The Navy is required by law to submit a report to the Congress each year that projects the service's shipbuilding requirements, procurement plans, inventories, and costs over the coming 30 years. Since 2006, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has been performing an independent analysis of the Navy's latest shipbuilding plan at the request of the Subcommittee on Seapower and Expeditionary Forces of the House Armed Services Committee. This CBO report, the latest in that series, summarizes the ship requirements and purchases described in the Navy's 2011 plan and assesses their implications for the Navy's funding needs and ship inventories through 2040. The new plan appears to increase the required size of the fleet compared with earlier plans, while reducing the number of ships to be purchased, and thus the costs for ship construction, over the next three decades. Despite those reductions, the total costs of carrying out the 2011 plan would be much higher than the funding levels that the Navy has received in recent years.

Statement of Eric J. Labs on the Navy¿s plans for its shipbuilding programs and corresponding budget. Contents: (1) Changes in Ship Requirements Under the 2011 Plan; (2) Ship Purchases and Inventories Under the 2011 Plan: Combat Ships; Logistics and Support Ships; (3) Ship Costs Under the 2011 Plan: The Navy¿s Estimates; CBO¿s Estimates; Changes from the 2009 Plan; (4) Outlook for Individual Ship Programs; Aircraft Carriers; Submarines; Large Surface Combatants; Littoral Combat Ships; Amphibious Ships. Charts and tables. This is a print on demand edition of an important, hard-to-find publication.

This is an independent analysis of the Navy's latest shipbuilding plan. This study summarizes the ship inventory goals and purchases described in the Navy's FY 2012 plan and assesses their implications for the Navy's funding needs and ship inventories through 2041. The Navy currently envisions buying a total of 275 ships during the next 30 years at an average annual cost of nearly $16 billion (in 2011 dollars) for new construction alone or a little more than $17 billion for total shipbuilding. By comparison, this report estimates that the cost of the Navy¿s plan will average $18 billion per year for new construction or $20 billion per year for total shipbuilding. Charts and tables. This is a print on demand report.

Updated 12/10/2020: In December 2016, the Navy released a force-structure goal that callsfor achieving and maintaining a fleet of 355 ships of certain types and numbers. The 355-shipgoal was made U.S. policy by Section 1025 of the FY2018 National Defense AuthorizationAct (H.R. 2810/P.L. 115- 91 of December 12, 2017). The Navy and the Department of Defense(DOD) have been working since 2019 to develop a successor for the 355-ship force-level goal.The new goal is expected to introduce a new, more distributed fleet architecture featuring asmaller proportion of larger ships, a larger proportion of smaller ships, and a new third tier oflarge unmanned vehicles (UVs). On December 9, 2020, the Trump Administration released a document that can beviewed as its vision for future Navy force structure and/or a draft version of the FY202230-year Navy shipbuilding plan. The document presents a Navy force-level goal that callsfor achieving by 2045 a Navy with a more distributed fleet architecture, 382 to 446 mannedships, and 143 to 242 large UVs. The Administration that takes office on January 20, 2021,is required by law to release the FY2022 30-year Navy shipbuilding plan in connection withDOD's proposed FY2022 budget, which will be submitted to Congress in 2021. In preparingthe FY2022 30-year shipbuilding plan, the Administration that takes office on January 20,2021, may choose to adopt, revise, or set aside the document that was released on December9, 2020. The Navy states that its original FY2021 budget submission requests the procurement ofeight new ships, but this figure includes LPD-31, an LPD-17 Flight II amphibious ship thatCongress procured (i.e., authorized and appropriated procurement funding for) in FY2020.Excluding this ship, the Navy's original FY2021 budget submission requests the procurementof seven new ships rather than eight. In late November 2020, the Trump Administrationreportedly decided to request the procurement of a second Virginia-class attack submarinein FY2021. CRS as of December 10, 2020, had not received any documentation from theAdministration detailing the exact changes to the Virginia-class program funding linesthat would result from this reported change. Pending the delivery of that information fromthe administration, this CRS report continues to use the Navy's original FY2021 budgetsubmission in its tables and narrative discussions.