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ARTICLE: The U.S. Navy Is Shrinking While China Builds the World’s Largest Fleet

Jacques Pj Provost

2026-06-20 15:19:13

A Retirement Plan Disguised as a Bold Reform

Let’s look at the numbers objectively, because they’re what matter. The plan submitted to Congress proposes ordering only two Virginia-class submarines per year, a single Arleigh Burke-class destroyer per year for the remainder of the decade, and reducing the aircraft carrier fleet from eleven to nine units in the medium term. On paper, these cuts are offset by 47 surface drones and 16 XL underwater drones. On paper only. Because these drones have not yet proven they can survive high-intensity combat; they have a fraction of the endurance of a manned destroyer; they carry a fraction of the armament; and they have never faced an adversary equipped with electronic warfare capabilities worthy of the name. China, on the other hand, has electronic warfare capabilities. It has the DF-21 and DF-26 hypersonic anti-ship missiles. It has the numbers. It has the quantity. It has the shipyards.

There is one more thing that technical reports rarely mention outright: U.S. naval industrial capacity is in tatters. Shipyards lack qualified welders, naval architects, and modern dry docks. When the administration announces a new, futuristic battleship with great fanfare, it is announcing a concept—not a ship. There are no finalized plans. No keel has been laid. No shipyard is available until the middle of the next decade. It’s a political promise dressed up as a military program. Meanwhile, in Dalian, Jiangnan, and Huludao, the Chinese are churning out hulls like bricks. Their shipyards can produce a Type 055 destroyer in about two years. U.S. shipyards take nearly twice as long to build an Arleigh Burke Flight III. The pace has been lost. And in naval strategy, pace is almost everything.

The Ghosts of Failed Programs

Let’s remember what we’re talking about. The Littoral Combat Ship, touted as a revolution in coastal operations, ended up as a costly joke, decommissioned well ahead of schedule after more than thirty billion had been sunk into it. The Zumwalt-class destroyer, whose production run was slashed from 32 to 3 ships, was turned into an experimental platform because no one knew exactly what it was supposed to be used for. The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford was delivered seven years late, with ammunition elevators that took years to function properly. Every failed program represents a lost decade, tens of billions down the drain, and a message sent to Beijing: your adversary no longer knows how to deliver.

The contrast with China is stark. When Beijing announces a program, Beijing builds it. The Type 055, a 13,000-metric-ton heavy cruiser, went from design to launch in less than five years. The Type 075 class, amphibious assault helicopter carriers, went into mass production within a few years. The Fujian, an aircraft carrier equipped with electromagnetic catapults, completed its sea trials on a schedule that American design firms view with barely concealed envy. The difference is that in China, the navy is an absolute national priority, backed by a party-state that does not tolerate delays. In the United States, the Navy has become a budgetary adjustment variable caught between congressional debates.

You don’t win a naval war with PowerPoint presentations. You win it with ships, crews, torpedoes, missiles, and trained sailors. Everything else is just seminar literature.

China, or the exact opposite of American doctrine

Beijing doesn’t negotiate—Beijing imposes

There is one fundamental thing to understand about China—and one that Western foreign ministries stubbornly refuse to accept: the Chinese do not believe in negotiation as we understand it. For the imperial political culture that still runs deep in Beijing, negotiating as equals is a concession made to an inferior, a sign of weakness, almost a ritual humiliation. Its relationship with the world is one of tribute. There is the center, and there is the periphery, which must align itself, bow down, and pay symbolic or actual tribute. This framework is not a Western caricature. It is the very backbone of the Chinese Communist Party’s strategic discourse since Mao, and even more so since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012.

Look at the evidence piling up before our eyes. Tibet, invaded in 1950, crushed culturally and demographically without any negotiations worthy of the name ever having taken place. Xinjiang, where the Uyghurs are being crushed in a system of re-education camps that no diplomacy has managed to crack. Hong Kong, where the “one country, two systems” promise was methodically torn apart between 2019 and 2021, despite an international treaty signed with London. The South China Sea, where Beijing has built militarized artificial islands in direct violation of a 2016 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague—a ruling that was simply brushed aside. Taiwan, whose very existence as a sovereign political entity is denied. At every stage, the same method: they announce, they build, they impose a fait accompli, and they let others wear themselves out protesting in press releases that no one reads.

The Navy as a Tool of Coercion, Not Dialogue

Within this mindset, a navy is neither an instrument of multilateral stability nor a tool for regional cooperation. It is an instrument of silent coercion, a lever for the gradual humiliation of neighbors. When China fields six to nine aircraft carriers by 2035, it will not be to participate in joint humanitarian aid exercises in the Strait of Malacca. It will be to control Asian sea lanes, economically strangle Taiwan, stifle Japanese ambitions, silence the Philippines, close the South China Sea to Western navies, and send a chilling message to all coastal nations: choose your side—and choose quickly.

In Chinese strategic circles, this doctrine is known as the “War of the Three Seas” and the concept of “active defense” extending to the second and third island chains. The objective is explicit: to gradually push the U.S. naval presence beyond Guam, and then beyond Hawaii. This is not a fantasy. It has been laid out in China’s defense white papers for the past fifteen years. And everything Beijing has done over the past fifteen years has been aimed precisely at this goal. No pause. No slowdown. No sincere negotiations. Just a methodical, calculated, well-funded, industrial-scale buildup.

When an adversary has been explaining to you for three decades, in its own public documents, how it intends to expel you from your own ocean, the bare minimum is to believe it. The next step is to build up your own capabilities in response. Not to withdraw your ships.

The Reassuring Myth of Autonomous Drones

When Technology Becomes an Excuse

The official cornerstone of the new U.S. naval doctrine rests on an enticing promise: surface drones and XL underwater drones will multiply firepower without costing as much as a manned destroyer. This is the argument that admirals, defense contractors, and Beltway analysts have been repeating for the past three years. The problem is that this argument rests on a series of unverified assumptions that no one really wants to test under real-world conditions. First assumption: the drones will survive the massive electronic jamming that China will deploy from the very first hours of a conflict. Second assumption: satellite links will hold up, even though Beijing demonstrated as early as 2007 its ability to destroy low-Earth orbit satellites. Third assumption: drones will be able to make tactical decisions without constant human intervention, which raises ethical, legal, and operational issues that no one has yet resolved.

The announced cost is also a mirage. The first prototypes of surface drones far exceed initial estimates, and the gap widens with every budget revision. As for the Orca-class XL underwater drones, the program is plagued by delays, cost overruns, and technical incidents. The industry’s promise of a drone costing one-third as much as a destroyer is crumbling as operational requirements rise. And even if the costs were to hold, the question remains: can an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and its crew of 320 sailors be replaced by an autonomous platform that no enemy has ever seriously tested? The honest answer is no. Not yet. Perhaps never on equal terms.

The Brutal Return to Reality

The other blind spot in drone doctrine is the inability of these platforms to project political presence. A U.S. destroyer in the Taiwan Strait sends a diplomatic message—a flag, a crew, a commander making real-time decisions. A drone is a cold, anonymous, automated signal that no foreign government interprets as a serious commitment. The navy isn’t just for firing shots. It’s for making a statement. For occupying space. For signaling that the United States is there, physically, with men and women ready to fight. Replacing that with a phantom fleet of unmanned platforms dilutes the political message the navy has carried since 1945.

The Chinese have understood this point perfectly. That is why they are building manned, heavy, visible ships, painted a menacing gray, with hull numbers, crews, and televised commissioning ceremonies. They know that the navy is as much a stage as it is a tool. And that on this stage, the global audience is watching to see who occupies the spotlight. When America leaves the stage—even temporarily, even for budgetary reasons—the message sent is dire: the sea is no longer American by default.

A drone doesn’t salute a flag. It doesn’t welcome a foreign president onto its deck. It doesn’t console the family of a fallen sailor. It doesn’t instill fear in the same way. Replacing a destroyer with a robot is like replacing a soldier with a poster.

Ruined Construction Sites: Washington's Worst-Kept Secret

The U.S. shipbuilding industry can no longer keep up

Let’s put it bluntly: the United States has lost its naval industrial capacity. Not symbolically. In concrete terms. The country now has seven shipyards capable of building major military vessels, down from more than twenty in the late 1980s. The skilled workforce has aged, technical schools have emptied out, and apprenticeship programs have collapsed. The report submitted to Congress by the Government Accountability Office in 2024 states in black and white that the construction time for a Virginia-class submarine has increased from seven years to more than twelve years—sometimes as long as fourteen. The Columbia program, which is intended to replace the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, is already facing delays that threaten U.S. strategic nuclear deterrence.

China, for its part, has shipyards whose combined capacity far exceeds that of the United States. The Jiangnan, Dalian, and Hudong-Zhonghua shipyards can simultaneously produce destroyers, frigates, aircraft carriers, and submarines, all at production rates that U.S. shipyards have not matched since World War II. According to several comparative studies, China’s naval production capacity is now approximately 230 times greater than that of the United States in commercial tonnage, and while the gap is narrowing in the military sector, it remains massive. This industrial asymmetry is Washington’s worst-kept secret. Everyone knows about it. No one is taking action commensurate with the threat.

The Shortage of Welders and Engineers

Beyond the dry docks lies a shortage of skilled workers. U.S. shipyards are desperately short of certified welders for submarine hulls, nuclear propulsion engineers, and qualified electrical technicians for Aegis systems. The Department of Defense has launched an emergency program to recruit and train 100,000 additional workers in the shipbuilding trades by 2030. This is an admission of failure. It means that over the next five to ten years, even if money were pouring in, the Navy would not be able to build faster, because there are no longer enough skilled workers or operational design offices to do so.

This human bottleneck is the real reason the plan calls for decommissioning ships. Decommissioning is not a strategic move. It is happening because we no longer know how to maintain, modernize, or staff what we already have. The Ticonderoga-class cruisers are being decommissioned because their maintenance costs are too high and no shipyard can meet the schedule. The Los Angeles-class submarines are being decommissioned because their reactors are reaching the end of their service life and no one can replace them quickly enough. The official narrative speaks of modernization. The real story speaks of structural exhaustion.

Taiwan, the cornerstone of the entire structure

The Timeline of the Invasion

This entire naval debate boils down to a single issue: Taiwan. The CIA director and several U.S. military leaders have publicly stated that Xi Jinping ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. This date is not a Western projection; it comes from internal directives of the Chinese Communist Party. Being ready does not necessarily mean attacking in 2027. It means that the military option becomes credible, operational, and executable. And in terms of coercion, the mere existence of credible capability is often enough to secure the adversary’s political submission without firing a single shot.

However, it is precisely by 2027 that the U.S. Navy will reach its lowest point of 288 ships. It is precisely in 2027 that the first massive withdrawals will begin. It is precisely in 2027 that the promised drones will not yet be operational on a large scale. The U.S. Navy’s window of maximum vulnerability coincides exactly with the Chinese Navy’s window of maximum opportunity. This timing has not escaped anyone’s notice—not in Beijing, not in Taipei, and not in Tokyo. It may have escaped the notice of—or been ignored by—the drafters of the budget plan in Washington.

The Ultimate Test of U.S. Credibility

If China imposes a blockade on Taiwan in 2027 or 2028, what will the United States do with a shrinking fleet, stalled shipyards, anxious allies, and a public weary of distant commitments? The honest answer is: we don’t know. And it is precisely this uncertainty that plays into Beijing’s hands. A superpower whose allies doubt its ability to intervene is a superpower that has already lost some of its aura. The U.S. Navy is not merely a military tool. It is the pillar of Washington’s geopolitical credibility throughout the Indo-Pacific. Weakening this pillar—even temporarily, even for budgetary reasons—means opening a breach that adversaries will rush to exploit.

Regional allies are not fooled. Japan is accelerating its naval rearmament. Australia is investing in nuclear submarines under the AUKUS agreement. South Korea is developing its own heavy helicopter carriers. The Philippines are reopening U.S. bases that have been closed for thirty years. Everyone is preparing for the scenario in which America will not be able to hold the line on its own. Everyone, that is, except—it seems—certain Pentagon budget officials who draft the long-term plans.

When an ally sees your fleet shrinking, they don’t think about your courage. They think about their own future. They think about the moment when they’ll have to choose between waiting for you or making a deal with the other side. And every ship you withdraw is one more reason for them to pick up the phone and call Beijing.

The Fiscal Trap and the Illusion of Money

More Billions, Fewer Ships

The most striking paradox in the U.S. naval debate is this: the Navy’s budget has never been higher in absolute terms, and yet the fleet has never been under such strain. The Navy’s budget exceeds $260 billion a year. But inflation in military costs, skyrocketing maintenance expenses, program delays, personnel cost overruns, and the growing complexity of systems mean that each dollar buys less capability than it did ten years ago. A Virginia-class submarine now costs more than $4 billion. An Arleigh Burke-class destroyer costs nearly two billion. A Ford-class aircraft carrier exceeds thirteen billion. The numbers are skyrocketing, while the number of vessels is declining.

This downward spiral is no accident. It is the result of an oligopolistic industrial system where a few prime contractors set prices without real competition, a military procurement bureaucracy that adds specifications at every stage, and a Congress that protects every local job without an overarching strategic coherence. The result is a navy that is increasingly expensive, increasingly slow to modernize, and increasingly vulnerable. China, on the other hand, builds ships more cheaply, more quickly, and in greater numbers. Not because it is smarter. But because it has made coherent policy choices and is sticking to them without wavering.

The Myth of the Golden Fleet

The current administration has dubbed its naval vision the “Golden Fleet.” It’s a campaign slogan, not a military program. Behind the polished rhetoric lie the same budgetary inconsistencies, the same industrial contradictions, and the same unsustainable promises regarding drones and hypersonic weapons. Announcing a futuristic $2.5 billion battleship without plans, without a shipyard, and without a credible timeline is political spin. It’s not strategic planning. And while Washington churns out slogans, Beijing is building hulls.

The truth is that the United States will not be able to rebuild its navy without a complete overhaul of its naval industrial base, a massive vocational training program, a reform of military procurement, and a bipartisan commitment lasting at least twenty years. None of these conditions are currently in place. None are being seriously discussed. People are debating drones and futuristic concepts while the foundations are crumbling.

Conclusion: The Deafening Silence of the Sea

What the Oceans Will Tell Us in 2030

History is cruel to powers that fail to grasp strategic timing. Rome did not lose the Mediterranean in a single battle. It lost it through a hundred budgetary decisions accumulated over two centuries—each reasonable when taken in isolation, each disastrous when taken together. The U.S. Navy is currently facing a comparable situation. Every decision to decommission a ship is technically justifiable. Every program delay is understandable from a budgetary standpoint. Every bet on drones is justifiable from an industrial perspective. But the sum of all these reasonable decisions produces a catastrophic result: a superpower that is voluntarily disarming at the very moment its main rival is arming at full speed.

By 2030, when the first assessments are made, the outcome will already be clear. Either Beijing will have established its dominance in the Western Pacific without firing a single shot, simply by demonstrating its numerical superiority. Or an incident will have forced the United States to realize, in a moment of crisis, that it no longer possesses the necessary capabilities to fulfill its commitments. In either case, the verdict will be the same. The choices made in 2026 will have determined the fate of an entire region. And tomorrow’s chroniclers will not say that the Chinese were invincible. They will say that the Americans still had everything going for them, and that they chose instead to cut back, delay, and delegate to machines.

There is something ancient about this story. Something that resembles a warning we’ve been hearing everywhere for three thousand years. Empires do not die in lost battles. They die in budget decisions made on a Tuesday morning by weary bureaucrats, in air-conditioned offices, six thousand kilometers from the sea they are about to abandon. And one day, a Chinese captain, standing on the bridge of a brand-new aircraft carrier, looks out at the horizon and realizes there’s no one left across the way. On that day, the ocean changes color. And no one in Washington will realize it until it’s too late.

By Jacques Pj Provost, columnist