The Small Warship America Forgot
What U.S. Naval History Can Teach Us About Iran—and the Future of Geopolitical Warfare
For much of American naval history, the United States understood something that today’s Navy sometimes seems to have forgotten:
A navy does not win maritime wars simply by owning the most powerful ships. It wins by having the right ships for the geography, mission and enemy it actually faces.
That distinction matters enormously in the Persian Gulf.
It matters in the Strait of Hormuz.
And it may matter even more in the future battlespaces of the South China Sea, the Red Sea, the Baltic and the enormous collection of contested maritime environments where the United States may have to operate.
America has extraordinary naval technology. It possesses nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, Aegis destroyers, advanced aircraft and increasingly sophisticated unmanned systems.
But there is a hole in the fleet.
The United States has too few small, affordable, heavily capable surface combatants that can operate persistently in confined waters.
That is not simply a procurement problem.
It is a strategic problem.
And American naval history provides a remarkable warning.
America Has Always Needed Small Warships
The idea that the U.S. Navy is fundamentally a fleet of large ships is historically inaccurate.
From the earliest days of the republic, American naval forces have used small vessels because the country itself was built around an enormous coastline, rivers, bays, islands and coastal trading routes.
During the American Revolution, small American vessels were used for commerce raiding, reconnaissance, coastal operations and disrupting British logistics.
The young United States could not afford a fleet of European-style ships of the line on the scale of Britain.
So it improvised.
The same pattern would appear repeatedly throughout American history.
When the mission moved close to shore, the Navy needed smaller ships.
When the enemy used small craft, the Navy needed small craft.
When geography constrained maneuver, the Navy needed vessels designed around that geography.
This is one of the most persistent themes in American naval history.
The American Revolution: Small Ships Against a Superpower
The Continental Navy was tiny compared with the Royal Navy.
America could not fight Britain symmetrically.
Instead, American naval forces relied heavily on smaller vessels, privateers and commerce raiders.
The strategic objective wasn’t necessarily to destroy the Royal Navy.
It was to make British maritime control more expensive and more difficult.
That is an important lesson for the modern era.
Naval warfare does not always require symmetrical fleets.
A smaller power can exploit geography, numbers, speed, surprise and asymmetric tactics.
The United States understood that principle when it was the weaker naval power.
Today, America should understand it from the opposite perspective.
The Civil War: River Warfare Changes Everything
The Civil War demonstrated another fundamental principle:
water geography determines naval architecture.
The Mississippi River and its tributaries became enormous military highways.
The Union developed specialized river gunboats and other relatively shallow-draft vessels capable of operating where conventional ocean-going warships were poorly suited.
These ships were not miniature battleships.
They were specialized tools.
Their value came from being able to operate where larger vessels could not.
That lesson should sound familiar in the Persian Gulf.
A ship designed primarily for blue-water operations is not automatically the ideal platform for every confined maritime environment.
World War II and the Birth of the PT Boat
Perhaps the clearest American example is the PT boat.
Before World War II, the U.S. Navy experimented with small, fast boats capable of operating close to enemy shores.
In 1938, the Navy held a competition encouraging American boat builders to develop highly mobile attack craft. The resulting program eventually produced the famous patrol-torpedo boats of World War II.
The boats were tiny compared with cruisers and battleships.
But that was the point.
They were fast.
They were relatively inexpensive.
They could operate close to shore.
They could conduct reconnaissance.
They could attack enemy shipping.
They could lay mines and smoke screens.
They could rescue downed airmen.
They could conduct intelligence and raiding missions.
The Navy ultimately formed 43 PT squadrons, each with 12 boats during World War II.
The PT boat was not a replacement for the battleship.
It was something different.
And that distinction is critical.
The PT Boat’s Greatest Lesson
The lesson of the PT boat isn’t:
“Small boats are better than large ships.”
That would be ridiculous.
The lesson is:
Different maritime environments require different platforms.
The United States still needed carriers.
It still needed battleships.
It still needed cruisers and destroyers.
But it also needed hundreds of small boats.
That created a layered fleet.
The PT boat was one piece of a much larger naval ecosystem.
That is exactly the philosophy the Navy should revisit today.
Vietnam: The Return of Small Boats
The Vietnam War produced another enormous experiment in small-boat warfare.
The U.S. Navy operated patrol boats, riverine forces and other small craft throughout the country’s rivers, deltas and coastal waters.
The geography was unforgiving to conventional naval assumptions.
The enemy could hide among civilian traffic.
The waterways were narrow.
The coast was complicated.
The river systems created thousands of potential approaches.
The Navy needed ships that could go where the war was.
The lesson was straightforward:
A ship that cannot operate effectively in the environment where the mission occurs is not necessarily useful simply because it is technologically sophisticated.
The Persian Gulf Changes the Equation Again
The Persian Gulf presents another version of the same problem.
It is not the open Atlantic.
It is not the North Pacific.
It is a geographically constrained maritime environment containing commercial shipping, offshore infrastructure, islands, ports, shallow waters and strategically important chokepoints.
And at its center is the Strait of Hormuz.
The Strait is one of the world’s most consequential maritime chokepoints.
That geography makes small and fast vessels particularly relevant to the operational environment.
Iran has spent decades developing a naval strategy built around coastal geography, missiles, smaller craft, mines and asymmetric capabilities.
The United States possesses vastly superior conventional naval power.
But superiority does not eliminate geography.
The Iran Problem Is Really a Geography Problem
This is where the debate over small American warships becomes more interesting.
The question isn’t:
Could an American destroyer defeat an Iranian small boat?
Of course it could.
That isn’t the strategic problem.
The real question is:
Should a multi-billion-dollar destroyer be the platform the United States relies upon for every low-end maritime mission in a confined waterway?
That is much harder to answer.
A destroyer is extraordinarily valuable.
It has sophisticated radar.
It carries powerful missiles.
It provides command and control.
It can defend itself and other ships.
But it is expensive.
It requires a large crew.
It consumes substantial resources.
And there are relatively few of them.
If the Navy uses its most expensive platforms for every maritime security, patrol, escort and small-craft mission, it risks turning every encounter into an unfavorable economic equation.
The Missing Middle
The Navy has enormous ships.
It has submarines.
It has aircraft.
It has small boats and unmanned systems.
But historically it has struggled to maintain a robust category between the patrol craft and the major surface combatant.
That is the missing middle.
The Navy needs something like a modern corvette or heavily armed offshore patrol vessel.
Not another LCS.
Not a miniature Burke.
Something simpler.
Something smaller.
Something designed from the beginning to be affordable.
Something the Navy could actually build in meaningful numbers.
The Cyclone Class: The Forgotten American Answer
The most obvious recent American example is the Cyclone-class patrol craft.
The class consisted of 14 ships, with most built by Bollinger Shipyards in Louisiana. The first ships entered service in the 1990s.
The Cyclones were roughly 170 feet long and designed for missions involving coastal security, patrol, special operations and maritime interdiction.
They were not designed to fight an enemy destroyer.
That wasn’t their purpose.
Their purpose was to perform missions where a destroyer was excessive and a small RHIB was insufficient.
That is precisely the category the Navy increasingly lacks.
The Naval Institute observed that the Navy’s patrol-craft heritage stretches from the American Revolution through Vietnam and into the Persian Gulf.
That historical continuity is important.
The requirement did not disappear.
The Navy’s fleet structure simply changed.
The Command Problem
There is another reason small warships matter that has little to do with missiles.
They create commanders.
A navy needs officers who have actually commanded ships.
Large surface combatants have relatively few command billets.
Small combatants can create an entirely different leadership pipeline.
A young surface warfare officer can learn navigation, engineering, weapons employment, crew management, logistics and tactical decision-making while commanding a ship that is genuinely part of the fleet.
That matters.
Navies are not simply collections of weapons systems.
They are institutions that manufacture maritime leaders.
Then Came the Littoral Combat Ship
The United States recognized the need for something different.
The answer was the Littoral Combat Ship.
The basic concept was ambitious: create a fast, flexible vessel capable of performing different mission sets in the littoral environment.
The Navy envisioned three major mission areas:
surface warfare, mine countermeasures and antisubmarine warfare.
But the program became increasingly complicated.
Costs rose.
Schedules slipped.
Requirements evolved.
Mission modules struggled.
And the program became associated with exactly the kind of acquisition complexity that a small, affordable warship should avoid.
The Government Accountability Office documented the deterioration of the original LCS business case, noting that early expectations of 55 ships at roughly $220 million each evolved into plans for 40 ships at approximately $478 million each.
That is an extraordinary lesson.
The Navy wanted a relatively small ship.
It eventually created a very expensive one.
The Lesson of LCS Is Not “Never Build Small Ships”
This distinction is critical.
The LCS experience should not lead to:
“The Navy doesn’t need small combatants.”
It should lead to:
“The Navy needs to build small combatants without turning them into extraordinarily complicated large combatants.”
That means abandoning the desire to make one hull perform every conceivable mission.
It means avoiding excessive customization.
It means designing for production.
It means accepting that a $500 million ship cannot provide the same economic mass as a $100 million ship.
And it means understanding that quantity itself is a military capability.
The Future Navy May Need Hundreds of Small Platforms
The future maritime battlespace will probably contain far more objects than today’s fleet planners are accustomed to.
There will be:
Drones.
Autonomous surface vessels.
Unmanned underwater vehicles.
Small missiles.
Commercial ships.
Fishing vessels.
Satellites.
Aircraft.
Cyber systems.
Electronic-warfare platforms.
Artificial intelligence systems.
And traditional warships.
The ocean is becoming a giant network.
A modern small warship could become a mobile node in that network.
Its most important weapon might not be a missile.
It might be its sensor suite.
From Platforms to Networks
This represents a fundamental change in naval warfare.
The twentieth-century question was often:
How powerful is this ship?
The twenty-first-century question increasingly becomes:
How useful is this ship to the network?
A relatively small vessel might detect a threat.
Another platform might classify it.
A drone might track it.
A satellite might provide additional information.
A larger surface combatant might engage it.
A submarine might provide another layer of surveillance.
The individual ship does not need to do everything.
It needs to contribute to the system.
This is where small warships could become extremely valuable.
The Coming Age of Geopolitical Warfare
This is also why the argument extends beyond Iran.
Future geopolitical warfare will increasingly be conducted across multiple domains simultaneously.
Consider what happens around a maritime chokepoint.
A competitor doesn’t necessarily need to sink a U.S. Navy ship.
It can create uncertainty.
It can disrupt shipping.
It can threaten ports.
It can attack communications.
It can interfere with satellites.
It can use drones.
It can manipulate insurance markets.
It can spread disinformation.
It can threaten energy infrastructure.
It can conduct cyber operations.
It can use civilian-looking vessels to create ambiguity.
The battlefield increasingly becomes economic, informational, cyber, maritime and military at the same time.
A modern Navy therefore needs persistent presence.
And persistent presence is expensive if every mission requires a destroyer.
The Economics of Maritime Warfare
Imagine two adversaries.
One has extremely sophisticated warships.
The other can produce thousands of inexpensive drones and small vessels.
The sophisticated fleet can defeat individual threats.
But it cannot necessarily be everywhere simultaneously.
That creates a problem of scale.
The enemy can create hundreds of contacts.
The defender has to identify them.
The defender has to track them.
The defender has to decide which ones matter.
The defender has to allocate weapons.
And every interceptor costs money.
This is sometimes described as the cost-exchange problem.
A navy that answers every inexpensive threat with an expensive weapon can eventually find itself fighting an economic war as much as a military one.
Small Ships Can Create Economic Asymmetry
This is where affordable American warships become strategically interesting.
A small combatant doesn’t have to defeat every threat by itself.
It can provide:
presence.
surveillance.
identification.
communications.
escort.
interdiction.
force protection.
unmanned-system control.
maritime security.
And, depending on its design, a meaningful amount of combat power.
The objective is to create a fleet that can put many more decision-makers and sensors into the maritime environment without spending destroyer-level money for every hull.
The Persian Gulf Could Be the Perfect Laboratory
The Gulf is precisely the kind of environment where the concept deserves serious experimentation.
Large ships would remain essential.
Aircraft would remain essential.
Submarines would remain essential.
But smaller ships could provide the persistent presence required by a geographically constrained environment.
They could operate in groups.
They could work with unmanned systems.
They could support larger combatants.
They could perform maritime security missions.
They could free destroyers to concentrate on higher-end tasks.
That is not a replacement strategy.
It is a force multiplication strategy.
Imagine a Modern American Sloop of War
Call it whatever you want.
Corvette.
Patrol combatant.
Small surface combatant.
Offshore patrol vessel.
Sloop of war.
The label doesn’t matter.
The characteristics do.
Imagine a ship of perhaps several hundred to roughly a thousand tons that emphasizes:
high reliability
long endurance
modern sensors
secure communications
unmanned-system integration
electronic warfare
modest but useful defensive weapons
surface warfare capability
crew survivability
low operating cost
rapid construction
The objective would not be to build a tiny destroyer.
It would be to build a useful ship.
The Ship Should Be Designed for Quantity
This is perhaps the most important procurement principle.
The Navy should decide how many it wants before designing the ship.
If the answer is 10, almost any design can become affordable.
If the answer is 100, the design must be radically different.
If the answer is 200, production becomes part of the strategy.
America’s shipbuilding industry would have to be structured around producing these vessels rapidly.
That means multiple shipyards.
Common components.
Open architecture.
Commercial manufacturing where appropriate.
Standardized engines and electronics.
Minimal bespoke technology.
And a design that can evolve without requiring the entire ship to be redesigned.
The Historical Parallel Is Strong
America did this before.
During World War II, the country rapidly expanded production of small naval craft.
PT boats were built by companies that were not traditional naval giants.
The National Park Service notes that roughly a dozen manufacturers in the United States, Canada and Britain participated in PT-boat production before production eventually became concentrated among major builders such as Elco and Higgins.
That matters in an age of strategic competition.
The United States does not necessarily need every warship to come from one enormous shipyard.
It needs a distributed industrial base capable of producing useful vessels quickly.
The Future May Look More Like World War II Than the Cold War
The Cold War encouraged a certain kind of naval thinking.
Supercarriers.
Nuclear submarines.
Large surface combatants.
Global deployments.
Massive technological advantage.
The future may require something more complicated.
The Navy will still need those platforms.
But it may also need mass.
And mass doesn’t necessarily mean hundreds of destroyers.
It could mean a handful of carriers and submarines surrounded by a large ecosystem of smaller crewed and unmanned vessels.
The fleet becomes less like a collection of giant platforms and more like a distributed organism.
China Makes This Even More Important
Iran provides the immediate geographical example.
China provides the long-term strategic argument.
The People’s Liberation Army Navy and China’s broader military-industrial system can produce ships, missiles, drones and other systems at a scale that the United States must take seriously.
The American response cannot simply be:
“Build a more expensive ship.”
At some point, the United States has to ask:
How many useful maritime platforms can we actually put into the water?
That is a different question.
And it may be the more important one.
The South China Sea Is Not the Persian Gulf
The United States should not assume that lessons from Iran transfer perfectly to China.
They don’t.
The South China Sea is vastly larger.
The distances are different.
The missile environment is different.
The adversary is different.
The industrial base is different.
The geography is different.
But the broader lesson transfers:
maritime geography determines what kinds of forces are useful.
The United States needs a fleet capable of operating across multiple geographic environments.
That means diversity.
The Red Sea Provides Another Warning
The Red Sea has demonstrated how vulnerable commercial maritime traffic can become when relatively inexpensive weapons and unmanned systems threaten a major international shipping route.
The lesson is not that small warships should solve every problem.
It is that the Navy increasingly has to protect maritime systems, not simply fight enemy fleets.
That requires persistence.
And persistence requires numbers.
The Real Future Is Manned-Unmanned Teams
The ideal small combatant of the future may not operate alone.
It could command or coordinate several unmanned systems.
A single crewed vessel could potentially deploy or supervise:
- Surface drones
- Underwater drones
- Reconnaissance aircraft
- Decoys
- Electronic-warfare systems
That changes the economics dramatically.
Instead of putting 50 sailors aboard five ships, the Navy might eventually operate a smaller number of crewed command platforms connected to a much larger number of autonomous systems.
The small ship becomes the human command node.
That may be one of its most important future roles.
What America Should Not Do
There is a temptation whenever the Navy identifies a capability gap to create a gigantic requirements document.
Then the requirements grow.
The technology becomes more complicated.
The ship becomes larger.
The price increases.
The procurement schedule slips.
And eventually the Navy has another exquisite platform that is too expensive to buy in sufficient numbers.
That cycle needs to end.
The next small warship should be deliberately boring.
Boring is good.
Reliable is good.
Cheap is good.
Easy to maintain is good.
Easy to manufacture is good.
Having 100 of them is better than having 10 magnificent examples.
The Forgotten Lesson of Naval History
The history of the U.S. Navy repeatedly demonstrates that the fleet is strongest when it combines different kinds of ships.
The Continental Navy used small vessels because America lacked Britain’s naval power.
The Civil War produced specialized river craft because rivers demanded them.
World War II produced hundreds of PT boats because the Pacific and Mediterranean demanded small, fast combatants.
Vietnam produced riverine and patrol forces because conventional ships could not dominate every waterway.
The Persian Gulf created renewed demand for small patrol craft.
And the Navy eventually built the Cyclone class because there was a persistent requirement for a platform between a small boat and a major surface combatant.
The requirement keeps returning.
Perhaps that is the most important historical fact.
The Navy Should Stop Asking Whether Small Ships Are Necessary
The question has been answered repeatedly.
The question should instead be:
What kind of small ship does the United States need in 2030, 2040 and 2050?
That is a much more productive debate.
It should be inexpensive enough to build in quantity.
It should be technologically sophisticated enough to operate inside the modern information environment.
It should be simple enough to maintain.
It should be survivable enough to operate in contested waters with appropriate support.
It should integrate unmanned systems.
And it should be designed from day one as part of a distributed fleet.
The Small Warship Is Not the Future Navy
And that is precisely the point.
The United States does not need a Navy consisting of small warships.
It needs a Navy in which small warships finally have a place again.
The carrier still matters.
The submarine still matters.
The destroyer still matters.
The Marine Corps still matters.
Aircraft still matter.
Satellites matter.
Drones matter.
But the United States should not build a fleet in which every problem requires the most expensive platform available.
History suggests a better model.
Build the right ship for the right water.
In the Persian Gulf, that may mean smaller combatants.
In the South China Sea, it may mean distributed forces.
In the Atlantic, it may mean something else.
In the Arctic, something else again.
The future of naval warfare will not be defined by one revolutionary ship.
It will be defined by the ability to put the right combination of ships, aircraft, sensors, drones and weapons in the right place at the right time.
That is ultimately what geopolitical warfare is becoming.
It is no longer simply a contest between armies and fleets.
It is a contest over geography, logistics, information, commerce, infrastructure, technology and political will.
And in that world, the United States may discover that one of its most valuable weapons is not another enormous warship.
It may be the little ship sitting beside it.
The small warship America forgot may be the ship America needs to build next.
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