The U.S. Navy is on track to retire aging cruisers and destroyers that collectively carry more than 2,000 vertical launch system (VLS) cells, the tubes used to fire cruise missiles, air-defense interceptors, and anti-submarine rockets. No replacement hulls are arriving fast enough to close the gap. The shortfall threatens to erode American missile firepower during a period of intensifying competition with China’s rapidly expanding fleet, and congressional oversight bodies have flagged systemic shipbuilding problems that make a quick fix unlikely.
Where the Missile Cells Are Disappearing
VLS cells are the basic currency of naval striking power. Each cell can hold a Tomahawk land-attack missile, an SM-6 air-defense round, or other munitions. When a warship retires, every cell aboard leaves the fleet permanently unless a new ship takes its place. The Navy’s Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers, each carrying 122 cells, have been decommissioning steadily, and older Arleigh Burke-class destroyers will follow. The Congressional Research Service tracks these force-structure plans in a continuously updated report (RL32665) that lays out the gap between planned retirements and new construction. The math is stark: ships are leaving faster than replacements can be built, bought, and crewed.
What makes this different from normal fleet turnover is scale. Losing more than 2,000 cells does not simply reduce firepower by a percentage; it shrinks the number of salvos the Navy can deliver in the opening hours of a conflict, precisely the window that war planners consider most decisive in a Pacific scenario. Allies and adversaries alike measure fleet capability partly by counting launch cells, and a visible decline sends a signal that budget documents alone cannot offset.
Billions Spent on Cruisers With Little to Show
The Navy tried to buy time by modernizing its oldest cruisers rather than retiring them, but the effort backfired. Since 2015, the service spent about $3.7 billion modernizing seven guided-missile cruisers, yet only three of those ships became operational. The Government Accountability Office concluded that roughly $2 billion of that spending was effectively wasted, money that could have funded new construction or accelerated other programs.
This episode illustrates a pattern that runs through Navy procurement: the service often extends the life of legacy platforms because new designs are not ready, then discovers that aging hulls absorb enormous maintenance costs without delivering reliable capability. Each dollar poured into a cruiser that never returned to sea is a dollar unavailable for the next-generation ships the fleet actually needs. The cruiser modernization failure did not just waste money; it consumed shipyard capacity and workforce hours that are themselves in short supply.
Bloomberg’s separate coverage of the cruiser overhaul plan underscores how sunk costs can distort future planning. Once billions are committed to keeping old ships alive, it becomes politically harder to cancel them, even when technical problems mount. That dynamic has helped lock the Navy into a fleet mix that sheds VLS cells faster than new ones can be added.
Shipbuilding Delays Are Structural, Not Temporary
Even if Congress appropriated unlimited funds tomorrow, new warships would not arrive for years. The GAO’s report on Navy shipbuilding (GAO‑25‑108225) documents what it calls enduring challenges that demand systemic change. Those challenges include immature designs entering production too early, a fragile supplier base for specialized components, and persistent cost growth that forces the Navy to buy fewer ships than planned.
Supplier fragility deserves particular attention. The industrial base that produces propulsion systems, combat electronics, and hull steel has consolidated over decades, leaving single points of failure. When one vendor falls behind, entire ship classes slip to the right on the calendar. The GAO’s framing is blunt: these are not one-time setbacks but recurring patterns baked into how the Navy manages shipbuilding programs. Without structural reform of acquisition practices and sustained investment in the supplier network, new VLS-carrying hulls will continue to arrive late and over budget.
Design maturity is another recurring problem. Programs often enter detailed design and construction before key technologies are fully tested. When those technologies underperform, shipyards must rework already-installed systems, tying up dry docks and skilled labor that could be building additional hulls. The result is a fleet plan that looks robust on paper but delivers fewer ships, later, at higher cost, and with less confidence that the promised capabilities will work as advertised.
DDG(X) Promises Power but Faces Uncertain Timing
The Navy’s primary answer to the cell deficit is the DDG(X) next-generation destroyer, designed to carry more firepower and improved sensors than the current Arleigh Burke class. A CRS report updated in January 2026 (IF11679) outlines the program’s background and the issues lawmakers are weighing, including development funding levels and the pace of design work.
According to that CRS analysis, DDG(X) is expected to incorporate a larger hull form, expanded power generation, and room for future weapons, including high-energy lasers. Those features are meant to support a greater number of VLS cells than current destroyers and to give the ship growth margin for decades. Yet the same report cautions that the program remains in early development, with no construction contract yet yielding a hull and key design decisions still under review.
History suggests caution. The Zumwalt-class destroyer was also billed as a leap forward; it ended up truncated from 32 planned ships to three, each plagued by cost overruns and ammunition shortages. DDG(X) is being framed more as an evolutionary step than a revolutionary one, but it inherits the same industrial base constraints the GAO has cataloged. If design maturity problems push construction starts further into the future, the VLS gap will widen before it narrows, leaving a period when the surface fleet’s magazine depth is thinner than planners once assumed.
Congressional analysts have also highlighted broader surface combatant questions surrounding DDG(X), including how it will coexist with upgraded Arleigh Burke destroyers and whether the Navy can afford both new hulls and the weapons to fill their launch cells. Building ships without the missiles to arm them would do little to solve the underlying firepower problem.
Budget Tradeoffs and the Readiness Squeeze
Senior Navy leaders have acknowledged the tension between keeping today’s fleet ready and investing in tomorrow’s ships. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Seapower, VADM James Pitts joined other officials in a joint statement for the FY25 Seapower Investment Hearing that laid out budget priorities, readiness constraints, and timelines for future surface combatants and unmanned efforts.
The statement reflects a service stretched between competing demands. Maintenance backlogs already keep existing destroyers in shipyards longer than planned, reducing the number of deployable hulls at any given time. At the same moment, the Navy is trying to fund new construction, missile procurement, and experimentation with unmanned vessels that could eventually supplement manned ships. Every dollar allocated to fixing aging platforms is a dollar not available to accelerate new VLS capacity.
Leaders have framed these tradeoffs as a choice between “capacity” and “capability.” Capacity means more hulls and more launch cells; capability means better sensors, longer-range weapons, and advanced networking. In practice, the Navy is struggling to buy enough of either. The cruiser modernization missteps, the structural shipbuilding delays, and the uncertainty surrounding DDG(X) all point toward a decade in which the fleet will likely field fewer missile cells than planners once promised (even as potential adversaries continue to add their own).
For Congress and the Pentagon, the policy question is not just how many ships to buy, but how to change the underlying system so that planned ships actually arrive on time and on budget. That will require hard choices, canceling underperforming legacy programs sooner, demanding greater design maturity before authorizing construction, and investing in the industrial base rather than assuming it can surge on demand. Without those reforms, the Navy’s disappearing VLS cells will be a symptom of a deeper problem, an acquisition system that cannot reliably translate funding into combat power at sea.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
