It’s a danger because potential foes like China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy have already installed anti-ship cruise missiles in a variety of platforms specifically to assail U.S. and allied surface navies. It’s an opportunity because the U.S. Navy can reciprocate. The commission should exhort Congress and the Pentagon not only to arm every hull in the inventory but to propagate hard-hitting flotilla vessels, crewed and, potentially, uncrewed, of America’s own. Stationed in embattled regions such as East Asia, such craft can help deny antagonists access to waterways where they must go to accomplish their aims.

Waterways such as the East China Sea, Taiwan Strait, and South China Sea.

Swarms of flotilla ships acting in unison are sea-denial platforms par excellence, ideally suited for the opening phase of active defense against aggression. They can help confound an aggressor’s strategy until the U.S. Pacific Fleet and affiliated joint and allied forces can assemble in the theater in numbers. Buying time, weakening the foe, and amassing friendly forces is what active defense is all about.

This brings us from the greats of strategy to a few more specific items for the National Commission on the Future of the Navy to consider. The budget for sea power looms large, of course. More of everything is desirable considering how lean and fragile the U.S. Navy force structure has become since the Cold War. 

However, our Republic can afford more. Spurred by the fall of France in 1940, Congress set the Two-Ocean Navy Act in motion on the heels of several humbler naval expansion acts. By the end of fighting in 1945, the navy had swelled to close to 7,000 hulls of all types. Then the United States spent an average of six percent of GDP for the next four decades waging the Cold War.

That far exceeds what we spend today relative to our means. My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that defense spending for 2023 came to three percent of GDP almost exactly. In other words, the republic can double expenditures on sea power should the government and society resolve to do so. Commissioners should impress on lawmakers, the incoming administration, and the larger society that they are making a conscious strategic choice if they decline to support more generous defense budgets. 

They are choosing not to compete with the Chinas, Russias, and Irans of the world, or to support longstanding allies, partners, and friends such as Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.

They are choosing to relinquish America’s standing in world affairs.

Leave aside the glamour platforms that dominate discourses about force structure. They will get their due in the commission’s work. Here are some relatively low-cost ways to boost numbers and firepower in the U.S. Navy fleet in the fairly near term, if indeed more shipbuilding dollars are in the offing. 

First, retrofitting littoral combat ships with anti-ship cruise missiles is a start. An obvious one. “LCS is back!” proclaimed Secretary of the Navy Carlos not long ago, pointing to the installation of cruise missile launchers aboard these long-troubled small surface combatants. Are these ideal platforms to anchor an active defense, or for any other function? 

No. But they are hulls displacing water, of which the U.S. Navy has few to hand, and they are big enough to carry armaments useful for sea-denial missions. Neglecting to wring value out of them would amount to fleet-design malpractice.

Second, expanding the submarine fleet is a must. Yet the submarine industrial base is struggling to reach production rates needed to expand the U.S. Navy undersea contingent, let alone supply several nuclear-powered attack boats (SSNs) to the Royal Australian Navy as promised under the AUKUS arrangement. The U.S. Navy SSN contingent is limping along at about half its numbers from the late Cold War years. China poses challenges of at least the same dimensions as the Soviet Union. History thus implies that at least doubling the U.S. inventory of submarines would be a prudent move.

But submarines need not be nuclear-propelled to be effective. Many legends of undersea warfare were not. The good news is that conventional subs are cheap by contrast with their atomic-powered brethren. Japan’s latest diesel-electric sub, Taigei, runs the Japanese people about $720 million per copy, whereas a U.S. Navy Virginia-class SSN sets the American people back about $4.5 billion per hull. In other words, buying Japanese could provide our navy with six diesel boats, plus a little, for the price of one Virginia. Nuclear propulsion is desirable, but we need hulls in the water to compete strategically and fast. Nukes are not going to get it done. 

SSN construction is not going to expand the fleet noticeably in any timeframe that matters.

Diesels are Good Enough, Buy Some

Third, it’s high time to start fielding small surface combatants in bulk, the way service doctrine says should be done. Designs are readily available and in production. The U.S. Coast Guard operates fifty-eight fast response cutters that could be repurposed as U.S. Navy small surface combatants with relative ease. These cutters are a bargain at $65 million per copy, compared to around $2.5 billion for a frontline Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer. That’s thirty-eight gray-hulled combatants bearing anti-ship munitions for the price of one destroyer, cheap by today’s standards. 

Let’s purchase a seventy-six-ship flotilla for $5 billion. Forward-deployed to the first island chain, that would start looking like a swarm.

And antagonists would weep and gnash teeth.

Fifth, the commission should review plans for a medium landing ship (LSM), the workhorse vessel the U.S. Marine Corps wants to shift Marine Littoral Regiments along the first island chain to help the fleet with sea denial and active defense. The LSM is supposed to be a truck for hauling troops and their gear across relatively short distances. It should be simple and cheap. And yet the program has stalled, years after the Marine Corps leadership declared a requirement for it in 2019. 

This is a travesty. Commissioners should take a stand on this controversy one way or the other. Better to ditch operational concepts that depend on a contingent of LSMs if that contingent will be built too late to make good on them, as appears likely.

After all, a strategy or operational design without the implements to execute it is a wish. The commission can foster clarity on island-chain operations, helping the Marine Corps define its role as an adjunct to the fleet in sea-denial operations.

And lastly, logistics. This one hardly requires belaboring. Between the U.S. Maritime Sealift Command, Merchant Marine, and Maritime Administration, the United States fields roughly as many logistics vessels as it lost to enemy action, sunk or damaged, during the horrific opening months of World War II. 

Here’s an anecdote for you: when asked what the decisive ingredients of U.S. victory in the Pacific War had been, wartime Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo picked three: U.S. island-hopping strategy, U.S. submarine operations against Japanese shipping, and the U.S. Navy’s ability to rearm, refuel, and reprovision at sea.

Notice that two of those three relate intimately to logistics. U.S. Pacific Fleet submarines raided the fleet of Japanese merchant vessels that carried raw materials hither and yon, binding together a scattered island empire. Sinking the logistics fleet helped dismember the Japanese Empire. Moreover, the U.S. Navy could fight more or less constantly because of lavish logistical support. Ships of war didn’t have to be put into port to restock with beans, bullets, and black oil, exiting the combat zone and depriving the fleet of their firepower. They could remain on station.

The service desperately needs to rediscover that philosophy. Whether it’s building new support ships at U.S. yards, buying from Korean or Japanese yards, or whatever—we need to restore our logistical dominance, pronto. Any war effort will fail without supply.

Strategy, operations, fleet design. So there are some observations from the masters of strategy, and a few from the cheap seats, as the commissioners set about their deliberations. Let’s wish them well and heed what they have to say.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Distinguished Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.

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