The Golden Fleet on Paper
Ambition meets strategic contradiction
The new US Navy Shipbuilding Plan has arrived. It is lavishly produced, rich in operational color, and bracingly confident in its own ambition. Reading it, one encounters the language of generational transformation, the promise of a Golden Fleet, and the vision of an American navy reborn—larger, more lethal, ready to fight tonight. Read in isolation, it is a compelling document. Read in the context of American naval acquisition history, and of the tensions in this administration’s naval program, it is something more complicated: A plan whose best instincts are undermined by its own contradictions.
What’s the Problem?
Let me start with the diagnosis, because the plan deserves credit for it. The US Navy currently operates 291 battle force ships against a legal requirement of 355. The shipbuilding budget has doubled over two decades while fleet size has flatlined. Requirements crept during construction, cost estimates were systematically optimistic, and the acquisition bureaucracy—spread across disaggregated chains of command that the plan traces, with some pride, all the way back to the Bureau of Construction, Equipment, and Repairs in 1842—produced delays as reliably as it produced paperwork. None of this is new analysis. The Government Accountability Office has been saying versions of it for 30 years. But it is rare for a shipbuilding plan to lead with so frank an admission of institutional failure, and the reforms it proposes in response deserve genuine attention: Portfolio Acquisition Executives with real authority, stricter requirements discipline, the ShipOS production management platform, the Vessel Construction Manager model. These reflect a serious attempt to change how the US Navy does business, not merely what it buys.
The plan’s most coherent thread is the hedge strategy, the framework outlined by CNO Adm. Daryl Caudle in his recent Fighting Instructions that pairs high-end, multi-mission platforms with modular, attritable, lower-cost systems capable of being produced at volume. The logic is sound: A force that can deter peer adversaries while meeting the relentless daily demand for presence and crisis response cannot be built exclusively from expensive, exquisite platforms, each of which spends roughly a quarter of its service life in maintenance. The hedge strategy recognizes that the character of naval competition has changed, that distributed lethality and unmanned mass offer genuine operational advantages, and that the unforgiving economics of modern naval warfare demand a more diversified force. What distinguishes Caudle’s framework is the attempt to embed this thinking structurally into fleet design rather than treating it as a doctrinal afterthought. I remain cautiously optimistic about it. American naval circles have been discussing variants of distributed lethality for decades without the concept making it off the page, and some healthy skepticism about whether this iteration fares any better is entirely warranted, but the intellectual architecture is correct.
Playing Battleships
Where the May plan parts ways with that framework—and where the tensions in this administration’s naval policy become most visible—is in the battleship program. I have written at some length about the BBGN already, and nothing in this shipbuilding plan has done much to assuage my concerns. The document requests advance procurement funding in FY27 for a nuclear-powered guided-missile battleship, with the lead ship of three to be procured in FY28. It describes this vessel in terms that would embarrass the most intense naval enthusiast: a platform for high-volume long-range fires, theater nuclear weapons, directed-energy systems, hypersonic missiles, and a Maritime Operations Centre. It is simultaneously a strike platform, a command ship, a strategic delivery vehicle, and an air defense asset. We should remember that ships designed to do everything are likely to do nothing on schedule and nothing within budget.
When I wrote about the battleship concept earlier this year, I made two observations that the May plan has done nothing to answer. First, the ship uses enormous displacement for negligible marginal gains in missile firepower compared to smaller ships. Second, and more damagingly, it replaces the DDG(X) program—which for all its limitations was at least sized to fit existing shipyards and represented an evolutionary step built on proven industrial foundations. The battleship resets the clock entirely: a clean-sheet design for a vessel the size of an Iowa, developed by a navy that has been delegating in-house design capability to shipbuilders for the better part of three decades, requiring yards that are not currently configured to build at that scale. The plan acknowledges, in a passage that deserves attention, that foreign module fabrication will likely be required for the BBGN—a significant concession from an administration whose public posture on restoring American shipbuilding has been decidedly triumphalist.
The deeper problem is strategic rather than industrial. I remain concerned that there is a serious conceptual tension that sits uncomfortably underneath both this plan and the Fighting Instructions: Caudle wants a navy of distributed lethality and attritable mass, but the battleship concept is the apotheosis of the high-value platform. A battleship is precisely the kind of asset that the hedge strategy seeks to move away from—large, expensive, crewed by hundreds of sailors, dependent on technologies that are not yet operational, and almost certainly not reaching the fleet until the late 2030s at the earliest. The shipbuilding plan asks us to believe that the US Navy can pursue distributed, unmanned-centric hedge operations while simultaneously committing billions to a program that embodies the opposite philosophy. It does not resolve this tension because it cannot. The battleship is a political program. The hedge strategy is a warfighting program. Printing them in the same document does not reconcile them.
Growing the Fleet
The frigate story illustrates a different but related pathology, and one I have been watching with a mixture of professional interest and professional despair. Last December, I wrote about the cancellation of the Constellation class as an autopsy of how a program that began with genuinely sound premises—buy a proven European design, exercise restraint on modifications, field hulls quickly—collapsed under the weight of the very institutional habits that it had explicitly been designed to avoid. The May plan confirms the cancellation of Constellation and introduces a new frigate, FF(X), with a lead ship in FY27. It presents the speed of this transition, accomplished “in a matter of weeks, not years,” as evidence of reformed acquisition culture. I want to believe this, but Constellation’s collapse was not principally a structural failure: It was a behavioral one. The May plan provides no convincing mechanism for preventing the same thing from happening a third time, after Constellation and after the Littoral Combat Ship. My conclusion stands: America’s ability to get the small surface combatants it needs depends solely on the US Navy’s willingness to pick a design and leave it alone long enough for a shipyard to actually build it. Announcing a new frigate is the easy part. The hard part comes when the first requirements review convenes.
The unmanned programs are where I find myself most genuinely encouraged, which is perhaps a function of having spent considerable time cataloguing everything else that has gone wrong. The shift to a mission-driven competitive gauntlet model—in which companies deliver prototypes and production-ready capabilities for evaluation against operational requirements, rather than chasing technology demonstrations—reflects a real lesson from the early unmanned acquisition era. The procurement profile provides a meaningful demand signal. If the US Navy can resist the temptation to add a hundred extra requirements to these platforms before the first hulls are delivered, it may finally field unmanned systems at the scale that operational concepts have assumed for years. That is a significant if, but at least the structural conditions are more propitious than they have been before.
The submarine program is the plan’s least controversial element, which is not a coincidence. Columbia-class and Virginia-class procurement follow well-established industrial logic. The Direct Reporting Program Manager for Submarines provides the single-point accountability that programs have historically lacked. The ShipOS results—reducing schedule planning from 160 manual hours to under ten minutes, cutting material review times from weeks to under an hour—are exactly the kind of mundane industrial progress that rarely generates headlines but genuinely moves the needle.
The industrial base section contains the plan’s most honest passage, even if it is not framed that way. As well as encouraging overseas investment into US shipbuilding, the US Navy is seeking legislative authority to allow American prime contractors to subcontract the building of large-scale non-sensitive modules to allied overseas shipyards for programs including the BBGN, DDG-51, LHA, and LPD. These are pragmatic choices, and I support them as such—American shipbuilding capacity genuinely cannot support the construction of the Golden Fleet at the pace and scale the plan demands, and pretending otherwise would be more dishonest than the plan’s actual approach. But there is an obvious tension between this admission and the administration’s loudly America-first public narrative about shipbuilding and maritime dominance. That tension matters not just rhetorically but politically, because the durability of foreign shipbuilding arrangements depends on a congressional and executive mood that could shift with the political headwinds.
Papering Over the Cracks
The plan’s conclusion returns to the language of accountability it established at the outset: success measured by ships delivered on time, an industrial base strengthened, a fleet ready and globally present. This is the right measure. Applied honestly, and applied retrospectively, it would produce some uncomfortable scores. The Constellation class failed it. The Littoral Combat Ship failed it on an extended schedule. The Zumwalt class, which the plan cheerfully incorporates as a “bridge” between existing destroyer technology and the battleship—as though that framing erases the program’s history—failed it in ways that should give the administration pause before betting the next generation of surface combatant development on another clean-sheet design stuffed with immature technology.
The reforms the plan proposes are, in places, genuinely serious. The investment in unmanned systems reflects correct strategic instincts. The maintenance reforms—digital twins, predictive scheduling, smaller and more frequent availabilities—address one of the most persistent drains on operational readiness. The industrial base investments, ShipOS, the PAE structure: these are not window dressing. But the plan is compromised by a political program that contradicts its own operating concept, leaving a gap between the CNO’s hedge strategy and the Golden Fleet’s capital-ship ambitions that the document papers over rather than resolves.
Naval force structure does not care about spectacle. It does not care about Golden Fleets or concept art or quotes from Mahan. It cares about usable combat power delivered on schedule and within budget, available to combatant commanders when they need it.
The plan’s authors know this—the plan says so, repeatedly and with evident conviction. And then it funds three battleships.
That tension, more than any single program decision, is the most revealing thing in the document. Whether this administration has the discipline to resolve it in favor of the warfighter, rather than the press release, is a question that only time will answer.
Dr. Emma Salisbury is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an Associate Fellow at the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre.
If it gets the shipyards building again with all the factories that supports, Bravo.
Short, sharp, excellent piece. Precisely focused and very worrying
Commander K sends.