The easiest way to misunderstand the Navy’s shipbuilding mess is to treat it as a shipyard story. That is how the issue is usually framed. Too few workers, too much complexity, too much bureaucracy, too many delays. None of that is wrong, but it is only the visible part of the problem.
The deeper problem sits upstream. The Navy’s procurement troubles reflect not just industrial strain, but a long stretch of strategic drift. If Washington cannot decide what kind of fleet it wants, shipbuilders will never deliver it on time.
(July 28, 2022) U.S. Navy Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyer USS Michael Monsoor (DDG 1001) sails in formation during Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2022, July 28. Twenty-six nations, 38 ships, three submarines, more than 30 unmanned systems, approximately 170 aircraft and 25,000 personnel are participating in RIMPAC from June 29 to Aug. 4 in and around the Hawaiian Islands and Southern California. The world’s largest international maritime exercise, RIMPAC provides a unique training opportunity while fostering and sustaining cooperative relationships among participants critical to ensuring the safety of sea lanes and security on the world’s oceans. RIMPAC 2022 is the 28th exercise in the series that began in 1971. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Aleksandr Freutel)
Zumwalt-class Guided Missile Destroyer USS Michael Monsoor (DDG 1001) transits the Pacific Ocean, June 25, 2022. Twenty-six nations, 38 ships, four submarines, more than 170 aircraft and 25,000 personnel are participating in RIMPAC from June 29 to Aug 4 in and around Hawaiian Islands and Southern California. The world’s largest international maritime exercise, RIMPAC provides a unique training opportunity while fostering and sustaining cooperative relationships among participants critical to ensuring the safety of sea lanes and security on the world’s oceans. RIMPAC 2022 is the 28th exercise in the series that began in 1971.
Recent reporting makes the scale of the problem hard to shrug off. Roughly 82 percent of the warships now under construction are behind schedule. That figure matters not simply because it is embarrassing, though it is. It matters because it points to something more serious than managerial sloppiness.
When Strategy Was Clear
For most of the Cold War, the Navy knew what it was for. Its central task was to deter and, if needed, defeat the Soviet Navy. Carrier groups projected power, attack submarines stalked Soviet submarines, and surface combatants helped protect sea lines and the larger fleet around them.
That strategic setting did not answer every question, but it answered the big one. The Navy was building for a recognizable adversary in a recognizable kind of maritime competition. Procurement could therefore follow a relatively stable logic.
Naval thinkers have understood this for a very long time. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s point was never just that fleets matter. It was that sea power depends on the fit between national purpose, geography, and fleet design. When those things line up, procurement has a kind of internal discipline. When they do not, programs start wandering.
The Long Drift After 1991 for the U.S. Navy
After the Cold War, that discipline weakened. The Soviet Union disappeared, and with it went the organizing problem that had shaped American naval planning for decades. The United States still had a navy of overwhelming power, but it no longer had the same clarity about what that navy was primarily meant to do.
So, the mission set widened. The Navy enforced sanctions, supported interventions, reassured allies, patrolled distant waters, and backed expeditionary operations in places where no serious fleet could challenge it. Those were real missions, but they did not impose the same kind of coherent design logic that Cold War competition with the Soviet Union had imposed.
Littoral Combat Ship Deck National Security Journal Image by Stephen Silver.
Littoral Combat Ship Deck Gun U.S. Navy. Image Taken by National Security Journal on October 14, 2025.
Littoral Combat Ship USS Cooperstown. Image Taken By National Security Journal October 14, 2025.
Littoral Combat Ship USS Cooperstown NSJ Photo Taken On October 14, 2025.
Then came the post-9/11 years, and the drift deepened. American strategy turned toward counterterrorism, irregular warfare, and operations near shore. The Littoral Combat Ship belongs to that moment. It made sense inside a world in which the United States expected to spend more time dealing with mines, swarming small craft, and permissive littorals than with a peer navy capable of contesting control of the sea.
That world did not last.
Ships Built for Yesterday’s Debate
China’s naval rise forced the United States back toward a much older problem. Suddenly, the key questions involved survivability, missile defense, range, sea control, and the problem of operating in a theater where the enemy could strike back with considerable force. The Western Pacific is not a permissive operating environment. It is a contested theater that punishes strategic confusion.
The trouble, of course, is that warships are not built overnight. Moving from concept to design, engineering, budgeting, and construction takes years. When strategy shifts, the ships already in the pipeline were designed for the assumptions that shaped the program at the start.
That is where the delays and overruns begin to make more sense. When strategic priorities shift midstream, existing programs get revised rather than replaced. New capabilities are added, and requirements change as Washington tries to retrofit yesterday’s program for today’s strategic problem. As a result, costs go up, and delivery timelines are pushed back.
The Zumwalt-class destroyer remains the cleanest illustration of the pattern. It began life as part of a very different strategic conversation, one shaped heavily by land attack and littoral operations. As the rationale behind the program weakened, the order contracted until the Navy ended up with three ships that are still being pushed toward missions other than those that originally justified them. Needless to say, unit costs went through the roof.
Groton, Conn. (July 30, 2004) – The nation’s newest and most advanced nuclear-powered attack submarine and the lead ship of its class, PCU Virginia (SSN 774) returns to the General Dynamics Electric Boat shipyard following the successful completion of its first voyage in open seas called “alpha” sea trials. Virginia is the Navy’s only major combatant ready to join the fleet that was designed with the post-Cold War security environment in mind and embodies the war fighting and operational capabilities required to dominate the littorals while maintaining undersea dominance in the open ocean. Virginia and the rest of the ships of its class are designed specifically to incorporate emergent technologies that will provide new capabilities to meet new threats. Virginia will be delivered to the U.S. Navy this fall. U.S. Navy photo by General Dynamics Electric Boat (RELEASED)
That was not just a procurement failure. It was strategic whiplash forged in steel.
Why China Sharpens the Contrast
China makes the American problem easier to see because Beijing has been working from a far more consistent script. Over the past two decades, the People’s Liberation Army Navy has built toward a fairly clear objective: to contest American command of the sea in the Western Pacific and deny U.S. naval forces freedom of action in the waters around Taiwan.
That does not mean Chinese programs are flawless or that Chinese naval planners are more rational. It means, rather, that their shipbuilding has been guided by a steadier strategic question than the one guiding the United States.
History makes the point clearly enough. In earlier periods of naval competition—from Britain and Germany before 1914 to later U.S. fleet expansions driven by clearer geopolitical aims—strategic coherence tended to make industrial performance look better than it might otherwise have.
Shipbuilding does not require perfect conditions to function well. What it does require is a reasonably stable sense of what the fleet is supposed to do and what kind of ships that mission demands.
The Real Fix for America’s Navy Challenge
The United States still retains immense maritime strengths. Its submarine force, surface fleet, carrier aviation, and global logistics system remain formidable in ways few others can match. This is not a story about a navy in collapse.
120710-N-RY232-571 MEDITERRANEAN SEA (July 10, 2012) – An SH-60F Seahawk from the Nightdippers of Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron (HS) 5 flies alongside Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69), July 10. Dwight D. Eisenhower is on a regularly scheduled deployment in support of Maritime Security Operations (MSO) and Theater Security Cooperation (TSC) efforts in the U.S. 5th and 6th Fleet areas of responsibility. IKE deployed as part of Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group (CSG), which includes CSG 8, IKE, guided-missile cruiser USS Hue City (CG 66), guided-missile destroyer USS Farragut (DDG 99), guided-missile destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG 81), USS Jason Dunham (DDG 109), the seven squadrons of Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 7, and Destroyer Squadron 28. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Julia A. Casper/Released)
It is, however, a story about a navy that has spent too long building amid unresolved strategic arguments. Many of the ships now entering or moving through production belong, in important ways, to earlier phases of post-Cold War thinking. That is why the problem is bigger than shipyard labor shortages or acquisition reform, important though both are.
Those issues matter, but they sit downstream from the real question. Washington has to decide what kind of naval war it is preparing for and what kind of fleet that war actually requires. Until that happens, the Navy will go on trying to build ships for several futures at once, and procurement systems do not handle that kind of ambiguity well.
Ships built under those conditions tend to arrive late. More troubling, they often enter service shaped by strategic debates that ended years before the vessel ever touches water.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham. He writes a daily column for 19FortyFive.com
