The ensuing crisis is shedding light on the weaknesses in U.S. military infrastructure that could prove highly problematic in a potential conflict with China. The Pentagon should act decisively to protect Oahu’s aquifers and stop deferring investments in Indo-Pacific posture that are needed to deter Chinese aggression.

On the eve of World War II, the Roosevelt administration recognized the vulnerability of above-ground fuel stores at Pearl Harbor and commissioned a crash construction program to secretly build 20 steel-lined underground storage tanks encased in concrete. More than a dozen workers died erecting the resulting engineering marvel that has been compared to the Hoover Dam and can securely store 250 million gallons of fuel, more than anywhere else in the United States.

Red Hill has ably served the nation, but the nearly 80-year-old facility is showing its age. A series of spills over the past decade heightened public concerns that fuel could seep into an adjacent aquifer and forced the Navy to agree to upgrade the facility by 2037, but the Navy has estimated the project will not be complete until 2051.

That approach appears to have been 30 years too slow. Earlier this month, hundreds of families served by a well near Red Hill smelled fuel coming from their faucets, causing the Navy to suspend operations at the facility. Navy officials now suspect the contamination stemmed from an operator error that has already been addressed, rather than leaking tanks, but the crisis has cast a shadow over the entire facility and makes clear 2051 is not soon enough.

Shutting Red Hill would be straightforward, but the facility is more vital than ever. China has improved its ability to attack bases throughout the Indo-Pacific region, and the Pentagon has swapped many of its underground fuel tanks in California, Washington state and on other Pacific islands for lower cost but more vulnerable aboveground tanks. These shifts make it even more critical for Red Hill to be able to securely supply ships and aircraft in a crisis or conflict, just as the Biden administration confronts an increasingly belligerent China.

The challenge at Red Hill is emblematic of widespread infrastructure deficiencies throughout the U.S. military. For decades, the Department of Defense deferred modernization, and now the bill is coming due as buildings, piers, and runways age or are rendered obsolete by security threats or rising oceans.

Even in priority theaters like the Indo-Pacific, the military’s latest infrastructure projects seemingly underestimate adversaries. For example, in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and northern Australia, the U.S. plans on building a pair of above-ground fuel tanks that would be vulnerable to Chinese attack and could only supply a couple weeks’ worth of operations. These weaknesses undercut deterrence and embolden Chinese aggression.

Moving forward, the Navy will need to thoroughly clean the spill at Red Hill and swiftly fund a plan to enhance the security of its fuel stores. This could include upgrading Red Hill’s tanks or replacing them with double-hulled, underground tanks that allow for interstitial monitoring and maintenance. As construction progresses, the Pentagon can house a portion of its fuel stocks in leased commercial tanks on Oahu and aboard maritime tankers that would complement Red Hill’s underground stores.

More broadly, the Pentagon will need to shift from a brittle fuel architecture to a resilient one that can sustain distributed operations amidst attacks and help deter adversary aggression. Given the Department of Defense’s delays, this will not be cheap or easy, requiring billions of dollars and aggressive implementation plans that skip standard bureaucratic processes.

Red Hill is the latest in a string of black eyes plaguing the Navy, from collisions to failed shipbuilding programs. It comes at a time when confidence and trust in the military is declining nationally, and faltering even further in Hawaii. Del Toro said the current crisis is “very personal” for him. As he and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin finalize the president’s budget proposal for next year, remediating Red Hill and shifting to a resilient posture in the Indo-Pacific should be atop their priorities.

Timothy A. Walton is a fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology. He recently published a report titled Resilient Aerial Refueling: Safeguarding the US Military’s Global Reach.

Originally envisioned as a campaign of learning to develop new operational concepts for its emerging generation of ships, unmanned vehicles, sensors and weapons, events such as the Large Scale Exercise and Unmanned Integrated Battle Problem could end up being expensive photo ops unless the Navy sustains a rapid pace of experimentation that addresses its most important operational challenges.

In addition to overcoming organizational inertia, this will require fielding more unmanned system prototypes central to the fleet’s new warfighting approaches.

The Navy has come under fire for failing to articulate a long-term strategy and force structure plan. Although plans are essential to inform industry and Congress, the fleet’s more urgent need is to exploit new technologies by assessing and incorporating promising systems.

Even at their current levels of endurance, automation and survivability, unmanned vehicles like the Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel, Mk-18 medium unmanned undersea vehicle, and MQ-9 unmanned air system could enable more scalable and sustainable operational concepts better able to increase uncertainty and costs for opponents.

A small number of fundamental operational challenges stand between the Navy and its dissuasion of Chinese or Russian aggression; these should guide the fleet’s unmanned concept development.

For example, countering both adversaries’ precision weapons will require distributing manned and unmanned units at sea and ashore to dilute attacks, coupled with higher-capacity — and therefore shorter range — air defenses. Suppressing operations by quiet Russian or numerous Chinese submarines demands scalable approaches to anti-submarine warfare using unmanned systems that do not take manned ships and aircraft away from offensive operations. And threatening enemy forces in highly contested electromagnetic environments requires attritable or expendable unmanned systems from space to undersea for sensing, communication and attacks.

The Navy’s initial unmanned programs and recent Unmanned Campaign Framework failed to align its proposed unmanned vehicles with the challenges they would address or the tactics they could enable. By proposing unmanned systems without clearly articulated use cases, the Navy slowed its transformation. The service reduced the urgency to solve operational problems and left Congress and industry in the dark.

The Unmanned Integrated Battle Problem exercise could help fill this gap between problems and solutions, but instead pursued basic tasks like assessing unmanned systems as communication relays or surveillance and targeting platforms. These long-established use cases for unmanned vehicles are table stakes in the military competition against China.

The Navy should lean in to develop and practice operational concepts combining manned and unmanned systems to close effects chains that attack, suppress or disrupt the enemy. And if years pass between each edition of the Integrated Battle Problem or Large Scale Exercise, learning will be lost and operators and program managers will be unable to refine their tactics or system requirements.

Congress could help the Navy avoid an innovation cul-de-sac by pushing service leaders to sustain the fleet’s pace of experimentation. Congress has already provided the naval services some of the tools needed for their transformation to a distributed, more agile force. For example, the fiscal 2019 appropriations legislation included five Extra Large Unmanned Underwater Vehicle prototypes to enable tactics development, requirements refinement and engineering evaluations. Congress also funded the Marine Corps to buy two MQ-9A Reaper unmanned aircraft for experimentation and concept development.

Congress should complement these efforts by funding two Medium Unmanned Surface Vehicle prototypes in FY22. The first Navy MUSV prototype was funded in FY19 and will be delivered by the end of FY23. It follows two experimental unmanned surface ships, Sea Hunter and Seahawk, built by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Research.

Seahawk and Sea Hunter are helping the Navy work through manned-unmanned teaming, but are not able to carry the larger and more varied payloads the MUSV will need to employ for missions like over-the-horizon targeting or electromagnetic warfare, deception, communications or anti-submarine warfare. With only one MUSV prototype, the fleet will lack the flexibility to test new payloads while also evaluating the vehicle itself. Additionally, waiting more than a year between the first prototype and follow-on MUSVs will idle the workforce and supply chain, delaying the transition to a production program.

In return for its support of Navy’s unmanned transformation, Congress should demand its leaders identify how the current generation of unmanned systems can help address the fleet’s most pressing operational problems and how further technology maturation could increase their utility in the future. This is a different approach than the methodical process of acquiring large, multi-mission manned warships with decades-long service lives. If the Navy and Congress cannot partner in embracing an evolutionary path to revolutionary results, the United States risks fielding a fleet that is reliable in peacetime, but irrelevant to preventing war.

Bryan Clark is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of the Hudson Center for Defense Concepts and Technology. Timothy A. Walton is a fellow at the Hudson Center for Defense Concepts and Technology.

The Navy clearly needs to change its force design and operational approach. Even though naval forces are increasingly important to deter and defeat Chinese aggression, the Navy’s previous plan to build a force of 355 ships lacked resilience and firepower, fell short on logistics, and was projected to cost 50 percent more than the current fleet. The Navy tried to adjust that plan with an integrated naval force structure assessment, but Esper rejected it, as it failed to implement new concepts for distributed multidomain operations and would be too expensive to realistically field.

Instead, over the course of nine months, he and Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist led a study taking a fresh look at the Navy’s force structure. The Hudson Institute contributed to the project by developing one of three fleet designs that informed the new plan.

Hudson’s proposed fleet is affordable to acquire and operate. Even though it consists of 581 vessels, more than 200 are unmanned or have small crews. The Hudson study’s conservative estimates suggest it can be acquired for the ship construction funding in the Navy’s President’s Budget for fiscal 2021, adjusted for inflation, and would only cost moderately more than the current one to operate.

The Hudson proposal becomes more affordable than the Navy’s plan by gradually rebalancing the fleet to incorporate more smaller, less-expensive ships and fewer large multimission combatants. The proposed fleet would also constrain the size and cost of some large new ships, such as the future large surface combatant and next-generation attack submarine.

Employing new operational concepts, the proposed fleet would outperform the current Navy in important metrics for future operations. First, the proposed fleet’s groups of manned and unmanned vessels would generate more numerous and diverse effects chains compared to today’s Navy, improving the force’s adaptability and imposing greater complexity on enemy decision-making.

Second, the fleet would deliver more offensive munitions from vessels and aircraft over a protracted period, and defend itself more effectively using distribution, shorter-range interceptors and electric weapons.

Lastly, it enhances the fleet’s amphibious, logistics and strategic sealift capacity. Overall, this results in a Navy that can help the joint force prevail across a range of potential scenarios, including the most challenging ones such as an attempted Chinese attack on Taiwan.

The Hudson fleet is also achievable. Its shipbuilding plan relies on mature technologies or allows sufficient time to complete needed engineering and operational concept development before moving ships into serial production. The plan sustains the industrial base through stable ship-construction rates that avoid gaps in production and smoothly transition between ship classes.

Even with this measured approach, however, the fleet can rapidly evolve, reaching more than 355 manned and unmanned vessels by 2030, and 581 by 2045.

Although Battle Force 2045 focuses on ships, the Navy needs to spend more on improving repair yard infrastructure, growing munitions stocks, and providing command-and-control capabilities to the force. As the Hudson study shows, ship construction savings could help fund these and other enablers, but only if the Navy and the DoD have the discipline to avoid expensive new investments, such as building a third attack submarine every year, installing boost-glide hypersonic missiles on old destroyers or pursuing a significantly larger combatant to follow the Arleigh Burke class.

Even if the procurement cost of these programs was funded through budget shifts within the DoD, each will incur a sustainment bill that is not factored into Navy plans and could accelerate the descent toward a hollow force.

The Navy is now developing a new shipbuilding plan as part of its FY22 budget submission. Congress should carefully assess that plan and, in collaboration with the DoD, refine the budget. Esper may depart, but the results of this study can serve as a starting point for an operationally effective and fiscally sustainable fleet for the next administration.

Timothy A. Walton is a fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, where Bryan Clark is a senior fellow. Along with Seth Cropsey, they recently completed a study of future naval force structure.

Guam is pivotal to U.S. and allied military posture in the Western Pacific. Home to Andersen Air Force Base and Apra Harbor, it is far enough from adversaries like China and North Korea to negate the threat from more numerous short-range missiles but close enough to support air and naval operations throughout the Philippine Sea and South and East China seas.

Although the current Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery on Guam can defend against some ballistic missiles, its single AN/TPY-2 radar is vulnerable and cannot provide 360-degree coverage. Moreover, THAAD’s focus on high altitudes makes it a poor fit to defeat lower-flying aircraft or cruise missiles that would likely be used by China’s military against Guam. The island needs a new air defense architecture.

Aegis Ashore is highly capable, but has its own limitations. Designed primarily to counter small numbers of ballistic missiles, its fixed missile magazine and radar would be vulnerable to attack and would fall short against the bombardment possible from China.

Instead of installing one or more Aegis Ashore systems on Guam, a more effective air and missile defense architecture would combine the latest version of the Aegis Combat System with a disaggregated system of existing sensors, effectors, and command-and-control nodes. A distributed architecture would also be scalable, allowing air and missile defenses to also protect U.S. citizens and forces operating in the Northern Marianas.

Guam’s geography enables longer-range sensing than would be possible from a ship or a single Aegis Ashore radar. Fixed, relocatable and mobile radio frequency sensors should be positioned around the island’s perimeter, such as compact versions of SPY-6 or Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor radars and the passive Army Long-Range Persistent Surveillance system. During periods of heightened tension, passive and active radio frequency and electro-optical/infrared sensors could also be deployed on unmanned aircraft and stratospheric balloons to monitor over-the-horizon threats. This mixed architecture would provide better collective coverage and be more difficult to defeat compared to one or two fixed Aegis Ashore deckhouses.

To shoot down enemy missiles and aircraft, the architecture should field mobile, containerized launchers for long-range interceptors like the SM-6 and SM-3 rather than Aegis Ashore’s finite and targetable in-ground vertical launch magazines. They should be complemented by medium- to short-range engagement systems to protect high-value targets such as the Patriot, the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System or the Army’s planned Indirect Fire Protection Capability, as well as non-kinetic defenses such as high-powered microwave weapons and electronic warfare systems that could damage or confuse the guidance systems on incoming missiles.

Today, destroyers patrol the waters around Guam to provide ballistic missile defense capacity beyond that available with THAAD. A new distributed architecture would place more capacity ashore to free surface combatants from missile defense duty. In a crisis or conflict, the architecture could add capacity with surface action groups and combat air patrols capable of intercepting threats at longer ranges.

Instead of Aegis Ashore’s large, single C2 node, a distributed architecture would virtualize the Aegis Combat System to allow multiple facilities or mobile vehicles to serve as miniature air operations centers. The mobility of sensors, effectors and C2 nodes in this architecture would enable the employment of camouflage, concealment and deception, including decoys, to complicate enemy targeting and increase the number of weapons needed to ensure a successful attack.

INDOPACOM’s plan for implementing new Guam air defenses should also apply lessons from Japan’s aborted Aegis Ashore program, whose accelerated timeline contributed to the selection of the least expensive and technically risky option — two fixed Aegis Ashore systems — and the discounting of alternatives. Adm. Phil Davidson’s 2026 goal of improving Guam’s defenses faces a similar risk.

Bound by an iron triangle, Guam’s air and missile defenses can be good, fast or cheap — but not all three. If 2026 is held as a rigid constraint, the only solution able to meet the schedule and requirements may be the familiar, and ineffective, fixed Aegis Ashore architecture.

Compared to one or two Aegis Ashore sites, a distributed architecture may require slightly more time to develop or funds to field. But a phased approach could introduce new systems as funding becomes available and allow expanding the system’s capability to meet the evolving threat. For example, SPY-6 radars, C2 bunkers and composite THAAD-Patriot-NASAMS batteries could be fielded before 2026, quickly followed by the introduction of mobile assets.

Guam and the Northern Marianas are essential to U.S. strategy and operations in the Western Pacific. Their defenses have long been ignored, and Adm. Davidson should be lauded for charting a path forward. A disaggregated architecture, however, will be more likely to realize INDOPACOM’s vision of resilient and scalable air and missile defense.

Timothy A. Walton is a fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, where Bryan Clark is a senior fellow.

The critics are partly right, as the program’s cost doubled from the government’s original optimistic estimates. However, at about $1.8 billion each, the planned Aegis Ashore facilities are less expensive than the combined cost of the three or four $1.6 billion Aegis destroyers they partially replace.

Japan’s defense minister cited cost as one reason for the cancellation, but a more significant stumbling block was worry from communities around the Aegis Ashore sites that missile debris could fall on their homes and that high-power radars could harm nearby inhabitants.

Although some of these concerns may be unfounded, the Abe government should use this pause to follow its Medium Term Defense Program and reallocate the Aegis Ashore investment toward a “comprehensive air and missile defense capability” that addresses the full range of threats facing Japan.

Aegis Ashore could economically protect wide areas of Japan from ballistic missiles. However, its capacity is constrained by the size of its missile magazine, and as a fixed site, it is susceptible to attack. North Korea now likely has enough ballistic missiles as well as decoys and other penetration aids to overwhelm the 24 interceptors in the planned Aegis Ashore magazines, particularly if defenders shoot multiple interceptors at each incoming missile. The Chinese or Russian militaries could launch much larger attacks, as well as strike the Aegis Ashore site itself.

The Japanese Ministry of Defense is exploring alternatives to the current Aegis Ashore program. For example, programming SM-3 interceptors to drop their boosters over the ocean and placing radars closer to the coast could reduce impacts on the surrounding communities. The MoD is also considering placing Aegis Ashore installations on inexpensive vessels or barges.

These approaches could address public concerns but would likely be more expensive than the current program.

Instead of spending increasing amounts in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent successful ballistic missile attacks, the MoD should embrace a comprehensive approach to air and missile defense that acknowledges Japan is in a salvo competition with China and other adversaries. To gain an advantage in this competition that might deter an attack, Japan will need an approach that generates timely warning and targeting, defeats both cruise and ballistic missiles, makes better decisions faster, and is resilient in the face of missiles that will inevitably leak through.

A new Japanese air and missile defense architecture should consist of five key elements, some of which already exist, lowering the cost for its implementation. Funding that would have gone to Aegis Ashore could pay for much of the new systems needed for this portfolio:

• A distributed network of mobile and fixed passive and active sensors, including Japan’s Aegis destroyers; U.S. satellites and AN/TPY-2 radars; and new or planned long-endurance unmanned aircraft carrying infrared sensors for early warning of ballistic or hypersonic missile launches.
• Air and missile interceptors, increasing the emphasis on short- and medium-range weapons that are smaller, less expensive and can be fielded in greater capacities. The architecture should incorporate current and planned SM-3s and SM-6s at sea to protect large swaths of Japan and intercept enemy aircraft; existing Patriot Advanced Capability-3 interceptors to defend important areas like cities or bases; new point-defense systems such as the Rolling Airframe Missile that can protect key facilities; and future boost-phase air-to-air interceptors that could engage North Korean missiles shortly after launch.
• New, energy-based defenses such as high-powered microwaves, electronic warfare jammers and decoys, or lasers around important targets that can bring an infinite magazine to complement short-range interceptors and point defenses.
• Resilient command-and-control systems that can fuse data, including with U.S. forces, and efficiently use defenses by engaging threats with the least-costly weapon.
• Passive defenses for military forces and facilities such as camouflage, concealment and deception, as well as selective hardening and reconstitution that challenge adversary targeting and ensure forces can fight through attacks.

Attack operations are often proposed as a complement or replacement for defensive systems. However, Japanese strike capabilities are unlikely to be used preemptively against North Korea and would lack the capacity to substantially degrade Chinese or Russian missile launchers or command and control.

Japan’s government should embrace the opportunity created by its suspension of Aegis Ashore to adopt a comprehensive approach that protects Japan from air and missile threats by deterring attacks through a combination of complementary defensive systems, effective command and control, and resilience. Otherwise, the Japanese MoD will continue chasing an elusive ballistic missile shield without substantially improving Japan’s security.

Bryan Clark is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, where Timothy A. Walton is a fellow.

If they lost, two of the four shipyards bidding on the frigate were at risk of either going out of business or joining the underemployed ranks of U.S. commercial shipbuilders. Due to specialization, only one or two yards construct each class of Navy combat ship with workforces, equipment, and infrastructure that would be expensive and difficult to adapt.

A decision on any single ship class, as with the frigate, can shut down a shipyard and send its workers to the unemployment line.

Specialization is also a problem when orders increase. The Navy’s two submarine shipyards, General Dynamics Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News division, shrank the time needed to build subs by 20 percent during the past decade while increasing production to two per year.

The rising sophistication of Virginia-class submarines has now reversed this trend, however, and submarine builders’ challenges are only increasing. They recently started a new contract to build up to 10 of the larger Block V Virginia submarines and are in negotiation with the Navy on a block-buy contract for the first two Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines.

Supplier challenges abound

U.S. shipbuilders may be fragile, but their suppliers are on life support. After decades of being whipsawed by changes to shipbuilding plans and budget uncertainty, a shrinking number of suppliers are able and willing to stay in business.

The Navy’s recent initiatives to improve supplier production capacity and resilience don’t go far enough to address its rising dependence on sole-source suppliers, which now provide more than 75 percent of submarine parts. For example, when problems with Columbia missile tubes led the Navy to seek new suppliers, it replaced the existing, primary source — BWXT — with another — General Dynamics — that will assemble tubes at the same facilities that are constructing parts for the Virginia and Columbia submarines.

Last year, the Trump administration used the Defense Production Act to establish new suppliers for military missile fuel. The Navy should build on this effort to identify sole-source items for which an additional supplier is appropriate.

In selecting additional suppliers, the Navy should prioritize attributes other than cost. Sole-source items by definition are important enough to justify seeking out or creating a single supplier rather than adapting the ship’s design to use an existing item. Therefore, the Navy should emphasize the provider’s track record in conducting similar or other challenging engineering; its ability to adjust to what will likely be variable demand and changing specifications; and the likelihood of quality production that avoids rework.

Planning for resiliency

The Department of Defense could help address the shipbuilding-industrial base’s fragility with its current study of the number and mix of ships needed in the future fleet. Although the primary goal of this analysis should be determining the most effective fleet possible within likely budget constraints, it must also ensure the industrial base can build and sustain the future Navy.

Industrial base considerations are not new to Navy force structure planning. During the last decade, the Navy or Congress added amphibious ships, submarines, destroyers and auxiliary vessels to maintain hot production lines or keep a shipyard afloat until the next order. Each of the Navy’s new combatant ships are expected to cost more than $1 billion to build, constraining the Navy’s ability to spread ship construction to other qualified shipyards to fill production gaps or extend classes to keep a shipyard in operation.

The Navy could better support shipbuilders by rebalancing its fleet architecture to increase the number of smaller vessels such as corvettes or tank landing ships, and reduce the number of larger destroyers and amphibious warships.

Smaller, less-expensive ships could be built in larger numbers per year, providing more flexibility in shipbuilding plans to stabilize the workload for shipbuilders and providing more scalability to align shipbuilding expenditures with changing budgets.

Smaller ships could also be built at a wider range of shipyards, including those that only build commercial vessels and noncombatant government ships like Coast Guard cutters and oceanographic research vessels. These “dual-use” shipbuilders suffer today from a lack of coordination between commercial and government shipbuilding, which creates a feast-or-famine cycle of orders.

The Navy and nation depend on a healthy shipbuilding-industrial base. To foster the industrial base in the face of natural and man-made challenges, the Navy should change its fleet design and shipbuilding plans, while investing to establish and qualify new suppliers. Without deliberate action, the U.S. shipbuilding industry will become increasingly fragile, limiting the Navy’s ability to build the ships it needs and respond when today’s competitions turn to conflict.

Bryan Clark is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, where Timothy A. Walton is a fellow.

Correction: “An earlier version of this commentary incorrectly stated the number of suppliers for missile tubes for the Columbia submarine. There have been up to four suppliers of these missile tubes

The Navy clearly needs guided-missile frigates. By bringing comparable capability with less capacity, frigates will provide a less expensive alternative to Arleigh Burke destroyers that are the mainstay of today’s U.S. surface fleet. Freed of the requirement to conduct almost every surface combatant operation, destroyers would have more time to catch up on maintenance and training or be available to conduct missions demanding their greater missile capacity like Tomahawk missile strikes or ballistic missile defense.

However, the frigate’s size — less than a destroyer, more than a littoral combat ship or corvette — also limits its ability to support U.S. Navy wartime operations. Frigates like the Franco-Italian FREMM can conduct the full range of European navy operations such as local air defense, maritime security and anti-submarine warfare, or ASW.

But the American FREMM variant will not have enough missile capacity for large or sustained attacks like those conducted by the U.S. Navy during the last several years in the Middle East, or like those that would be likely in a conflict with China. And although they could defend a nearby ship from air attack, the planned U.S. frigates could not carry enough longer-range surface-to-air interceptors to protect U.S. carrier and amphibious groups, or bases and population centers ashore.

Proponents argue frigates’ capacity limitations could be mitigated by buying more of them, better enabling distributed maritime operations and growing naval presence in underserved areas like the Caribbean and Arctic. In a post-COVID-19 employment environment, accelerating frigate construction could also create jobs by starting production at additional shipyards.

Although they cost about $1 billion each to buy, the money to buy more frigates — at least initially — could be carried in the wave of post-pandemic economic recovery spending. But after a few years, that spigot will likely run dry, leaving the Navy to decide whether to continue spending about half the cost of a destroyer for a ship that has only a third as many missiles and cannot conduct several surface warfare missions.

The more significant fiscal challenge with buying more frigates is owning them. Based on equivalent ships, each frigate is likely to cost about $60 million annually to operate, crew and maintain. That is only about 25 percent less than a destroyer. For the U.S. Navy, which is already suffering manning shortages and deferring maintenance, fielding a fleet of 70 frigates in addition to more than 90 cruisers and destroyers will likely be unsustainable.

Instead of simply building more frigates to create jobs and grow the Navy, Department of Defense leaders should determine the overall number and mix of ships it needs and can afford within realistic budget constraints. The secretary of defense recently directed such an effort, which continues despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This commentary’s authors are participating in the study.

As recommended in a recent study, instead of buying more frigates to expand the fleet’s capacity, the Navy would be better served by adding missile-equipped corvettes like those in European or Asian navies. These ships could carry as many missiles as the Navy’s planned frigate but would not incorporate capabilities for area air defense or ASW. The smaller size and reduced capability of corvettes would reduce their sticker price to about one-third that of a frigate, and their sustainment cost to about a quarter that of destroyers.

The lower price for corvettes would allow more of them to be built and deployed, where they could team with other surface forces to provide additional missile magazines that could be reloaded by rotating corvettes to rear areas. In peacetime, corvettes would enable the Navy to expand presence and maritime security to underserved regions and provide more appropriate platforms for training and cooperation.

Frigates will still be needed, even with a new corvette joining the U.S. fleet. Frigates would replace destroyers in escort operations to protect civilian and noncombatant ships, like supply vessels. They would also conduct maritime security operations in places such as the Persian Gulf or South China Sea, where piracy, trafficking and paramilitary attacks occur. Most importantly, frigates would lead ASW operations, where their towed sonar systems could be more capable than the systems used by current destroyers.

Although ASW is an important naval mission, buying more frigates than planned to expand the Navy’s ASW capacity is unnecessary and counterproductive. The Navy could gain more ASW capacity at lower cost and with less risk to manned ships by complementing its planned 20 frigates with unmanned systems including fixed sonars like SOSUS, deployable sonar systems that sit on the ocean floor, unmanned surface vessels that tow sonars and trail submarines, and unmanned aircraft that can deploy and monitor sonobuoys or attack submarines to suppress their operations or sink them.

The U.S. Navy is at the beginning of a period of dramatic change. New technologies for autonomy, sensing, weapons and networking are enabling new concepts for naval missions at the same time fiscal constraints and pressure from great power competitors are making traditional approaches to naval operations obsolete or unsustainable. The Navy’s frigate award is a great start toward the future fleet, but the Navy needs to take advantage of this opportunity and assess the best mix of ships to field the capabilities it needs within the resources it is likely to have.

Bryan Clark is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, where Timothy A. Walton works as a fellow.