To win the coming China war, the US Navy needs more missile firepower. Here’s how

A Tomahawk cruise missile is launched from the US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Arleigh Burke, in the Red Sea. US warships can carry various powerful missiles in their arrays of vertical launch cells - Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Carlos M Vazquez/US Navy via Reuters

After decades of breakneck growth, the Chinese navy now has more ships – nearly 350 – than the US Navy has: 290.

But the American fleet still has one key firepower advantage. All combined, its ships carry nearly 10,000 vertical cells for launching air-defense, anti-ship and land-attack missiles. Chinese ships together carry fewer than 5,000 missile cells.

America’s missile lead is slipping, however – and the one US program that stands any realistic chance of reversing the missile slippage is moving at a glacial pace. That program aims to build potentially scores of inexpensive robotic warships that can sail alongside manned ships, adding their own missile cells to a battle group’s firepower.

For the first two generations of naval technology following the advent of the guided missile in the 1950s, warships typically launched their missiles via rotating arms, one or two per launcher. Even the most powerful ships usually boasted just two launchers.

US Navy frigate USS Nicholas leaves Malta in 2001. Note the old-school single shot Mark 13 missile launcher. Modern warships nowadays use vertical launch cells - Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters

These arms had to spin back to their reload position after firing their missiles, and fresh weapons had to move up from the magazine onto the launching arm. The reload time limited the pace at which a ship could shoot, with potentially catastrophic consequences if a battle group was trying to defeat waves of incoming enemy missiles.

The advent of the vertical launch cell, in the 1980s, changed everything. Instead of a single- or twin-arm launcher, a ship carried its missiles in tightly-packed launch tubes installed vertically inside the ship’s hull.

A VLS installation not only salvoes its missiles faster than an arm launcher can do, it’s also more flexible. The standard US-made Mark 41 VLS system can fire a wide array of missiles to engage targets on land, on the ocean surface, in the air and in space. It can even launch a missile (the ASROC) which deposits a submarine-hunting torpedo into the sea at a location chosen by the warship’s captain.

By the early 2000s, a tally of a fleet’s total VLS cells was a fair measure of the fleet’s overall firepower. And the US fleet by far was the most powerful, largely owing to two classes of vessels: Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Ohio-class cruise-missile submarines.

Each of 22 cruisers carried 122 VLS cells. The four cruise-missile subs packed 154 cells apiece. Together, the two classes accounted for a third of the US Navy’s missile firepower – and seemed to ensure the American fleet’s lead over all possible rivals.

But several efforts to replace the Ticonderogas with a new class of cruiser foundered as costs rose and the Pentagon prioritized its land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, the staggering cost of developing a new large submarine pushed replacements for the cruise-missile subs into the 2040s.

The problem, for the US Navy, is that both the 1980s-vintage Ticonderogas and the equally-aged cruise-missile subs are wearing out, fast. By 2028, all the cruisers and subs will have decommissioned without direct replacements.

And that’s why the Chinese navy is poised to erase much of the US Navy’s missile advantage. Steadily building ever-bigger ships in ever-greater numbers, the Chinese are on schedule to add a thousand missile cells over the next three years, while the Americans lose 500 cells.

Anticipating this problem several years ago, the US Navy settled on a possible solution: build inexpensive ships that are nothing but missile cells – and don’t even need crews. The result was the Large Unmanned Surface Vessel program, or LUSV.

As recently as 2022, the Navy expected to build scores of the 300-foot LUSVs, each armed with as many as 32 missile cells, for around $300 million per ship. That’s a tenth of what a new manned warship might cost. The flotilla of LUSVs promised to add a thousand missile cells to the US fleet at exactly the moment the fleet needed them the most, and without sinking the fleet’s budget.

Then came the delays. This year, the US Navy pushed back production of the first robotic missile ships by two years to 2027 – and dropped any official projection for the overall size of the LUSV flotilla. While four American shipyards have completed the reliability tests that make them eligible to build LUSVs, the US fleet isn’t in any hurry to select one yard to lead the program.

This might not be a problem if the Chinese fleet weren’t itself in a hurry – to build new manned ships and at least match, if not eventually exceed, the US Navy’s missile-cell count.

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