The United States Navy's plans to increase the number of ships in its fleet would cost more than $1 trillion over the next three decades, a new analysis published by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows.
Newsweek reached out to the U.S. Navy for comment.
Why It Matters
The U.S. Navy is a dominant Western maritime power, but it is spread thin. Keeping a navy the size of Washington's going is a phenomenal task and one with an expensive price tag. The cost of developing, building and sustaining a vast fleet is high, as is manning the vessels with well-trained crew members and arming them with sophisticated missiles.
But the U.S. is now contending with Russia's robust surface and submarine fleet and the significant investment China is funneling into its own navy. The U.S. Navy is used to project power worldwide and reassure Washington's allies, including in the Middle East and Indo-Pacific.
"The Navy wants to put more offensive capability—primarily missiles and unmanned systems—on a greater number of ships than it currently has," the CBO said. According to the report, if the Navy can achieve the goals it sets out in its 2025 plan, it will eventually have the largest fleet the Navy has operated since 2001. However, it expressed some skepticism over the impact of persistent delays.
What To Know
The CBO looks at the plans submitted by the Pentagon and Navy, which outline its trajectory for the coming decades. The plan was presented to Congress in March last year.
The Navy hopes to increase its ship numbers over the next 30 years to 390 vessels. It currently has 295 ships, although this will briefly drop by more than a dozen by 2027 as ships are retired faster than they are commissioned.
The Navy's 2025 plan would cost 46 percent more each year—when adjusted to take out inflation—than the average amount dedicated yearly over the past five years, the CBO said. The total shipbuilding costs would cost $40 billion annually over the next 30 years in today's money, coming in at 17 percent more than the Navy estimates.
The analysis from the CBO is an assessment of what would be needed to meet the Navy's stated goals, said Dr. Bradley Martin, a retired U.S. Navy Captain and a senior policy researcher at the RAND think tank.
"The number is substantially larger than what the Navy has estimated, and it reflects CBO's previous experience with Navy cost estimates being low for individual ship programs," Martin told Newsweek.
The CBO put the Department of the Navy's 2024 budget at roughly $255 billion but said that current plans would need an annual budget of around $340 billion by the 2050s, a hike of approximately a third.
American shipyards in the coming decades would need to produce "substantially more naval tonnage than they have produced over the past 10 years," according to the report. "The rate of production of nuclear-powered submarines, in particular, would need to increase significantly."
What People Are Saying
The Congressional Budget Office in January 2025: "The Navy's 2025 plan would cost 46 percent more annually in real terms (that is, adjusted to remove the effects of inflation) than the average amount appropriated over the past 5 years. CBO estimates that total shipbuilding costs would average $40 billion (in 2024 dollars) over the next 30 years, which is about 17 percent more than the Navy estimates."
Eric Labs, a naval analyst at the CBO, told the Associated Press in August 2024: "I don't see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It's taken us a long time to get into it."
What Happens Next
It remains to be seen how the report's conclusions will be taken, but keeping the U.S. Navy as a dominant force will be very expensive.
Dedicating $1 trillion over the next 30 years is "probably achievable" for an economy the size of the U.S., Martin said, "but CBO's fundamental point is the persistent lack of realism in Navy cost estimation."
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