A new combination of surveillance, drones and precision strike is eroding the old assumption that navies could generate sea control through superior ships, vessels, aircraft and operational skills alone. Geography still matters, but the new combination of systems exploits it to compress manoeuvre space, shorten warning time and make maritime operations more exposed and risky.

Increasingly, we will see not classic sea control – exerted by a largely unchallenged navy for long durations and over wide areas – but something far more intermittent, contested and geographically constrained.

In 1798, while at war with France, an exasperated British Lord Nelson exclaimed, “Were I to die at this moment, ‘want of frigates!’ would be stamped on my heart.” It’s a perennial problem: Frigates formed the backbone of navies in Nelson’s time and do so today as well, and there seldom seems to be enough. The U.S. Navy’s ambitious Golden Fleet shipbuilding plan aims to fill a frigate gap but will require shipyard capacity that today the nation lacks.

The Navy’s 2026 shipbuilding plan plans a fleet of 66 frigates. By 2031, two Constellation-class frigates are to be completed at the Marinette, Wisc. shipyard and a modified U.S. Coast Guard National Security Cutter at the Ingalls, Miss. shipyard. But to meet the Navy’s goal, a sustained delivery of more than three frigates per year will be needed by 2037. Such a production schedule is unlikely with one shipyard, and the plan all along was to have two frigate-producing shipyards.