Can the US Navy actually get any bigger?

Can’t build enough ships, and couldn’t crew them anyway

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the US Navy’s top officer, has laid out a three-year strategic plan for the world’s leading fleet. Most notably, the Admiral has acknowledged the hard reality that there isn’t any scope for the US fleet to get bigger in the near term.
Franchetti’s priorities are improving ship maintenance, integrating robotic vessels with the wider fleet, recruiting more sailors and improving training for the likeliest war scenarios. These efforts are “how we will get more ready players on the field by 2027,” Franchetti wrote in her Chief of Naval Operations Navigation Plan for 2024.
Notably missing is one of the top priorities of CNOs who preceded Franchetti, who was confirmed in her post by the US Senate back in November. Franchetti’s plan effectively suspends the Navy’s 20-year struggle to grow from today’s roughly 290 front-line warships to a fleet with at least 350 big manned ships.
It’s not that the fleet doesn’t need to grow, Franchetti conceded. “The Navy emphatically acknowledges the need for a larger, more lethal force,” she wrote.
But the money just isn’t there. With its roughly $200-billion annual budget, the Navy can barely afford the ships, planes and people it already has – to say nothing of the 25-percent bigger force repeated analyses have concluded the Navy needs in order to reliably fight and win simultaneous wars.
Struggling to balance shipbuilding, maintenance and recruiting, the Navy is failing at all three. Finally admitting that the badly-designed, lightly-armed new Littoral Combat Ships aren’t worth the cost of maintaining and crewing them, the Navy has been decommissioning the practically brand-new vessels as fast as it commissions the final few examples of the type.
The one-third cut to the 35-ship LCS class has weighed on the fleet expansion plan, as has a serious manpower crisis that has slowed construction of new frigates, destroyers and submarines and has compelled US Military Sealift Command, which operates 130 support ships alongside the Navy, to lay up several vessels for a want of mariners. Dozens of Navy and MSC vessels are awaiting long-deferred maintenance. 
Lasting fixes will take money, time and careful planning. “We will continue to partner with Congress to invest in our industrial base capacity and secure the necessary budget growth to deliver a larger, more lethal force,” Franchetti wrote. “Without those resources, however, we will continue to prioritise readiness, capability and capacity – in that order.”
That means completing construction of ships Congress has already paid for, repairing broken ships and recruiting additional sailors and, for the MSC, civilian seafarers before spending billions on ordering more ships that would just add to the industrial backlog and deepen the existing shipbuilder and crew shortage. This “right-sizing” could take a while, Franchetti wrote. “We cannot manifest a bigger traditional Navy in a few short years.”
One of Franchetti’s priorities could mitigate the planned pause in fleet expansion. She intends to sail full steam ahead on the Navy’s plan to add scores of large robotic vessels to the fleet – some of them for surveillance missions, others packing vertical cells loaded with long-range missiles. 
“Nearer-term operational challenges demand that we integrate proven robotic and autonomous capabilities as soon as possible,” Franchetti wrote. “We must do so with a focus on how we will use these systems in war. By 2027, we will integrate proven robotic and autonomous systems for routine use by the commanders who will employ them.”
Crewless vessels could add firepower to the fleet without adding a lot of new hard-to-fill billets for human sailors – although to be fair, the unmanned ships the Navy is developing do require a few operators to monitor and command them from a distance. 
But if the Navy screws up the robotic ships the way it screwed up, say, the manned LCS, it will only compound its problems – by burdening industry with additional workload building ineffective vessels. And by wasting money and time, neither of which the service has in abundance.