The Future United States Navy Surface Fleet (2020-2040)
With the US Navy's fiscal year 2021 budget proposal being recently released, combined with the latest news that the USN has dropped its previous plan to extended the service lives of its cruisers and destroyers to a historically unrealistic 45+ years, I thought I'd put up a quick post showing the likely future of the USN's surface fleet. Before delving deeper into the above graph, I should first make clear that the budget documents only give (somewhat) hard numbers on annual deliveries out to around FY2027, and everything past FY2031 is entirely my own projection. The assumptions I made are that CG/DDG retire after 35 years, LCS last 30 years, DDG and FFG production both stabilize at 2 ships annually, that 22 Arleigh Burke Flight III are procured to replace the Ticonderoga-class 1 for 1, and that the Future Surface Combatant phase in mirrors the planned LCS to FFG(X) transition. However, different assumptions will not change the overall shape of the future force