U.S. Updates 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan
More surface combatants and fewer expeditionary warfare ships are in the U.S. Navy’s new 30-year fleet construction plan, which, despite numerous changes, preserves the goal of a 313-ship fleet.

The plan, approved Feb. 2 by Navy Secretary Donald Winter, is updated every year and sent to Congress along with the president’s annual budget.

While the numbers required for individual types of ships such as submarines and aircraft carriers haven’t been altered, the 2008 plan improves the building rate for surface combatants in the “far-term” period — those years from 2021 to 2037.

Instead of two ships per year, the revised plan shows three ships in every year beginning in 2025. Those ships, according to the Navy, will be the yet-to-be-designed DDG(X) destroyer, a follow-on to today’s DDG 51 Arleigh Burke class of Aegis guided-missile destroyers.

But the number of “expeditionary warfare ships” — amphibious types such as LHA and LHD assault ships, LSD landing ship docks and LPD landing transport docks — drops in the “near-term” 2008-2013 period and the “midterm” 2014 to 2020 time frame, falling to 30 ships in 2015 rather than 2020 in last year’s plan.

The number of support vessels also has been scaled back, along with a slight drop in attack submarines.

No replacement for the four newly converted SSGN cruise missile submarines appear in the 2008 plan. The Navy, in its explanation for the plan, said replacement of the ships would be “deferred until the ships are fully operational and their war-fighting utility has been tested.”