America's navy stands at half its cold-war peak strength, with just under 300 ships to China's more than 370. Shipbuilding programmes are unable to keep up with plans for a 381-ship navy by 2054. Out of 45 battle-force ships under construction, 37 face delays, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. China is due to field more sea-based vertical launch tubes—a measure of missile capacity—than America, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
On December 22nd 2025, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Donald Trump unveiled a proposal for a "Golden Fleet"—a name apparently inspired by Theodore Roosevelt's Great White Fleet of the early 1900s. The centrepiece is an enormous Trump-class "battleship" (more accurately a missile cruiser), three to four times larger than today's main American surface combatants and, in the president's words, "a hundred times more powerful than any battleship ever built". Early designs envisage a ship as large as 40,000 tonnes with 128 missile launchers, plus launchers for hypersonic missiles and nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The Congressional Research Service estimates each would cost $15bn, meaning relatively few could be fielded without bankrupting the navy. Concentrating more firepower on fewer ships cuts against prevailing naval doctrine, which favours dispersing ships to make them harder for China to hit with missiles.
Trump cancelled the planned Constellation-class frigate, which was delayed and over budget, in part because the navy tinkered endlessly with the original Italian design. His replacement, temporarily called the FF(X), is based on the coastguard's Legend-class cutters. The advantage of using a proven design is speed: the first FF(X) is intended to be in the water in two years. But at 40% smaller than the cancelled frigate, initial images suggest the new design might have no vertical launch tubes at all—a potentially serious shortcoming for a modern naval war.
The administration is pursuing many more uncrewed vehicles. The navy's Modular Attack Surface Craft (MASC) programme envisions a family of drone-boats to operate alongside crewed ships, carrying payloads in regular shipping containers. John Phelan, the secretary of the navy, boasted that a small drone-speedboat had gone from prototype to production in less than a year. Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute argues that wargames show a sweet spot: uncrewed ships with 16 to 32 missiles. Any less and a drone ship cannot do enough damage to a well-defended target on its own; any more and the ship becomes too big and easy to detect. Within that range, he says, autonomous ships could "slow and disrupt a Chinese invasion" of Taiwan.
America's submarine fleet has shrunk from 70-odd boats a decade ago to 67 today: 49 nuclear-powered attack subs (SSNs), 14 ballistic-missile subs (SSBNs) and 4 guided-missile subs (SSGNs). It will shrink to 63 before in theory growing to 66 by 2054—still well short of the navy's goal of 66 SSNs alone. About a third of SSNs are in maintenance or idle; depot maintenance can take over 18 months. America manages only 1.1-1.2 Virginia-class boats a year, against a requirement of two and a target of 2.33 to supply Australia under AUKUS. A Virginia-class boat costs about $5bn. The "tip of the spear" attack subs operate from Guam, Pearl Harbour and (from 2027) Perth. The Pacific has only two specialised resupply vessels. In the 2026 Iran war American subs fired Tomahawks at land targets and—for the first time since the second world war—a torpedo at an enemy ship, sinking the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena.
American intelligence reckons China will have 70 submarines next year and 80 by 2035, with about 40 nuclear-powered, against America's all-nuclear force of 67. China is building two attack subs and an SSBN per year since 2024, mostly at Huludao on the Bohai Sea, says the IISS. New Chinese classes (Type 093B, Type 095, Type 096) use pump-jet propulsion and X-shaped rudders for stealth.
America has 11 big aircraft-carriers but only a handful are available at any one time. Two—the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Gerald R. Ford—were deployed for Operation Epic Fury in Iran, with the USS George H.W. Bush en route. The Ford had been at sea for almost 270 days; in mid-April 2026 it would break the record for the longest carrier deployment since the Vietnam war. If still deployed in two months, it would also break the record set by the USS Midway in 1973. The Ford suffered a 30-hour fire in March, leaving more than 600 sailors without beds. Such mammoth deployments would be felt long after the war; a former Pentagon official likened it to "driving a car at 200 miles per hour for months, without an oil change", compounding a "massive backlog" in maintenance. The current pace of operations was likely to produce occasional "carrier gaps"—periods when America could not deploy a carrier in some parts of the world—for two to three years.
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