Navy needs more ships, new shipyard and more funding, chief says

Emma Rose Brown, The Virginian-Pilot on Aug 26, 2026

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NORFOLK, Va. — A year into his tenure as Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Daryl Caudle said he needs the service to grow.

Caudle was in Norfolk on Wednesday ahead of his annual State of the Navy address.

He said the latest assessment says the Navy needs even more than the previously projected 387 ships. He also said he wants a fifth shipyard, which he said he would prefer to have on the West Coast.

Currently, ships are built at about the same rate they are decommissioned.

Building a larger fleet will require a significant expansion of the country’s shipbuilding capacity. Caudle said he expects the Navy to move forward with a fifth public shipyard — and potentially through a public-private partnership and with foreign investment.

He said some of the challenges will be budgeting and building a bigger workforce.

Caudle’s first year in the job has been marked by continuous conflicts, and he acknowledged the strain extended deployments put on sailors and their families.

He said the biggest difference between the issue-plagued deployments of the USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Abraham Lincoln was the ability to reset.

“What I think fundamentally has made (the Ford’s) a better experience for sailors than the Abe’s experience is not the operations. They’re nearly identical in the combat sortie process that they were conducting. It’s really the port calls and the ability to kind of reset and take a knee,” Caudle said.

He said the Navy is also focused on efforts to make deployments more manageable, like giving families more lead time to plan for longer stints and providing additional services on the home front.

“Healthcare, childcare, housing, spouse employment — things that we just know are distractors for our military families that we need — no kidding — solutions for, money put behind, track to completion to improve those things,” Caudle said.

Asked about recent reporting on issues with military housing in Hampton Roads and nationwide, Caudle and Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy John Perryman said better oversight and accountability of private partners is needed.

“One of the things (Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations and Environment Brendan) Rogers and some of them are looking at — because the way these partners set their scheme up as their individual LLCs based on the region — is how do we get them to use some of the money where they’re flush to support one of their other LLCs, because it’s all the same parent company — to flow some of that in these areas where we’re struggling and the BAH rates have not kept up or went down and so that LLC doesn’t have enough money,” Perryman said.

Caudle said money intended for housing and other quality-of-life improvements could instead be pulled from the Navy’s facilities budget to cover costs not included in the current budget — including the $6 billion to $8 billion, and growing, supplemental needed to fund the war with Iran.

His message on Wednesday to Congress was simple.

“I need my money.”

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