One Size Doesn’t Fit All
BUILDING U.S. NAVY HEDGES AGAINST RISING THREATS
BY BRYAN CLARK
Sailors secure the rigid-hull inflatable boat on the
midship of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile
destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur (DDG 54) during small
boat operations in the South China Sea, Sept. 4, 2025.
attempt an invasion.
There are a small number of intense scenarios that
would require a substantial portion of the fleet, or of
key elements of the fleet. The U.S. Navy has traditionally
designed the fleet to meet the demands of these
scenarios. In its post-Cold War period of dominance,
the Navy could build a force able to counter a Taiwan
invasion and retain enough residual capability to handle
any other situation, albeit much less efficiently than a
purpose-built force.
Figure 1 illustrates this approach. It shows U.S.
combat deployments from 1943 to 2011 in terms of the
probability a given portion of the force is deployed on
any given day. (This chart is based primarily on U.S. Air
Force data, which is the most comprehensive). The peak
on the chart represents World War II, but the speed and
scale of a Taiwan invasion would preclude significant
mobilization. Navy leaders logically sized the active fleet
for that scenario.
Figure 1: US Combat Deployments 1943-2011
But the PRC’s improving and growing military is driving
up the capability and capacity needed to defend Taiwan.
In the early 2020s, the Navy began to retire or slow
production of ships and aircraft that were less relevant
to a Taiwan invasion scenario. The one-size-fits all fleet
started looking like a one-trick pony fit for one situation
and ill-suited for many others.
Other stressing scenarios soon emerged as adversaries
began exploiting military-relevant commercial
technology and geography. Russia expanded its invasion
of Ukraine beyond Crimea and is growing its submarine
fleet, Iran’s Houthi proxies attacked shipping across the
Red Sea and Bab El Mandeb, and China intensified air
and maritime incursions into Philippine and Japanese
territory.
This expanding set of challenges leaves the Navy in a
strategic cul-de-sac: It doesn’t have enough forces with
sufficient capability to be dominant in each region, but
it cannot grow in its current form under any realistic
budgets. In his opening speech during his assumption
of office, new Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl
Caudle argued the Navy should use “hedge forces” to
solve this force planning challenge.
Hedge forces are specialized groups of units designed to
address high-consequence, low-probability situations
like those on the left side of figure 1. These forces would
provide the additional capability and capacity needed for
a specific scenario but may not have broad utility in other
regions or situations. Figure 2 depicts this force design
paradigm using the data of Figure 1.
Figure 2: Hedge Forces Complement the Core Fleet
Under this paradigm, the Navy would size its core fleet
— or the traditional Navy of today — for the bulk of
scenarios that could emerge, including high-probability
day-to-day conditions such as homeland defense or
responding to gray-zone provocations. The core fleet
should also be able to mount relatively large campaigns
like Operations Desert Storm or Iraqi Freedom by surging
additional deployments for the duration of operation.
The Navy would build hedge forces to address the 5% of
operational problems that would overstretch the core
fleet.
The Navy should forward base hedge forces at allied
facilities in their region of interest and organize them
separately from the rotationally deployed core fleet.
Because they are composed for a specific scenario, hedge
forces will generally not be relevant to other theaters and
scenarios, although some units may move in response
to changing capability and capacity needs among hedge
forces. Forward basing helps deter opponents by showing
that hedge forces can quickly, potentially automatically,
respond to aggression. And from a fiscal perspective,
forward basing reduces the number of hedge force units
needed compared to rotationally deploying them from
U.S. territory.
The Navy’s need for hedge forces to be specialized and
forward based suggests they should be predominantly
composed of RAS. Conflicts in Ukraine, Nagorno
Karabakh and the Middle East show that RAS can be
relevant in high-end conflict. For example, after losing
its navy to attack or capture, Ukraine’s military restored
access to vital shipping lanes by pushing the Russian
Black Sea Fleet to the far side of Crimea using uncrewed
attack boats and undersea vehicles.
RAS also offer dramatically lower costs of procurement
and, most importantly, sustainment. By shifting some
functions of traditional crewed platforms onto uncrewed
systems, the Navy could gain scale at lower costs than it
would take to achieve the same capacity through crewed
ships or aircraft.
The Navy is pursuing RAS and associated operational
concepts through an accelerating set of experiments.
These initiatives — including Task Force 59 in the
Middle East, 4th Fleet in Central and South America
and the Integrated Battle Problems in the Indo-Pacific
— are great examples of applying new technologies to
thorny operational problems. But the Navy needs to go
further and stop treating uncrewed systems as merely an
additive to the crewed force.
The U.S. Department of Defense is experimenting with
concepts like those used by Ukraine and Iran’s proxies to
create a “hellscape” for Chinese invaders in the Taiwan
Strait. By attacking troop transports with drone boats,
undersea vehicles and loitering munitions, a hedge force
of RAS could slow or disrupt the invasion, giving U.S. and
allied forces targeting information and time to destroy
PLA ships with long-range missiles and torpedo fires.
But the hellscape cannot stop an invasion alone. It will
need missile attacks from aircraft, submarines and
surface combatants to defeat the invasion fleet and its
escorts. However, surface forces will be hard-pressed
to get close enough to deliver weapons and survive. The
Navy could fill the gap by instead relying on a distributed
fires hedge force of Modular Attack Surface Craft and
submarines in the early phases of the fight.
The MASC program includes three RAS vessels, the
largest of which would carry 16 missiles. Hudson
Institute’s wargaming and modeling suggests
distributed uncrewed missile launchers with between
16 and 32 weapons offer an effective balance between
undermining adversary planning and creating risks to
adversary objectives. RAS vessels with larger magazines
are easier to detect, have difficulty efficiently using
their weapons before coming under attack and are large
enough to be worth multiple enemy missile salvos.
RAS vessels with fewer weapons are often unable to
successfully attack a defended target alone, creating
a need for coordinated attacks that can be difficult if
communications are degraded.
The Navy could benefit from building RAS-based
hedge forces to address other stressing situations. For
example, deployments by quiet Russian SSNs through the
Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (G-I-UK) gap could
quickly overwhelm U.S. antisubmarine warfare (ASW)
forces, especially if other operations in Europe demand
attention from U.S. SSNs, P-8A maritime patrol aircraft
and DDGs. And a renewed campaign of drone attacks by
the Houthis in the Red Sea could once again stretch a
Navy surface combatant fleet that is also defending U.S.
carriers, territory and other sea lanes.
A Dramatically Different Surface Fleet
This new force design paradigm implies changes in
the makeup of the core force. For example, if a largely
uncrewed hedge force can slow and disrupt a Chinese
invasion, the Navy may need a lower rate of fires from
surface combatants, strike-fighters, and SSNs. As a
result, the Navy could reduce the number of crewed
platforms it buys or delay their next generation.
But the changing threat environment also matters.
The fleet’s successful air defense actions in the Middle
East during the last two years showed that countering
drone and missile attacks is getting harder. These
operations already stress the capacity of today’s DDGs.
Hudson Institute’s wargaming with U.S., Australian
and Japanese officers during the last year suggest China
could overwhelm U.S. DDGs and successfully engage U.S.
carriers well into a conflict in the Western Pacific.
DDGs will soon have to focus on air and missile defense
and forgo other missions like ASW or strike due to
combat system and magazine limits. Despite their reach,
Tomahawk missiles still require DDGs to approach
adversaries like Iran, Russia and China within anti-ship
missile range and each adversary would be willing to
expend substantial numbers of $20 million ballistic
missiles on a $3 billion DDG.
This suggests the surface force will need to both increase
its magazine capacity and the range of its weapons
to conduct offense and defense during tomorrow’s
conflicts. The Navy could realize those characteristics by
renewing its pursuit of a CG(X) guided missile cruiser.
A CG(X) could, like today’s Ticonderoga CGs, carry
130-plus missiles in a vertical launch system magazine.
Like the Navy’s planned DDG(X), a CG(X) could also
carry larger missiles like the Navy’s planned hypersonic
conventional prompt strike weapon that can reach
targets more than 1,500 nautical miles away.
But with a cost of likely more than $5 billion per ship,
the Navy will not be able to replace today’s DDG-51s with
new CG(X) or DDG(X) hulls on a one-for-one basis. While
today’s DDG-51s will be in the fleet for decades to come,
the Navy will need to complement its new, larger surface
combatants with smaller, less expensive vessels.
Unfortunately, the Constellation guided missile frigate
cannot become that more affordable counterpart to the
DDG-51. Originally planned to cost less than $800 mil
lion per hull, the FFG-62 class has been plagued by pro
duction delays and cost overruns driven in large part by
Navy design revisions. The Congressional Budget Office
now estimates each FFG will cost at least $1.4 billion.
With a cost nearly twice that of its parent FREMM
FFG design or the Navy’s original estimates, the FFG
62 no longer has a role in the Navy fleet. Its 32-cell
vertical launch system magazine lacks the capacity to
defend another ship against even the Houthi threat.
The FFG-62’s very low frequency sonar will generate
long detection ranges against quiet submarines but still
would place the ship well within submarine-launched
anti-ship missile range. And the FFG-62’s cost and
complexity prevent the Navy from automating the ship
or buying it in sufficient numbers to be considered
expendable or attritable.
Surface force leaders could use the Navy’s budget
constraints to reshape the fleet for deterrence in a
post-dominance era. Instead of continuing the flawed
and overpriced FFG-62 program, the Navy could pursue
a smaller missile corvette like the Israeli Sa’ar-6 or
Swedish Visby. A corvette would not be multimission
capable like the FFG-62, but it could carry the same
32-cell VLS magazine for offensive weapons. With a
reloadable Rolling Airframe Missile air defense system, it
would be survivable against realistic missile salvos.
If the Navy used an existing design without significant
modifications, it could purchase at least two corvettes
for the cost of each planned FFG-62. This is not a novel
approach. The Navy is beginning procurement this
year of a new medium landing ship based on the Israeli
logistics support vessel, which itself was derived from a
U.S. Army landing ship.
Corvettes could conduct coastal defense around the
United States and across the Western Hemisphere. But
they could also lead and manage hedge forces overseas
that are defending Taiwan, countering submarines at
the G-I-UK gap, clearing mines in the Strait of Hormuz
or defeating air attacks in the red Sea. Although hedge
forces will be predominantly composed of RAS, human
operators will still need to maintain, command and
protect them when not in use. Corvettes could help
provide those functions while also providing maritime
security and addressing other threats.
With their lower complexity and smaller size, the Navy
could also automate corvettes enough for them to be
remote missile launchers during wartime, as it did with
the fast troop transport USNS Apalachicola. They could
then join the distributed fires hedge force in defeating
amphibious assaults or blockades.
The Navy’s fleet design needs dramatic change to deter
in a post-dominance era. Instead of relying on the
broad overmatch of its one-size-fits-all fleet, the Navy
should pivot to a smaller core fleet complemented by
hedge forces to address its most challenging operational
problems. Without a change like this, the Navy will
lose relevance as opponents exploit proliferation and
geography to threaten America’s allies and interests.
Bryan Clark is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute.