Navy’s top officer calls for building bigger, better fleet ‘now’

The Navy’s top officer wants a bigger fleet faster, arguing in a paper released Wednesday that an increasingly complex global security environment is playing out on the seas.

“The Navy must get to work now to both build more ships, and to think forward — innovate — as we go,” Chief Naval Officer Adm. John Richardson wrote in the white paper. “To remain competitive, we must start today, and we must improve faster.”

Richardson’s paper aligns with President Trump’s calls for a 350-ship Navy, as well as the Navy’s most recent force structure assessment that projected a need for 355 ships.

Right now, the Navy is at 275 ships.

Citing capabilities from competitors such as China and Russia, the population trends toward coastal cities and the melting of the polar ice caps opening up new maritime avenues, among other issues, Richardson argued the U.S. naval advantage is “shrinking.”

“We must reverse this trend,” he wrote.

Most projections put the 355 number achievable in the 2040s. But Richardson wants the fleet to grow by the 2020s.

“To do that, we must get more capability out of what we already own and bring new technologies and platforms into the mix as rapidly as possible,” he wrote.

Growing the size of the Navy alone won’t be enough, he added.

“Put another way, a 355-ship Navy using current technology is insufficient for maintaining maritime superiority,” he wrote. “We must grow, yes. But we must also implement new ways of operating our battle fleet, which will comprise new types of ships.”

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that building and operating a 355-ship Navy would average $102 billion annually through 2047.

Richardson told reporters this week it will cost “far less” than the CBO prediction but did not provide an exact figure, according to The Associated Press.

Still, in the paper, Richardson acknowledged that “more will be needed” than the historical levels of funding for shipbuilding.

Shifting to more unmanned systems and energy-based weapons can drive down costs, as well as an acquisition system “far more agile” than the current one, he wrote.

“The competition is on, and pace dominates,” he concluded. “We must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency that our previous advantages may have afforded us, and move out to build a larger, more distributed and more capable battle fleet that can execute our mission.”