The new disorder at sea and the limits of American sea power

As Congress debates the 2027 defense authorization bill, the House Armed Services Committee has proposed another study on shipbuilding and acquisition from the Navy. It’s one of a series of studies on the topic. While scrutiny is welcome, and the new request is specific in focusing on the viability of the new proposed nuclear-powered guided-missile battleship, the announcement drew predictable grumbles. After all, the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service, not to mention nongovernmental experts, have identified the same set of structural impediments to shipbuilding for more than 30 years. And during that time, the shipbuilding budget has doubled while the fleet has not grown at all.

The problem is not a shortage of diagnoses, but the absence of an analytical framework for understanding the nature of the challenges the Navy will be responding to. The need for such a framework has only grown considering the Strait of Hormuz crisis and recent challenges in the Black and Red seas.

The Hormuz crisis is a symptom, not the disease

Since Iran responded to Operation Epic Fury by mining the Strait of Hormuz and threatening to levy tolls, U.S. forces have been unable to fully reopen one of the world’s most critical chokepoints. The operation has drained naval capacity from every theater the roughly 280-ship U.S. Navy serves. It’s not just the expenditure of three years’ worth of Tomahawk missiles at current production rates. It’s ships reassigned, family duty stations changed, at-sea time for crews extended, and wear and tear on ships on extended deployments. Readiness in the Pacific has been eroded, precisely when it may matter most.

The irony is that among the primary beneficiaries of the Navy’s extended deployment in the Strait of Hormuz are China and Northeast Asia. The strategic logic of an American guarantee that protects Chinese oil imports while degrading American readiness in the Western Pacific deserves examination. American naval plans have not yet adequately adjusted to the changed realities of post-Cold War globalization.

What the Strait of Hormuz crisis illustrates is not primarily a naval procurement failure, though it is that too. It is a symptom of persistent maritime disorder—a condition distinct from collapse or chaos. Today, while maritime systems continue to function, their underlying security conditions steadily erode. Understanding this distinction matters because it determines what kind of response is both adequate and desirable.

Three overlapping forms of disorder are driving this condition. The first is coercive disorder: the deliberate use of disruption to generate leverage without crossing into open conflict. The Red Sea demonstrated its economics clearly: Houthi forces used inexpensive drones and missiles to impose global rerouting costs on the largest shipping firms in the world. The United States and a small handful of partners and allies responded with naval systems whose per-unit cost dwarfed the threat they were countering. The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz is the same logic at far greater consequence.  

The second is structural disorder: the misalignment between naval power, commercial shipping capacity, and maritime industrial capability across major actors. The United States has the most powerful navy in the world and less than 1% of global commercial shipbuilding output. Europe has strong commercial shipping but diminished naval depth, having lost nearly a third of its main surface combatants since 1999. Between them, the United States and Europe do the lion’s share of work of protecting global maritime flows. Yet China has combined the world’s largest navy by ship count with dominance in shipbuilding, port infrastructure, and maritime logistics—building new warships at a peacetime pace that rivals American output after Pearl Harbor, while continuing to dominate commercial and warship production.

No coalition of like-minded Western states can secure maritime flows coherently when power is distributed this unevenly. Nor is it reassuring that the country aggregating all three dimensions fastest is the one whose strategic ambitions most directly contest the existing order. China’s willingness to support disruptors like Iran and Russia is increasingly evident.

The third is systemic disorder: vulnerabilities embedded in the architecture of maritime interdependence itself. Undersea cables carry 95% of global data yet remain largely unguarded along most of their length. (The AUKUS agreement between the United States, the U.K., and Australia to codevelop unmanned underwater vehicles for the purpose of cable protection is a welcome step toward a solution.) Global just-in-time supply chains optimized for efficiency over the past four decades have limited buffer capacity to absorb disruption—as COVID-19 demonstrated under non-adversarial conditions, and as the Strait of Hormuz crisis is demonstrating now under adversarial ones. Global maritime infrastructure of enormous strategic consequence can be threatened with minimal accountability.

These three forms of disorder are mutually reinforcing. Systemic vulnerabilities create the targets that coercive actors exploit. Structural misalignment determines who is positioned to exploit them. Coercion-based crises expose and deepen the underlying fragilities. The result is not a trajectory toward breakdown but toward a continuously contested, less predictable—and therefore more expensive—maritime environment. The U.S. role in securing the commercial and industrial foundations of the order is at risk, and its primary strategic competitor is poised to gain.

Maritime recapitalization is necessary but insufficient

The current administration is aware of the structural gap at least. Both plans and significant new procurement funding reflect a belated but genuine reckoning. But naval recapitalization, however necessary, addresses only part of the problem. The Navy’s shipbuilding plans, even if fully realized, would leave it better prepared to fight a peer competitor—but not to do that and respond to ongoing disorder at sea.

The seas are not collapsing. Ships sail, oil flows, data moves. But the maritime system that underpins the U.S. and global economy is no longer in good order. The goal of restoring it to the conditions of the 1990s is not achievable at acceptable cost. The question is whether the United States and its allies will develop a shared strategy adequate to the disorder that actually exists—or continue to admire the problem and mount ad hoc, unsustainable national responses.

What is needed is a strategic framework that treats maritime disorder as a continuous fact, not a series of discrete crises to be managed one at a time.