It was the US Navy’s controversial and unlikely proposal to build an enormous 35,000-ton Trump-class battleship armed with lasers, hypersonic missiles, and a railgun that grabbed the headlines in a December announcement about the future fleet. But that masked a much more serious move.
In a heady six months starting last summer, USN leaders made four important decisions that could add significant tonnage to the fleet, and soon. Given China’s rate of warship construction (it is churning out vessels at an incredible rate), this is critical to ensuring the US has enough ships.
Whether and when the added tonnage will deliver significant added firepower remains to be seen, however. It’s an expansion that risks creating a hollow fleet — one that’s long on hulls and short on missiles.
Recent USN decisions aim to boost what the Americans describe as small surface combatants, that is, warships that are smaller and cheaper than the fleet’s current 9,000-ton, $2.5bn destroyers, but still possess seagoing qualities and combat capability.
These small combatants are widely seen as the key to growing the front-line fleet from today’s roughly 290 ships to the longstanding objective of 350 or more. And if the Navy can put a lot of small combatants in the water, quickly, it could inspire other Western navies that have also struggled to add mass — and thus struggled to keep pace with the fast-growing Chinese navy.
There are rocks in those programmatic shoals, however. Most worryingly, the Americans haven’t quite decided how to properly arm all those new ships they plan to build.
The key decisions came like a drumbeat starting last summer. First, USN leaders settled on a single cheap hull for a new class of unmanned missile corvette. Second, they cancelled the much-delayed, over-budget Constellation-class frigate program. In a related move, fleet officials selected the FF (X), a new, cheaper frigate based on a proven design. Finally, it reversed plans to further shrink the existing flotilla of unloved Littoral Combat Ships (LCS).
The potential $22bn battleship may never become anything more than a grandiose idea. It’s much more likely that $100m corvettes and $500m frigates will actually set sail, and the LCSs, for their part, are already in service.
Six years after a little-known Pentagon office began experimenting with robotic warships, the Navy finally lost patience. In late July, the fleet asked industry to pitch designs for a modular attack surface craft (MASC). It wants a prototype in the water by mid-2027.
MASC is a family of crewless missile corvettes that borrows requirements from two previous concepts for unmanned surface vessels: the medium and large unmanned surface vessel (MUSV and LUSV). The MUSV would have been a surveillance platform. The LUSV would’ve included vertical missile cells for anti-ship and land-attack missions.
To speed unmanned vessels to the fleet, Navy planners simplified these efforts — and split the difference between the MUSV and the LUSV. Now, the plan is for a single type of robotic ship displacing around 1,000 tons to handle surveillance and combat missions at a unit cost of $100m or so. The point is “to move faster,” said Rear Adm. William Daly, the head of the Navy’s surface warfare division.
It’s unclear how the fleet will arm potentially dozens of unmanned ships. That’s a problem that’s endemic across the Navy’s planned fleet of small combatants. After cancelling the Constellation-class frigate, which was years late and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget owing to seemingly endless design changes, USN leaders selected the easiest-to-build alternative.
They chose the US Coast Guard’s 4,700-ton Legend class of patrol cutters. With minimal changes, the cutter design will become the Navy’s first new frigate in decades. How many FF(G) frigates the fleet may acquire is unclear. Likely at least 10. Possibly many more. The first ship is expected to launch in 2028.
At around $600m per ship, the cutter is inexpensive, but it’s also lightly armed with a 57mm gun, SeaRAM short-range surface-to-air missiles for self-defence, and a pair of quad launchers for Naval Strike Missile medium-range anti-ship missiles. Like the cutter it’s based on, the frigate can’t defend itself or nearby ships from serious aerial threats at long range, nor can it attack land targets deep inside enemy territory.
As it happens, the same dearth of heavy armament plagues the fleet’s only current small combatants: the near-shore LCS. The 28 vessels have the same guns, surface-to-air missiles, and anti-ship missiles as the cutter-based frigates.
The light weaponry is the main reason the Navy never loved the 3,000-ton, $600m LCSs — and planned to cull the fleet from 35 ships to just 21 despite many of the vessels being just a few years old. But in a surprise move in January, the Navy announced it would retain 28 LCSs, effectively adding seven small combatants to the fleet with the stroke of a pen.
There’s just one obvious way to add heavy weaponry to all three types at the center of the US fleet’s new concept for small combatants. It’s a metal container that can fit and launch all but the very biggest missiles in the USN inventory.
Each Mark 70 Payload Delivery System packs four missile cells. It’s compatible with any ship that has the deck space for a 12-meter shipping container. The Americans have already bolted Mark 70s onto the helicopter flight decks of at least one LCS for trial purposes. There’s space on the fantail of the Legend-class cutter for at least a pair of Mark 70s. The unmanned surface vessel could carry as many as four of the quad launchers.
None of the ships has the radar capability to spot targets for SM-2 and SM-6 long-range surface-to-air missiles, however, nor the combat systems to coordinate land attacks with Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles. But all three small combatant types should be able to receive target coordinates from nearby friendly forces.
Desperate to add small combatants, USN leaders are now willing to deploy lightly armed ships — something they hesitated to do as recently as a year ago. Mark 70s could lend all three new types some offensive and long-range defensive firepower, but it could take costly and time-consuming redesigns to add below-deck launchers and permanently integrate the heaviest armament.
The USN’s strategy is to accept some risk up-front while growing the fleet, and adding weapons only after adding hulls. For European fleets that are also struggling to grow — perhaps most notably, the under-funded, under-staffed, and aging Royal Navy — the Americans are an example.
The question is whether they’re a cautionary example or an example to follow. There’s little stopping the Royal Navy from commissioning small, lightly armed ships, bolting Mark 70s or similar container launchers onto their decks as a temporary measure, and then adding heavier weaponry later on.
Of course, if lightly armed US small combatants sail into battle sometime soon and suffer defeat, allied fleets may congratulate themselves for not following the Americans’ lead by rushing hulls into the water before they were fully armed.
David Axe is a journalist, author, and filmmaker in South Carolina. For 20 years, he has covered war for Forbes, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vice, The Village Voice, Voice of America, and others. He has reported from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere. Right now, he is focused on covering Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
War Without End
Russia’s Shadow Warfare
CEPA Forum 2025
Explore CEPA’s flagship event.
