Can the US Navy stay ahead of Russia and China? This expert has a plan
To put this 5-part plan in action, Northeastern’s Stephen Flynn is advocating not for a national, top-down process but for a “federated approach” that emphasizes regional strengths.
For 250 years, the U.S. Navy has both protected the flow of commerce and projected American military might across the seven seas.
Northeastern University national security expert Stephen Flynn has a five-part plan to adapt and rebuild the Navy, and ensure its next 250 years continue the mission.
“The ability of the Navy to continue to be the dominant maritime naval force is being challenged by the aging of the fleet, the aging of the weapon systems, and very importantly and challengingly, the aging of the industrial base to actually produce the ships and the weapons and keep the forces at cutting edge,” says Flynn, professor of political science and founding director of the Defense Industrial Base Institute at Northeastern. “The key here really is to provide the direction on five interrelated focal areas and how one action needs to be matched with other actions.”
The birth of the Navy dates back to Oct. 13, 1775, and celebrated its 250th anniversary this week.
Over its history, Flynn says, the Navy has ensured American economic success by securing international trade routes, preventing foreign blockades of American ports, and protecting merchant shipping.
Meanwhile, particularly in the post-World War II era, the Navy projected American military power in areas without forward bases, its fleet of warships and stealth submarines able to — as Flynn says — “put metal on target” at a moment’s notice.
But the world has changed significantly in recent years.
“Now we’re seeing the two (missions) have come together,” Flynn says.
He explains that China’s naval buildup is threatening American primacy over the waves in the Pacific, while wranglings over tariffs have underscored the importance of shipping supply chains and the flow of goods. Moreover, Ukraine’s resistance to an aggressive Russia has demonstrated the effectiveness of tools such as drones and unmanned vessels and made “a real significant change in the way naval warfare is going to be fought,” according to Flynn.
And Flynn says the Navy has a lot catching up to do.
He says the submarine fleet is near the end of its 40-year lifespan, its last major investment made during the Reagan administration. Moreover, the defense manufacturing base has decreased from around 50 to roughly five major contractors since 1990.
“You have to replace what you have, and you have to upgrade what you have, and you’re doing it with an industrial base that’s much, much smaller than it was in 1990 — in no small part because you stopped producing a lot of these things,” Flynn says.
But Flynn has a plan.
Flynn sees five “moving parts that need to be addressed concurrently.”
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These include a workforce that needs to be trained in both basic trades and digital processes; more access to advanced manufacturing for shipbuilding, revamping and stabilizing supply chains so that parts and raw materials are available; reforming the acquisitions and procurement processes so new companies can contract with the DOD; and finding new ways to finance the improvements.
“If I have any advanced manufacturing practice that I’m trying to use and apply to the production of a submarine, then there’s a supply chain that’s going to go with that manufacturing practice, there’s a workforce that has to be trained for it, there’s maybe a rule that keeps it from being done on a submarine, and we’re going to need capital for it,” Flynn says. “They’re all interrelated.”
To put this plan in action, Flynn is advocating not for a national, top-down process but for a “federated approach” that emphasizes regional strengths.
“Trying to coordinate that at the national level, I would argue, is just too daunting and too difficult,” Flynn says. “What I mean by ‘federated’ is more of a distributed kind of an effort where you have a bit of a division of labor – you produce this one thing, we’ll produce this thing and it all comes together and gets constructed into a vessel here.”
The plan also aligns with the Trump administration’s shipbuilding and naval strategy, and Flynn notes that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act appropriated $150 billion for defense and national security, including $29 billion for shipbuilding.
“The direction is there, the resources are there,” Flynn says. “The challenge right now is how to organize the effort to respond to that direction and to put that funding to work.”
