Navy Updates 30-year Fleet Plan

The updated U.S. 30-year fleet construction plan require more surface combatants and fewer expeditionary warfare ships, but preserves the goal of a 313-ship fleet, Defense News reported. The plan, approved Feb. 2 by Navy Secretary Donald Winter, is updated every year and sent to Congress along with the U.S. president's annual budget, according to the report. While the numbers required for individual types of ships such as submarines and aircraft carriers haven't been altered, the 2008 plan improves the building rate for surface combatants in the far- term period -- those years from 2021 to 2037. Instead of building two ships per year, the revised plan requires building three ships in every year beginning in 2025. Those ships will be the yet-to-be-designed DDG(X) destroyer, a follow-on to today's DDG 51 Arleigh Burke class of Aegis guided- missile destroyers.