experiments, and demonstrations.

As the maritime industry moves forward to produce capable uncrewed surface vessels to meet the Navy’s current and anticipated needs, companies would be well-served to participate in as many exercises, experiments, and demonstrations as possible. This will enable them to “wring out” their USVs as MARTAC has done in order to gain fleet feedback to produce uncrewed surface vessels that will meet the Navy’s needs.