Less Is More: The United States Must Stop Stretching Its Navy Thin

At the 2017 Army-Navy football game, the Navy unveiled a new recruiting tagline: “Forged by the Sea.” Nearly a decade later, as U.S. naval forces confront increasingly capable and aggressive adversaries around the globe with a force half the size of its Cold War capacity, a more apt slogan might be: “America’s Navy: Doing More with Less.”

Nowhere is this overstretching more evident and consequential than in the Indo-Pacific, where U.S. aircraft, ships, and submarines square off against China’s burgeoning maritime strength. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) outnumbers forward-deployed U.S. Seventh Fleet ships by 5.3 to 1.¹ Even the broader Pacific Fleet, which remains weeks away from potential East Asian hotspots, faces a 1.85 to 1 disadvantage.² 

This disparity empowers China to assert its maritime ambitions by disregarding international norms, pressuring U.S. allies, and eroding U.S. regional influence from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean. The U.S. Navy’s ability to respond is subject to the tyrannies of numbers, distance, and its many priorities in the Pacific. Rather than accepting these limitations, it struggles to maintain a constant forward presence that mirrors China’s naval presence, to avoid ceding control of strategic waters.³ At the same time, U.S. forces must juggle their commitments to allies, training certifications, readiness requirements, and off-the-cuff deployments to the Middle East.⁴ 

By behaving as though it wields limitless resources, the United States has lost sight of what should matter most in the Indo-Pacific: solidifying deterrence, sharpening warfighting skills, and reshaping the strategic landscape to counter China’s momentum. Overcommitted and constantly having to react to combatant command demands, the Navy has been rendered unprepared to meet and defeat the China challenge. It also has inadvertently played into Beijing’s hands. China has almost certainly exploited this “slavish devotion to forward naval presence,” as former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work put it, by distracting and exhausting U.S. naval forces to the point at which they may not be able to mount an effective defense when one is most needed.⁵

Operational Overextension

A natural and necessary tension exists between operational tempo and readiness generation. Civilian leaders and combatant commands often request as many naval forces as possible to maintain a forward presence.⁶ These demands are tempered by the practical limitations of fleet size and readiness. Since the end of the Cold War, however, this balance has skewed toward operational overextension. Today, some 100 Navy ships are deployed worldwide—the same number as during the Cold War, even though the fleet has fewer than 300 ships, a far cry from the Reagan era’s nearly 600 ships.⁷ 

The Navy’s reduced fleet now bears the weight of constant forward-presence missions, many of which are necessary to project U.S. influence but also are taxing the service’s operational resilience. These missions include:

• Freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs). Established in 1979, the FONOPs program has sought to challenge maritime claims deemed unlawful under international law. In 2015, the Navy carried out its first South China Sea FONOP when the USS Lassen (DDG-82) sailed within 12 nautical miles of Subi Reef, a militarized maritime feature Beijing claims as its territory.⁸ Since then, the Navy has performed roughly ten FONOPs annually in the region.⁹ 

• Taiwan Strait transits. In a similar show of presence, U.S. naval forces regularly transit the Taiwan Strait, a strategic and economic waterway that China claims as its own. International law gives every country the right to operate in these waters. Last year, U.S. warships conducted five transits, with eight the year before, each signaling the strait’s international status and U.S. opposition to Beijing’s ambitions to dominate cross-strait affairs.¹⁰

• Reacting to PLAN movements. As the PLAN expands its capabilities through joint exercises, pressure tactics, and extended area deployments, U.S. warships are frequently dispatched to surveil or shadow PLAN activities. One prominent example occurred in April 2021 when the USS Mustin (DDG-89) shadowed the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning, closely observing her operations.¹¹ This is far from an isolated mission; U.S. naval assets often monitor PLAN combatants to send the message that wherever the PLAN operates, U.S. forces are poised to respond.

Beyond Exhaustion

The Navy now finds itself stretched dangerously thin. Its fleet is overextended trying to meet the relentless presence demands with fewer ships. The strain is visible—and troubling.

In 2009, after a string of ship inspection failures, the Balisle Report flagged a worrying trend: the Navy’s focus on “deriv[ing] efficiencies” and satisfying operational requirements jeopardized the surface fleet’s “material readiness,” which was “well below acceptable levels to support reliable, sustained operations at sea and preserve ships to their full service life expectancy.”¹² The report’s calls for improved maintenance and training periods went largely unanswered until the 2017 USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and John S. McCain (DDG-56) collisions.¹³ Only then did the Navy recalibrate, ensuring ships got the maintenance—and sailors got the training—they deserve. 

Yet, the small course correction failed to fix the big problem. If anything, it made matters worse. Maintenance and training were added on top of the operational requirements. Thus, ships were tasked with even more than before, contravening the Balisle Report’s original intent. And, as threats in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere have swelled, so have the demands on the Navy.

Today, the Navy is not sized to sustain the operational pace required to match the PLAN in its own backyard. Four years after the Fitzgerald and John S. McCain collisions, Congress commissioned the report “Fighting Culture of the Navy’s Surface Fleet,” which found the Navy still “too small to accomplish all the missions with which it is tasked by senior civilian leaders and combatant commanders.”¹⁴  

This “do more with less” approach lengthens deployments, shrinks necessary maintenance, and exhausts crews, which exacerbates recruitment and retention issues.¹⁵ Ships forced to swap maintenance cycles for extended deployments return home riddled with rust—an apt representation of their poor condition.¹⁶ When ships finally must undergo necessary repairs, their maintenance periods often run over time and over budget, reducing overall ship availability and the ability to surge in a crisis.¹⁷ These issues create a self-perpetuating cycle of readiness degeneration that weakens the Navy’s ability to operate as freely and frequently as its leaders would like.

Ineffective Deterrence: PLAN Runs Rampant

Despite years of U.S. FONOPs, Taiwan Strait transits, and persistent monitoring, the PLAN’s growth and assertiveness continue unchecked, casting doubt on the efficacy of presence as a deterrent. 

Since 2015—when U.S. presence operations in the Pacific began in earnest—China’s navy has surpassed the U.S. Navy in number of battleforce ships, which now totals around 370 ships compared with the U.S. Navy’s 295. High-end combatants are an increasing proportion of the PLAN fleet.¹⁸ Concurrently, China has built and militarized islands in the South China Sea, maintained pressure on Taiwan, and turned the China Coast Guard into a potent force that rivals most regional navies and regularly bullies other nations’ fishing fleets.

Supporters of constant forward naval presence may argue that these operations deter the worst of the PLAN’s plans—possibly even curbing China’s maritime expansion. However, proving deterrence—like proving any negative concept—is inherently inconclusive. Just because China has not invaded Taiwan or militarized Scarborough Shoal does not mean U.S. naval operations prevented those outcomes. If these operations genuinely deterred China, one would expect to see reduced Chinese naval activity—not its constant rise. But the PLAN has only become more assertive, deploying farther afield and increasing military pressure against U.S. partners and allies.

Moreover, if U.S. naval presence operations were unsettling Beijing, one would expect strong reactions, replete with retaliatory measures, belligerent rhetoric, or even pop-up military exercises. Yet, China’s standard, muted responses to constant U.S. naval presence suggest China sees these operations as tolerable—and maybe even advantageous for now, because they keep the U.S. Navy distracted and overextended, while doing little to temper China’s strategic aims.

Apart from a notable 2018 Spratly Islands FONOP, in which a PLAN Luyang-class destroyer came within 45 yards of the USS Decatur (DDG-73), most FONOPs, Taiwan Strait transits, and monitoring efforts elicit proportional, predictable responses.¹⁹ Typically, the PLAN will shadow U.S. ships during these operations. Afterward, Beijing issues statements condemning the United States for “illegally entering China’s . . . territorial waters without the approval of the Chinese Government.”²⁰ The posture and rhetoric are consistent—a copy-and-paste response that avoids escalation or deviation from the norm, though it gives China countless opportunities to assert bogus claims over these international waters without consequence.

In sharp contrast, actions that China deems provocative, particularly those involving U.S. diplomatic or military support for its allies, trigger harsher responses. For instance, when then–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022, China responded with a major military pressure campaign against Taiwan.²¹ The PLA sprinkled DF-17 medium-range ballistic missiles around the island, simulated a blockade, and conducted many surface and air incursions. In addition, Beijing suspended eight strategic cooperation channels with the United States. 

Similarly, though less bombastically, in 2024, following a spate of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, China vowed “countermeasures,” dispatched a combat patrol around Taiwan, imposed sanctions on U.S. defense companies involved in the sales, and suspended key arms control talks.²² In 2023, vitriolic rhetoric and military pressure from China also accompanied Japan’s decision to station a U.S. Marine littoral regiment in Okinawa, and the Philippines decision to grant the U.S. military access to four new defense sites.²³

This discrepancy in reactions demonstrates that China does not see U.S. naval presence as a serious threat to its objectives. Beijing does not retaliate after a FONOP by sanctioning Bath Iron Works or Newport News Shipyard or suspending bilateral diplomatic fora. Instead, these actions are met with a familiar, measured—almost acquiescent—response.

China’s Competitive Strategy

The reason behind China’s tame reaction to U.S. naval presence may lie in its competitive strategy. 

During the Cold War, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, led by Andrew Marshall, developed the concept of a “competitive strategy.”²⁴ The idea was simple: Use peacetime military power to shape a competitor’s decisions in ways that favor one’s objectives. This approach discerns a competitor’s limited resources and then forces the competitor to make tough choices that exacerbate its weaknesses.

China’s maritime strategy echoes Marshall’s competitive approach. By developing and advancing its naval proficiency throughout the Pacific theater, the PLAN lures the U.S. Navy into constant, resource-draining reactions and operations. Beijing may reckon that every minute the U.S. Navy spends tracking Chinese maneuvers is a minute not spent sharpening its combat or material readiness. Over time, U.S. naval forces could become unprepared to mount a credible deterrence or respond decisively in crisis or conflict.

China’s approach is not revolutionary. It is a strategy of exhaustion, in which one power seeks to wear down its adversary without direct confrontation. This doctrine can be traced back to Sun Tzu’s Art of War and was later reframed for the West by British historian B. H. Liddell Hart, who advocated for an “indirect approach” in his 1954 book Strategy. Hart argued that strategic success lies not in the “destruction [of enemy forces] by hard fighting” but in disarming them by upsetting their plans and resources, which he dubbed “dislocation.”²⁵ 

Today, Beijing’s strategy toward the U.S. Navy exemplifies Hart’s dislocation. By compelling U.S. forces to spread themselves thin across the region, China calculates that U.S. presence operations, though a nuisance, are unlikely to impede its broader regional ambitions.

Changing Course: Reactive to Proactive

The good news is that the bleak U.S. position in the Indo-Pacific is self-inflicted and, thus, reversible. The United States must swiftly recalibrate its Indo-Pacific strategy toward sustainable operations that prioritize effective deterrence and credible combat readiness. This demands a focus on advanced, multidomain exercises and rigorous, realistic training designed to outwit, outmaneuver, and outperform the Chinese fleet. In short, the Navy must ensure that the size of the fight in the navy is far more important than the size of the navy in the fight. However, achieving this requires other entities to assume some of the Navy’s current presence demands. Here are three ways to get started:

• Interoperate with allies and share the operational burden. While “strengthening alliances” is a popular prescription for U.S. foreign policy, the Navy’s efforts often are symbolic gestures—a “combined exercise” that generates a press release and a nice photo. But beyond the challenge of properly positioning U.S. and foreign warships for a photo exercise, which is not a transferable combat skill, there must be greater attention given to enhancing intelligence-sharing; deepening understanding of each other’s tactics, techniques, and procedures; and fostering true wartime interoperability.

To cultivate interoperability, the Navy should expand ship-to-ship exchanges with allied navies to provide greater access for liaison officers and incorporate realistic war-at-sea simulations in which some partners assume adversarial roles. Regular post-sail debriefs should accompany pre-sail conferences, so participants can offer lessons and determine ways to translate training into real-world operational capabilities suitable for peacetime operations and wartime contingencies. By equipping allies such as Japan, Australia, India, South Korea, and New Zealand with this level of hands-on experience, the Navy may be able to count on these partners to shoulder a greater share of presence patrols within their respective maritime backyards.

• Establish a larger, permanent U.S. Coast Guard presence to manage PLAN reactions and maritime law enforcement missions. Coast Guard cutters are well-suited for sustained, lower-intensity presence missions, such as FONOPs, sea lane enforcement, and monitoring PLAN operations near U.S. or allied waters—roles it has slowly begun taking on with notable effectiveness. To further ease the strain on Navy warships, the Coast Guard could establish a forward-deployed district in the western Pacific with permanent high- and medium-endurance cutters and at least two rotational national security cutters. 

Forward-staging additional Coast Guard assets in Guam or Hawaii would reduce transit times to the South China Sea and guarantee a reliable, steady stream of other U.S. assets in theater. With its law enforcement authority, the Coast Guard can enforce maritime norms without packing the escalatory firepower of an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer. Such a reallocation of responsibilities would help sustain a larger, capable, and diverse U.S. presence in the region.

• Invest in asymmetric capabilities to offset China’s numerical advantage. The conflict in Ukraine has shown that small, agile forces can inflict serious damage on a larger naval power through asymmetric means. The Navy should heed this lesson by accelerating investments in and deployments of unmanned systems, especially after early successes with Task Forces 59.1 and 66.²⁶ In peacetime, unmanned surface vessels (USVs) and aerial drones could patrol critical waterways autonomously, monitoring choke points and tracking Chinese naval movements without relying on manned assets. In preparation for war, unmanned underwater vehicles could practice targeting Chinese merchant vessels. USVs could begin escorting allied merchant vessels, reinforcing convoy security and safeguarding supply routes. 

With newfound time, resources, and opportunity, the Navy could practice “going dark” to evade Chinese detection and targeting, operate under communications constraints, fortify and diversify its logistics nodes, and rehearse decentralized command structures. These operations are not all-inclusive. Nor are they only about resource efficiency; they represent a proactive strategy aimed at getting real and getting better to neuter the PLAN’s numerical advantage by unleashing the U.S. Navy’s combat experience, innovative spirit, regional access, agile strength, and unparalleled war-fighting skill.

Back to the Basics

For years, U.S. defense leaders have aimed to address the Navy’s chronic supply-and-demand imbalance by promising to grow the fleet. The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act mandated a 355-ship Navy. Five years later, the Navy sought a 381-ship force.²⁷ The recommended goal oscillates like a soup of the day, but the broader ambition remains a mirage. 

The Navy certainly needs more ships to meet mounting threats across the Pacific (and beyond), but meaningful growth is at least a decade away. In the interim, the service must pivot to a proactive, resource-efficient approach that upholds a credible deterrent. Operational restraint, sharing presence missions with allies, improved services and technologies, and a preference for strategy over symbolism would position the Navy to thwart China’s rising assertiveness and, if conflict arises, decisively prevail. Doing less with more in the next several years may be the key to victory.