Next Navy: Transforming American Maritime Power

As the United States Navy confronts rapid shifts in technology and intensifying great-power rivalries, the foundations of maritime power are being reimagined. Next Navy, a CSIS Futures Lab project, explores how autonomy, unmanned systems, and emerging strategic pressures are reshaping naval force design, posture, and operations. This generational shift in naval power may prove as transformational as Alfred Thayer Mahan’s vision of sea control, Admiral John Fisher’s pre–World War I naval reforms, or Admiral Hyman Rickover’s nuclear revolution.

The Navy of tomorrow will fight not through a few high-end platforms but through networks of systems. Autonomous and uncrewed systems—on the surface, underwater, and in the air—will pair with crewed ships to extend reach and attritability, transforming naval warfare from platform-centric battles into distributed contests of detection, deception, and precision strike. Undersea capabilities will remain a core U.S. competitive advantage, while surface forces evolve towards a larger number of small and flexible platforms.

The transformation of the Next Navy extends beyond force design to warfighting concepts and the industrial base. Distributed Maritime Operations and new naval–marine integration models leverage geography—maneuvering across archipelagos, exploiting austere bases, and applying pressure from multiple axes. Simultaneously, building and sustaining a fleet capable of distributed operations at scale will require a more diverse and productive maritime industrial base, from traditional shipyards adopting digital design, modular construction, and advanced manufacturing to new entrants driving autonomy and innovation.

Next Navy brings together warfighters and strategic thinkers to examine how the U.S. Navy should navigate this evolution. Commentaries explore force structure, industrial revitalization, and emerging warfighting concepts, drawing on wargames, AI-driven scenarios, and historical analysis. The project assesses how the United States can structure, design, build, sustain, and operate a fleet for the next era of naval competition.

Banner image: Dr. Benjamin Jensen/Created using Midjourney.