Who Gives a Ship
The U.S. must build ships that fully embrace autonomy to regain naval dominance.
By David A. Cowan, who writes on Substack at The American System and is a non-resident fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation.
Naval warfare is on the brink of a radical transformation. The nature of sea power has evolved over time due to technological change, shaping global geopolitics from the Battle of Salamis to the present day. President Trump has put shipbuilding capacity at the heart of his vision for national greatness, putting more resources and planning into expanding the merchant and naval fleets.
The United States used to be world leading in its ability to build ships, establishing it as a great naval power. But now there is plenty of catching up to do. It also matters what kind of vessels our defense industrial base is producing. The U.S. Navy must be able to deploy a modern, hybrid fleet of ships—something very different from the days of World War II—and it cannot be held hostage by white elephant projects that never pan out.
The demise of ship building is connected to the well-documented decline of the American defense industrial base. The defense industry is now dominated by five prime contractors—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman—whereas 51 companies used to compete against each other as recently as 1993. Less competition has led to dangerous reductions in innovation and production with talent and capital being directed elsewhere in the tech sector. Dual-use companies serving both military and civilian purposes have become far less common. The nation’s stockpile of munitions would last only days in a hot war, with the ability to replenish them taking years in the event of a conflict with China. The gap in military-industrial power has become dangerously wide and risks getting worse.
What the United States must do today to confront an ambitious China is maintain an effective deterrence, as we did during the Cold War. The Indo-Pacific is the key geoeconomic region of the twenty-first century, eclipsing Europe. If China gains dominance over shipping lanes and trade, then it can exploit chokepoints in supply chains and rally other countries to apply pressure on the United States.
To do this, the U.S. Navy will have to grapple with how to maintain a supply of munitions, personnel, and ships to project power in Indo-Pacific waters for a sustained period, and, potentially, at the same time in other regional theaters. These ships need to be built to support new autonomous platforms adapted to the air, the surface, underwater, and in cyber. They will also need to be manufactured fast enough to cope with the burn rate of an Indo-Pacific conflict.
Doing that well requires demonstrating that we have the capacity to protect critical infrastructure, shipping lanes, and our coastlines. That, in turn, requires that we can rapidly manufacture the weapons and tools to project power. What this new geopolitical world demands is a nimbler U.S. Navy, consisting of smaller and more lethal ships capable of responding to situations quickly. It is also requires a U.S. Navy that can build a hybrid fleet under a new infrastructure with new partners instead of relying on the old primes.
This burn rate in defense resources has been a problem in successive conflicts. The World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq have all posed this challenge. Cutting-edge tech that can be manufactured rapidly and at scale will be essential in the next conflict, which will likely arrive before the F-47 fighter jet is ready in the early 2030s. When even low-level threats like the Houthis—an Islamist militia in northern Yemen that has been attacking American ships traveling through the Red Sea—can potentially shoot down an F-35, defense policymakers should seriously reconsider depending on manned fighter jets. Deterrence against Chinese ambitions demands a defense industrial base capable of producing a greater range of platforms at speed.
The rise of autonomous platforms makes this possible. Expensive manned vessels can be damaged by drones that are cost far less to manufacture and can be operated from a safe distance. AI software can guide these systems to predict potential threats, protect critical assets, and organize logistics more efficiently. In short, autonomous systems can provide a military advantage that decides whether a country can successfully survive a conflict.
And the time to deliver change is now. As China flexes its muscles in the Indo-Pacific, the United States needs a coherent response. The path of least resistance is likely the National Defense Authorization Act, which is currently making its way through Congress. It proposes impressive spending increases worth billions for autonomous weaponry, including $1 billion for kamikaze drones—which are loaded with warheads and can be used to devastate tanks and vessels. This funding should be spent in the most efficient way possible while maximizing innovation if the military is going to have the edge it needs over China.
Aircraft carriers and fighter jets are loved by politicians and the top brass, but they are infamous for budget overruns and have more value as job programs for congressional districts. The specter of an ascendent Chinese navy underscores that the U.S. Navy doesn’t have the luxury of time. Building the military readiness the United States needs is incompatible with waiting a decade for new ships—which may themselves be the wrong kind of ship.
Building these ships of the future will mean embracing the nascent defense tech sector in the United States, worth around $130 billion, and the companies emerging from Silicon Valley. Closer ties between the U.S. Navy and defense tech companies can foster collaboration, innovation, and growth, justifying steep defense spending rises to the public and delivering results. This should include intense R&D collaboration, trial testing prototypes with naval personnel, to create the best possible product. China, already a formidable naval power, isn’t just dramatically outbuilding the United States but is investing heavily in autonomous weaponry for naval purposes.
Unmanned Underwater Vessels (UUVs) can monitor critical offshore infrastructure and protect it from sabotage—such as interconnectors and data cables that Americans rely on for communication, family life, and business. Militarily, they can conduct search and rescue missions, hunt for mines, carry out surveillance and reconnaissance, and provide logistics support.
Autonomous weapons would act as a low-cost frontline maritime defense, keeping more valuable assets and personnel out of harm’s way. There is no replacing submarines and manned ships, but autonomous weapons can help serve American military interests while saving lives and money. And these smaller ships should embrace the use of drones. Today’s military has the capacity to build only 100,000 drones a year but should be scaled up by orders of magnitude to support a next-generation fighting force. Thankfully, a recent showcase on the Potomac made clear that there is a wealth of domestic companies doing exactly this type of work today.
We are starting to see budding collaborations between the federal government and new defense tech companies. Anduril and Palantir have launched a joint AI and data program for the Department of Defense to help improve weapons systems. These companies already enjoy strong relations with the department and are supporting the wider ecosystem around them. Palantir and Saronic are working together on autonomous naval capabilities, bringing together their respective expertise in software and hardware to expand the range of autonomous ships. Palantir is also working with Saildrone to develop unmanned surface vehicles to monitor maritime borders, supporting Operation Southern Spear to tackle the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. This provides vital data to the U.S. Coast Guard at a minimal cost compared with using ships to patrol the waters. Rebellion Defense is supporting the U.S. Navy with software programs for predictive targeting, ensuring enemy drones can be quickly identified, anticipated, and eliminated.
The technology is ready, but what is holding back America’s military is an inattentive Congress, failing to exploit the opportunities presented by autonomous systems. Admiral Samuel Paparo of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, to his credit, has been making the case that America needs to drastically scale up our unmanned capabilities at a time of increasing tension with China. But progress toward building a hybrid fleet has been slow since 2021. There are legitimate points about the difficulty of integrating autonomous systems with current manned platforms, as has been found in recent Pacific exercises, especially over maintenance, communications, and perception. But there is also bureaucratic inertia within the U.S. Navy that must be overcome.
To build more and smaller manned ships, fully adapted to working with autonomous systems, the United States needs to fix its shipbuilding crisis. During the Second World War, the United States could build a ship in five days. While that was not the standard, it shows how badly the nation’s shipbuilding capacity has become. The best we can do now is produce five merchant ships a year. China outproduces the United States in ships 232 times over. These numbers show American influence going in the wrong direction in the Indo-Pacific. The United States needs to up its game.
There’s wind in the sails of a solution. Bipartisan support is behind the SHIPS for America Act to rebuild the commercial maritime fleet. This legislation would provide a robust web of facilities, supply chains, and workers capable of producing more ships. China, Japan, and South Korea have dominated the commercial shipping industry for years. This should not be about what is most economically efficient, but what will secure the American national interest. On ship numbers, port operators, and software, China is taking the lead.
But building more ships isn’t merely a question of political will. The United States can only restore its naval advantage with an industrial base that can support autonomous systems. By deploying a range of policy levers, as recommended by the recent Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook—produced by American Compass, the Foundation for American Innovation, and Institute for Progress with a shared vision of a better designed state and cutting-edge tech—the federal government can take considerable steps toward accomplishing this feat. That includes a balanced combination of public investment to support critical technologies and regulatory reform to unblock bottlenecks in permitting and energy.
As part of increasing the production of such systems, Congress should authorize funding for the construction of autonomous shipyards through public-private partnerships. This could create spaces across the American coast where defense tech employees and naval personnel can discuss the impact of changing technology on sea power and exchange ideas. The Department of Defense can host training academies, annual summits, and regular workshops at these shipyards to keep a dialogue going around emergent technologies and threats. It would also provide alternative entry points into a naval career from the defense tech sector, supporting workforce development.
Autonomous systems should not be viewed as a luxury or an optional extra when it comes to protecting America’s interests and American lives. It should be decisively framed as the future of warfare. This requires a rewiring of the U.S. Navy and intense cooperation between the Department of Defense and the defense tech sector. Rebuilding shipbuilding capacity will have to be done in such a way as to create a naval power that can channel autonomy with total and devastating impact so any peer power will think twice before challenging the United States. Doing so is impossible with the ships of today, but American industry seems ready to step in to deliver the weapons of tomorrow—if the government would only ask.