OPINION:
The president has set an ambitious course for the U.S. Navy. Success will depend on whether that vision can be turned into industrial capacity and ships delivered on time.
Speaking at Mar-a-Lago on Dec. 22, President Trump announced the U.S. Golden Fleet as a “peace through strength” investment in American sea power, anchored by a new surface combatant that will be “100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built.”
The intent is clear. The test is whether America can rebuild the industrial capacity to produce warships at speed, at scale and on schedule.
The Golden Fleet runs into a hard reality: America’s ability to build warships has shrunk. Shipyard capacity has tightened, skilled labor has thinned, and acquisition rules have piled on delay. China now produces more than half the world’s commercial ships and uses that industrial scale to sustain naval output. The result is a widening gap between what U.S. strategy demands and what U.S. industry can deliver on schedule.
The question now is delivery. The Golden Fleet will not be built by declarations or renderings. It will be built by shipyards, suppliers and a procurement system that rewards delivery over paperwork. That means setting clear targets for cost, schedule and throughput and then making the policy and investment decisions that meet them. It also means sequencing the work so the Navy can show early progress and expand capacity without losing control of production at home.
This is the hard choice. Build using only current U.S. capacity, and the Golden Fleet will have to accept a slower fleet delivered later than the strategy requires. Or use trusted allies to expand capacity now, with clear rules that keep final assembly and long-term production in American yards. The difference is not rhetoric. It is whether deterrence arrives on time.
American sea power has never been built in isolation from industrial reality. When President Theodore Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet around the world, it was not only a display of naval strength but also a demonstration of industrial reach. The ships mattered, but so did the ability to build, repair and sustain them at scale. That lesson has repeated itself in every major naval expansion since. Fleets that arrive late or in insufficient numbers fail to deter, no matter how advanced their designs.
Cooperation is already moving from speeches to shipyards. The United States is beginning to treat allied shipbuilding capacity as a bridge, not a crutch, to rebuild production at home. The agreements with South Korea and Japan matter less for their headline numbers than for what they can standardize: design practices, workforce training, supplier qualification and modular construction methods that increase throughput.
Done right, the work is structured so American yards keep final assembly and long-term production while allies help compress learning curves and expand near-term capacity. That is the difference between partnership and outsourcing, and it is the difference between a fleet announced and a fleet delivered.
Execution also requires discipline about where to begin. The Navy should start with ships that allow shipyards to improve fastest and with the least risk. Auxiliary and support vessels fit that bill. Their requirements are clearer, their timelines shorter and their construction better suited to modular production and distributed work share. Building these ships first allows American yards to adopt new methods, train workers, qualify suppliers and demonstrate real throughput gains before scaling to the Golden Fleet’s more complex surface combatants.
Even the best sequence will fail if the money does not go where production happens. Shipyards need modern facilities, automation and trained workers. They do not need financial engineering. If the Golden Fleet is a national priority, then reinvestment has to be a priority for the firms that build it. When the government provides support, it should be tied to clear production results. When companies invest their own capital, the test should be whether they expand shipbuilding capacity, not whether they improve short-term financial results. Production output is the measure that matters.
Progress should be measured in ships delivered on schedule, labor hours reduced per hull, suppliers qualified faster and rework cut from one build to the next. These indicators show whether shipyards are improving, capital investment is paying off and cooperation is accelerating production rather than complicating it. If those measures move in the right direction, then the Golden Fleet becomes more than a slogan. If they do not, then no amount of ambition will close the gap.
Last week, Mr. Trump put a stake in the ground. The Golden Fleet is now policy, not a talking point. Whether it succeeds will depend less on design ambition than on industrial choices made early and enforced consistently. Allies can help accelerate progress, but only if the work strengthens American shipyards and workers. Capital can expand capacity, but only if it is tied to production, not paper gains.
In the end, the Golden Fleet will be judged the same way every other serious naval buildup is judged: by ships commissioned, deterrence delivered, and a maritime industrial base built to last.
• Jeffrey M. Voth is an engineering and technology executive focused on strengthening the U.S. defense industrial base, with more than two decades of experience supporting U.S. cooperation with allies and partners.
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