The shrinking U.S. Navy

Most don’t think much about the state of US Navy. They just assume that it is there, and that it is the best in the world.
This can no longer be taken for granted.

We watch naval affairs much more closely than most people, so we're often aware of problems that are overlooked by the general public.
One such problem is the US has been building naval ships at far below replacement rate for decades. The low shipbuilding rate is exacerbated by the Navy's alarming maintenance backlog for existing ships.
The Navy has been compelled to extended the lives of existing ships beyond the normal limits simply because their replacements don't get built.
This is unsustainable, and we are well past the crisis point.

The end result the Navy has been steadily shrinking since the end of the Cold War.

Since 2018 the Navy's stated goal is to build a 355 ship battle force, and the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act passed by Congress made this official U.S. policy. But the current size of the Navy's battle force remains well below this goal. As of 20 August 2026 the Naval Vessels Register shows just 289 total ships in the US Navy's battle force, with 239 classified as commissioned and active.
Even the these figures are somewhat optimistic: Both include 27 of the nearly useless Littoral Combat Ships, and 7 elderly (though still respectably powerful) Ticonderoga (CG-47) class cruisers. The "commissioned" number also includes the historical ships USS Constitution and USS Pueblo, which are technically are still commissioned U.S. Navy ships.

It gets worse. The size of the Navy's battle force is not only below its goal, it's still heading in the wrong direction. In January 2021 the Navy's battle force had 297 ships, with 253 "commissioned and active"; in January 2004 it had 276 "commissioned and active".

For comparison by 2024 China's navy had 370 ships in its battle force, including 140 major surface warships and 60 attack submarines. These numbers are steadily growing.

Help is not on the way.

• Completion of the Ford (CVN-78) class carriers John F. Kennedy, Enterprise, and Doris Miller has been delayed again, to 2027, 2031, and 2034 respectively.

• The Navy cancelled the planned construction of four (out of six planned) Constellation (FFG-62) class guided missile frigates on 25 November 2025. Of the remaining two, completion of Constellation has been delayed until 2029; construction of Congress has not even started.

  The announcement stated that the cancellation was for the Navy’s convenience rather than some failure by the builder. The Navy also said it hoped to replace it with a ship that can be build more quickly. This is notable, because the Navy had chosen the Constellation design in 2019 because it was based on an existing design that could be build quickly. We'll also observe that it was intended to replace the ill conceived Littoral Combat Ships, the Navy's previous attempt to acquire lower cost ships that could be built rapidly.

  In December 2025 the Navy announced that the cancelled frigates would be replaced by a new design based on the US Coast Guard's existing Legend class cutters.
  We're not confident that this new "off the shelf" frigate design will work out any better than the last two. The Navy seems to be doing the same things it's already done, and expecting the results will somehow be different.

• Construction of the planned DDG(X) destroyer class that is intended to replace the Ticonceroga (CG-47) class cruisers and early Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) class destroyers that are now reaching the end of their useful lives is not expected to begin until the early 2030s. To make matters worse, they might be further delayed to prioritize the Trump administration's questionable "battleship" project.

Given the various crises in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, South China Sea, and other areas, we need to recognize that when we need a navy, we can’t just order one from Amazon. It must be built well before a crisis emerges, and it must be continuously maintained.

Building ships is time consuming, even when we have good ship designs. This is exacerbated by the lack of suitable domestic shipyards: There is now only one shipyard in the USA capable of building nuclear powered aircraft carriers, and only two capable of building nuclear powered submarines; and there are only a handful that can build smaller warships. Skilled labor is also essential, and too often it's in short supply.

The Navy deserves a share of the blame for the problem. Too often it issues ship specifications that are unrealistic; and too often it changes a ship's specifications while it is already under construction. These contributed to the failure of several recent warship projects: The Zumwalt (DDG-1000) class destroyers; the Constellation (FFG-62) class frigates; and both Littoral Combat Ship (LCS-1 and LCS-2) classes. And when a project fails, the ships are either built in smaller numbers, or not built at all, with obvious consequences for the shipyards involved. The Constellation (FFG-62) class illustrates this: Construction of the first ship officially started on 31 August 2022; an April 2024 news report on the project's delays stated that the ship's detailed design was still only 80% complete, despite being based on an existing design that had been in service with the French and Italian navies for a decade. The same news report noted that the US design retained only about 15% of the original Franco-Italian "parent" design instead of the expected 85%. A Congressional Research Service report, quoting an unnamed Navy official, said I’ll be brutally honest, I don’t think people truly understood what it meant to adapt a parent design to Navy requirements. As delays (and costs) mounted the Navy cut the FFG-62 project from six ships to just two.

Congress also deserves a large share of the blame. Congress normally allocates funds for shipbuilding annually, and Congressional priorities can (and too often do) change frequently. Privately owned shipyards can hardly be blamed for being reluctant to make expensive investments to increase shipbuilding capacity when the Navy's demand is so uncertain.

At a minimum Congress should provide funding for shipbuilding that is consistent for more than one year.

Whatever approaches we choose, solving this problem will not be easy. It took us decades to get into this situation, and it will probably take years to fix it.