In 2025, America marks 250 years of protecting the people and defending our values, and the Navy remains the backbone of that mission.
It has stood as a storied force from the age of sail to the era of nuclear propulsion, long range strike, and undersea dominance, always defending our shores while preserving opportunity.
Yet the strategic environment today is unlike any we have faced in generations, and that demands a sharper focus on readiness and modernization.
For decades, American naval supremacy was treated as a given. Today, that margin is narrowing.
Our adversaries are building vessels expressly designed to contest our ability to project power, support our allies and operate in the Western Pacific and beyond.
Today, we are not the only navy to have an aircraft carrier with electromagnetic catapults.
They are expanding their reach and capabilities, signaling a willingness to operate globally and challenge U.S. dominance on the world’s oceans.
CNO dishes on sailor wellbeing, US Navy success in era of competition. As our competitors extend their capacity and reach, they study every move we make.
Across the Indo-Pacific, surveillance ships monitor our posture, logistics operations, and multilateral exercises; they chart undersea routes, map chokepoints, and track how we maneuver with partners.
In this environment, deterrence cannot be achieved by rhetoric or presence alone. It requires credible, modern, combat ready naval power.
That is why the U.S. Navy must stay ready, modernize rapidly, and invest wisely because the world is no longer defined by uncontested seas or predictable threats.
We are pursuing an ambitious but essential readiness goal: by January 2027, 80% of our ships, submarines and aircraft will be combat surge ready.
Achieving this requires shorter maintenance cycles, greater spare parts availability, improved training pipelines, and targeted upgrades across the fleet. Readiness is not a budget line; it is a promise to the American people that their Navy will never arrive late to a fight.
Modernization is not merely about keeping pace; it is about leap ahead advantages that deter war and, if necessary, win decisively. We are accelerating production of the Columbia class ballistic missile submarine, the bedrock of our nation’s nuclear deterrent.
A recent $2.28 billion contract for five hulls underscores our commitment to sustaining this unmatched capability for decades to come.
But the fleet of the future must be more than larger; it must be smarter, more resilient, and more lethal.
That requires a balanced mix of aircraft carriers, large and small surface combatants, submarines, unmanned systems, and emerging technologies that can out-think, out-sense, and out-fight any adversary on our terms.
The carrier remains indispensable, but its future lies in a closer pairing with stealth aircraft, longer-range strike platforms, unmanned systems, and advanced refueling concepts that extend reach and complicate an adversary’s calculus.
The air wing of the future must be survivable, dispersed, networked, and capable of operating in highly contested environments.
Large surface combatants will provide resilient command and control, massive payloads, and the electrical power and sensors needed for high-end fights, while small surface combatants will offer distributed fires, deception, escort, and maritime security in regions where presence deters and absence invites risk. The balance of these platforms is not a luxury—it is an operational necessity.
New technologies are reshaping maritime warfare faster than at any time in our history. The Navy is moving decisively to stay ahead. Directed energy weapons like HELIOS are already being tested on ships, but more powerful high energy laser and microwave systems are an imperative to counter drone swarms, cruise missiles, and fast inshore threats.
Unmanned systems will multiply the reach and lethality of our manned platforms. Through initiatives like Replicator, medium and large unmanned surface vessels, autonomous ISR platforms, and long-endurance undersea drones, the fleet grows more distributed, more adaptive, and more unpredictable to any adversary.
These platforms will only realize their full potential through a modernized command and control architecture that fuses sensors, weapons, and decision tools into a single operational picture.
That is why we are investing in resilient networks, artificial intelligence for decision support, and battle management systems that accelerate our ability to find, fix, and finish threats at machine speed while preserving human judgment where it matters most.
Even the most advanced fleet will falter without a strong industrial base, a skilled workforce, and world-class sailors. We are expanding the Maritime Industrial Base Program to grow workforce capacity through advanced technical training in welding, CNC machining, additive manufacturing, and nondestructive testing.
The new Maritime Training Center now produces roughly 1,000 trained workers annually—talent that goes directly into our shipyards.
Until American yards fully recover from workforce shortages and supply chain fragility, we are exploring responsible cooperation with allied shipbuilders in places like South Korea and Japan to bridge near-term gaps in maintenance, repair, and production.
These partnerships create strategic depth today while buying time for U.S. shipyards to modernize and expand for tomorrow.
We must be ruthless in our honesty about readiness and relentlessly innovative in our solutions. America does not want a fair fight—we want a fleet so capable, so ready, and so forward that the fight never begins.
Sea power has always reflected national will; if we intend to remain the world’s preeminent maritime power, we must match our ambition with the resources, stability, and discipline required.
What we protect is greater than what we project. We protect freedom of movement, freedom of trade, and freedom of thought.
As we look beyond this 250th anniversary, we must recommit to maritime superiority with stable funding, accelerated shipbuilding and repair, and a bold embrace of innovation—from machine learning to new ship design to new operational concepts.
Sea power is America’s first line of defense — and our last great advantage. We are committed to preserving it.