The 2025 plan to recapitalize the Navy’s fleet will cost about $40.1 billion annually — about double what the service has received from Congress for shipbuilding over the last five years, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s annual analysis, US Naval Institute News reports.
Across the scope of the service’s 30-year plan, the Navy is set to grow from its current battle force of 296 manned ships to ships to 381 manned vessels plus 134 unmanned surface and subsurface vehicles by 2045, according to the service’s latest fleet structure review presented to Congress.
Overall, the net addition of 85 ships to the fleet will cost the Navy $1 trillion, according to the CBO analysis.
“The cost of the Navy’s 2025 shipbuilding plan is high not only compared with recent funding but also by historical standards. Over the past decade, funding for ship construction reached its highest level since the Reagan Administration’s defense buildup in the 1980s,” reads the report.
The last five years have seen an average of $27.5 billion annually for shipbuilding, a significant increase since the fall of the Soviet Union.
“[S]hipbuilding appropriations averaged $32.8 billion (in 2024 dollars) during the Cold War years of 1955 to 1989, a period of intense competition between the United States and the Soviet Union,” reads the report.
Driving the shipbuilding plan is the ongoing maritime competition with China localized in the Western Pacific. After decades of investing in its shipbuilding industry, China now possesses the largest naval fleet in the world by hulls and is delivering new warships much faster than the U.S., which has driven concern both in the Pentagon and Congress.
Navy leaders want the current force to prepare for conflict and have made maintaining the existing fleet a priority by 2027. They are planning for a modest three to five percent growth in the shipbuilding budget.
“We cannot manifest a bigger traditional Navy in a few short years, nor will we rely on mass without the right capabilities to win the sea control contest,” reads Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti’s September navigation plan. “Without those resources, however, we will continue to prioritize readiness, capability, and capacity—in that order. We must recognize that the Navy faces real financial and industrial constraints.”
A Flourish chartAccording to the CBO analysis, the fleet will be at its smallest in 2027, then expand in the 2030s.
“Over the next three years, the Navy would retire 13 more ships than it would commission, causing the fleet to reach a low of 283 ships in 2027 before growing again,” reads the report.
“Over the next five to ten years, the Navy’s 2025 plan would reduce the number of ships that can fire missiles and torpedoes. Starting in the 2030s, however, those capabilities would grow along with the fleet, although not by as much as they would have under some of the alternatives… To take full advantage of that capacity, the Navy would also need to build up its inventory of munitions.”
The CNO report says the industrial base must grow to meet the demand for the new hulls.
“Over the next 30 years, the nation’s shipyards would need to produce substantially more naval tonnage than they have produced over the past 10 years. The rate of production of nuclear-powered submarines, in particular, would need to increase significantly,” reads the report.
“Over the past decade, the amount of tonnage under construction at the nation’s shipyards increased by 80 percent,” it adds. “Under the 2025 plan, the amount of naval tonnage that the Navy wants to buy would increase further, although demand would be greater for some types of ships than for others. Aircraft carrier construction would remain fairly steady, but the tonnage of submarines, surface combatants, and amphibious warfare ships under construction from 2030 to 2054 would be 50 percent higher, on average, than it is today.”
The Navy and the two nuclear shipyards — General Dynamics Electric Boat and HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding — are pushing to expand submarine construction capacity for both Virginia-class attack and Columbia-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines. According to the report, the Navy has been buying two submarines per year, but the yards have only produced 1.2 subs annually.
The service estimates it needs 100,000 new workers across the submarine industrial base over the next decade.
“Whether those efforts will lead to an increase in the production of attack submarines remains to be seen,” the report says.
