The Pentagon’s Unaffordable, Unbuildable Plan for a 500-ship Navy

Following months of secret planning, U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper revealed substantial details on his plans to radically and rapidly enlarge the U.S. Navy in the next few decades. The plan is ambitious, but not one that the Pentagon can likely pay for, nor one that the United States’ struggling shipbuilding industry can probably construct. 

Speaking at an influential D.C. think tank in October, Esper cited the threat of China’s growing, modernizing navy to implement Beijing’s “nefarious plans,” including an acceleration of the coercion and harassment that China already exerts on its neighbors.

The centerpiece of the Pentagon’s plan, called Battle Force 2045, calls for building up a fleet of 355 ships by 2035, and around 500 ships – comprising a mix of traditional ships and submarines and large unmanned vessels – by 2045. These benchmarks are driven by China’s own military goals to complete modernizing its forces by 2035 and field a world-class military by 2049.

Esper explained that while he was confident that the U.S. Navy could prevail in a conflict with China today, the Battle Force 2045 plan would ensure that it would be ready to deter China and win against the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) if needed before it reached world-class status in 2049. 

The details behind China’s goals remain ambiguous, but Esper asserts that it means the PLA Navy would have parity with the U.S. Navy, exceed some of its capabilities, and offset its “overmatch” in others. 

But according to a report on China’s military that the Pentagon released this past summer, the PLA Navy has arguably already achieved some of these metrics. It already has more ships than U.S. Navy, though most of the U.S. fleet is larger and more capable; much of China’s arsenal of anti-ship missiles far out-range what the U.S. Navy can currently shoot back; and in concert with land-based missiles and aircraft, the PLA can almost certainly concentrate greater force in certain places than the U.S. Navy could reply with, at least for a while. 

The plan’s key to maintaining an edge over China’s navy is a fleet of between 70 and 80 attack submarines, about 20 to 30 more than there are today. Esper said that “If we do nothing else, the Navy must begin building three Virginia-class submarines a year as soon as possible.” 

It is not clear whether industry can successfully deliver three attack submarines a year while keeping the Navy’s new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines on schedule. The Columbias, set to replace the aging Ohio-class missile submarines, are a critical leg of the United States’ nuclear deterrent and Navy and Pentagon leaders have emphasized for years that delivering the new subs on time is their highest procurement priority.

But limited shipyard capacity and the difficulty and time required to train the skilled workers who build submarines mean that industry struggles to build even two attack submarines a year – and this was before COVID-19 introduced additional production delays – and it is very unlikely that it can quickly expand to deliver a third, if it can at all.

The bigger problem for Esper’s plan is that even if the industry could start delivering three Virginia-class subs a year starting tomorrow, the supposedly too-small attack sub fleet would still not get any bigger because of the 30 aging Los Angeles-class attack submarines that are scheduled to be retired this decade. Rather than work its way up toward a 60 or 70-boat fleet, the U.S. Navy’s submarine inventory is more likely to fall from 51 today down the low 40s before very slowly starting to grow again sometime in the 2030s.

The core of the fleet will remain the Navy’s gigantic, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. But instead of the 12 carriers that Congress has told the Navy it needs to maintain (there are 11 currently), Esper’s plan calls for between eight and 11 super carriers. Esper’s comments suggests that the Navy may end up getting fewer of the $14 billion Gerald R. Ford-class super carriers than it wanted, a sentiment that has been echoed by Michelle Flournoy, a former senior Pentagon official during the Obama administration and widely viewed as a top choice to be the next secretary of defense in a Joe Biden administration. 

The United States’ 11 carriers are already over-tasked, with deployments growing in length and with less time between each for rest, repairs, and training. To make up for having fewer super carriers, the plan also calls for up to six light carriers, a class of vessel that the U.S. Navy has not had in its inventory for decades. The concept has been advocated by think tanks in recent years to give the Navy a broader air capability in environments that don’t require the commitment of an entire carrier strike group, or where the risks to its nuclear-powered carriers might be too high. The Navy’s light carriers would be based on the America-class amphibious assault ships that can carry about a dozen F-35 jet fighters.

The plan also calls for 60 to 70 small warships. The only small surface ships the Navy has now are its controversial Littoral Combat Ships. Nineteen are currently in service and 16 more are contracted or in various stages of construction, a significant cut from the 52 ships originally planned. Supplementing the LCS will be a new more traditional and heavily armed frigate based on an Italian design currently in use by several European and North African navies. 

The most ambitious part of Esper’s plan may be his call for integrating between 140 and 240 unmanned or optionally-manned vessels to the fleet to supplement the capabilities of the traditional ships and submarines. These vessels would notionally provide surveillance and tracking, lay mines, and shoot missiles, among other missions. Esper claims that these unmanned subs and surface ships would add substantial combat capability to the fleet at huge savings in terms of additional sailors and funds compared to traditional ships. This is true, but elides that these unmanned vessels would still add both an enormous expense and huge requirement for sailors and infrastructure to operate and maintain them that doesn’t currently exist.

That rhetorical sleight-of-hand underlines the nearly insurmountable budgetary challenge that Esper’s plan faces. 

Esper claimed that savings from across the Pentagon’s budget will allow him to increase the Navy’s shipbuilding budget by 13 percent toward making this fleet design a reality. But with the government’s independent budget analysts saying that the Navy has underestimated the cost of its new frigate designs alone by at least 40 percent, this is not nearly enough money to pay for the new flee. That plan also assumes authority that the Pentagon does not have on its own; only Congress can allocate funds to buy new ships and permit the Navy to enter into new shipbuilding contracts. 

Even if that were enough, additional shipbuilding funds are only part of the cost of a fleet. Navy estimates put the cost of additional sailors and infrastructure to operate those new ships at upwards of $20 billion a year. 

These numbers, on top of shipbuilding programs’ history of cost-overruns, and increasing congressional skepticism puts significant doubt on Esper’s claim that his plan has “a credible path for reaching 355 plus ships in an era of fiscal constraint.” Whatever the United States really needs to counter China’s assertiveness, it probably won’t have this fleet available to do it with.