"the larger problem is the apparent lack of clear direction for the Navy," wrote the Wall Street Journal editorial board in December 2025.
That judgment sits at the center of a dilemma described by Bruce Stubbs: a rare political alignment — presidential and congressional willingness to expand the fleet — paired with an absence of the public strategic document that would justify and sustain such an expansion. The result, Stubbs warns, is a window of opportunity that could be squandered unless the next Navy secretary and the chief of naval operations close the gap between promises of ships and a clear, unclassified maritime strategy explaining why those ships are needed.
Political alignment and the three preconditions for growth
Naval historians, Stubbs reports, identify three preconditions that made the 1980s buildup possible: a president and Congress willing to commit resources; a Navy secretary politically effective at promoting naval strategy; and a Chief of Naval Operations who unified the service behind that strategy. According to Stubbs, the first precondition is in place in 2026. The second “will be in place when the Senate confirms a new Navy secretary, widely expected to be Hung Cao, the current Acting Secretary,” and the third requires the new secretary to direct the CNO to produce and publicly articulate a viable maritime strategy that underwrites expansion.
The missing unclassified maritime strategy
What sustained the 600-Ship Navy in the 1980s, Stubbs notes, was an openly published Maritime Strategy — available in both unclassified and classified versions — that CNO Adm. James Watkins declared “the bedrock of planning, programming, and operations throughout today’s Navy.” By contrast, in 2026 there is no equivalent unclassified document. Announcements have come instead as a scattershot of program changes: a cancelled frigate, a new landing ship, a Coast Guard cutter adapted as a naval combatant, and a new battleship class — without a public strategic narrative connecting those choices to national objectives.
Stubbs quotes then-CNO Adm. Daryl Caudle describing his 2026 Fighting Instructions as “my strategy,” his “detailed plans,” and his “strategic vision,” then clarifying at Sea-Air-Space that they “are not a strategy document. They are a demand signal.” The Navy Warfighting Concept and Deterrence Concept remain classified with no public versions available. Stubbs invokes Samuel Huntington’s 1954 prescription: absent a public description of how, when, where, and why the Navy will protect the nation, political leaders and the public risk confusion and apathy.
Acquisition and industrial-base evidence of consequences
Stubbs links the lack of strategic transparency to concrete acquisition failures and industrial-base strains. The Congressional Research Service, he writes, documented that sustaining a fleet of 355 to 381 ships requires an average construction rate of ten to eleven ships per year sustained over thirty-five years. By comparison, the second Bush administration averaged five ships per year; the Obama years averaged roughly ten before falling; the Biden years averaged nine, with 2024 producing only five.
Fleet size has slipped: the Navy stood at roughly 316 ships in 2004 and stands at 291 today, and members of the Commission on the Future of the Navy expect it will shrink further before recovering while China’s fleet grows by double digits annually, Stubbs reports. Industrial‑base failures are visible in individual cases: the USS Helena spent over six years in the yard before being decommissioned in July 2025; the USS Boise sat pierside for nine years waiting for a maintenance availability to begin in February 2024, then spent two more years in the yard and consumed $800 million in overhaul funding only to be abandoned in April 2026. The Government Accountability Office documented the industrial base failures behind both outcomes as far back as 2018.
Program-by-program examples underline the pattern: the Littoral Combat Ship began life without a clear operational concept and proved too lightly armed and insufficiently survivable for contested environments; the Zumwalt-class destroyer was built around a land-attack mission that lost its strategic rationale before delivery; the Constellation‑class frigate evolved toward destroyer-level cost and was cancelled by then‑Navy Secretary John Phelan in November 2025; and the Ford‑class carrier, the GAO concluded, delivered “far less capability and capacity to fleet users than the Navy had promised.”
The urgent task for the next Navy secretary and the CNO
Stubbs argues the new secretary’s most urgent task is to “close the gap between the fleet the administration is building and the strategy that would explain it.” He should direct the CNO to produce an unclassified, strategically coherent maritime strategy capable of surviving congressional scrutiny — the same kind of foundation the 1980s Maritime Strategy provided. Without such a public document, Stubbs warns, fleet size risks becoming merely “a number, rather than a purpose.”
What this means for Congress, the public, and U.S. allies
- Congress: Lawmakers are being asked to fund a larger fleet without a public strategic logic connecting force structure to national objectives; Stubbs implies that a clear unclassified strategy would enable more informed appropriation decisions and oversight.
- The American public: Citizens lack a public document to evaluate whether expanded shipbuilding is necessary and properly prioritized; Huntington’s warning, cited by Stubbs, is that public confusion breeds apathy toward resource requests.
- U.S. allies: Allies and adversaries alike benefit from transparency; Stubbs notes that the 1980s Maritime Strategy allowed allies to understand expectations and adversaries to understand what they faced.
The alignment of presidential advocacy, congressional momentum, and industrial investment offers an opportunity not seen since the early 1980s. Stubbs’s prescription is narrow and concrete: produce an unclassified maritime strategy that ties ships to strategy, then defend it publicly. Absent that step, the Golden Fleet risks arriving without a defensible purpose.
