What is the world's largest navy? The second largest? How has this changed over time? Can't we just count how many ships each has?
Oh. Well, it's true that not every vessel is equal, but all navies are a mix of large and small vessels, and so it should come out in the wash, right? What? Some navies expect to operate close to home and buy a lot of small ships, while others buy only big ships? So just counting hulls is going to make you look really silly, isn't it? That seems like something to avoid.
OK, you're the expert. Tell me how we're going to do this.
Clearly, measuring navies is a problem that is at least moderately difficult, placing it outside the capabilities of the typical journalist. As a result, we've had to put up with stories about the PLAN overtaking the USN as the world's largest, thanks in large part to about 100 missile boats and 70 corvettes, vessels smaller than almost anything the USN has in service. Astonishingly, several of the articles turned up on Google when I went looking actually mention this and explain it, but it still remains beyond the grasp of, for instance, professors at the Naval War College.
So what do we do instead? There are several options we can pick from that give results that are closer to what we'd expect and more closely approximate actual combat power. By far the easiest of these is to count warship hulls of frigate size and above, along with all non-midget submarines. While this still counts a 3,000 ton frigate or a 1,600 ton submarine the same as a CVN, in practice this method screens out the small stuff that really messes up these comparisons. Frigates and submarines are about the smallest really useful warships, and nobody is actually trying to build a "frigate swarm". Everyone who has a lot of frigates also has other, bigger ships roughly in proportion. Obviously, this isn't a perfect model. Not all ships are actually equal, and in particular, there are several countries with quite large diesel submarine fleets that are overcounted by this method. But SSKs are still important units in a way that missile boats aren't, so cutting them out entirely isn't really a good plan. At the very least, the frigate+ method is a decent way of getting a rough idea of relative naval power from easily-available data, although it has obvious flaws.
The obvious alternative to just declaring certain ships out of bounds is to take the size of ships into account directly by counting tonnage. This has two major downsides. First, tonnage is terrible, and you need to make sure that all of your tonnage measurements are to a common baseline. Second, you need a lot more numbers. That is a manageable problem if you just want to compare the US and China today, but let's say you're asked when the Soviet Union overtook Britain as the 2nd largest naval power. Using the Frigate+ method, I can generate an answer (1949) within about 3 minutes from data in the book The Changing Face of the World's Navies. Doing a tonnage calculation easily would involve a fairly complete set of Jane's from the late 40s and early 50s and a complicated spreadsheet to keep track of all the different classes. Or if you don't have access to those, you could spend hours trying to reconstruct the fleet from other reference books. That would be a massive pain, and while it would push back the date somewhat due to the lack of Soviet capital ships, it doesn't seem like a fun way to spend your time.
Nor does using tonnage free us from the tyranny of having to decide what to count. Sure, we can safely include missile boats without skewing the results, but there are still a lot of judgement calls to make. Do we include the US Coast Guard, and if so, do we include all cutters, or just those over a certain size? What about the Chinese Coast Guard, which is a lot harder to find information on? What about auxiliaries, which are often very large compared to warships? The Iranian Navy operates IRIS Makran, a converted oil tanker which displaces more than every other ship in their fleet put together, including other auxiliaries. Obviously, you can make calls to deal with each of these problems, but there isn't an obviously right answer.
There are various other ways you could try to generate a single number, counting VLS cells/missile tubes being the most obvious, but the best approach is to abandon the quest for a single number and instead rely on type-by-type comparison. Even this can be messed up by getting the types wrong, and my approach would be to try and split them into as few categories as you can while still keeping the categories fully meaningful. For instance, you want to make sure true aircraft carriers are separated from helicopter carriers and SSNs and SSKs don't end up under the same heading, but lumping all fleet escorts (CG/DDG/FFG) together is basically fine.1 Obviously, this isn't perfect, as there will be considerable variation in capability within each category, but it's at least something which can be done reasonably quickly and will give results which actually make sense. For instance, here's the US v China under that scheme as of mid-2024:2
| Type | US | China |
|---|---|---|
| Carrier (CV/CVN) | 11 | 2 |
| SSBN | 14 | 6 |
| SSN | 54 | 6 |
| SSK | 0 | 50 |
| Fleet Escort | 88 | 100 |
| Patrol Escort/Corvette | 24 | 55 |
| FAC3 | 0 | 75 |
| Big Amphib | 32 | 11 |
From this, we can easily see that the US has huge advantages in carriers and SSNs, the two sides are about even in fleet escorts (although the Chinese figure includes a lot of Type 54 FFGs, while the USN figure is basically all Ticos and Burkes) and the Chinese advantage is entirely in SSKs (dangerous in coastal waters) and small stuff that we shouldn't really care too much about. This gives a vastly more accurate picture than the simple hull comparison, even if the people doing hull counting managed to avoid sweeping in really silly things like patrol vessels that basically just have a gun for reminding merchant ships that they are serious.
And if you're too lazy to look this stuff up on your own, you can do what I did to get the data and grab a copy of the annual Seaforth World Naval Review. Their classification scheme is basically what I described above, although I of course might have minor quibbles with where certain ships go. In any case, even new editions are quite reasonably priced, and used copies from a couple years back are very cheap.
Obviously, even this method conceals a lot of variation within each type of ship, for instance counting the Russian Kuznetzov as equivalent to the Ford, or inflating the Chinese "fleet escort" count with about 40 Type 054A frigates, while the USN list is almost entirely Burkes and Ticos of twice the size and far greater capability. But it's probably the best that can be done without spending a ton of time and effort on a ship-by-ship comparison, and it gives far better answers than simply counting hulls, as so many make the mistake of doing.
Comments
What is an FAC? The link in footnote 2 doesn't say.
Fast attack craft, basically a big speedboat with some missiles.
Shouldn't that be 'pull forward'?
No, the Soviets would overtake the British somewhat later on a tonnage metric than a frigate+ metric because the Soviet fleet was a lot heavier on small stuff than big stuff, particularly SSKs. Or they would if the swing wasn't so drastic, but I'm pretty sure the ~200 subs that the book I was working from has as completing between 1948 and 1949 are mythical. That's about the size of the entire Whiskey class, and the median completion for those was well into the 50s. But per tonnage, a carrier is worth at least 30 or so submarines, so how you count them will obviously shift the exact crossover date.
@Humphrey Appleby
For a historical comparison, FACs are the conceptual descendants of PT boats/MTBs: small, cheap, fast (well, in calm seas), and of negligible value against warships.
How valuable are 'big amphibs' outside of the flat-tops in peer/near peer naval warfare? I realize that's a somewhat different question than 'who has the biggest navy', but I'm not sure USS Comstock is actually a more valuable combatant than somebody's fast attack craft.
Though I suppose that also ties into how feasible / valuable opposed amphibious landings still are generally. To me it seems like what made them valuable in WWII/Korea doesn't really hold true anymore, and the counterpoints mostly seem to assume a relatively uneven battlefield.
Though on the other hand, I suppose the true mark of a blue water navy is not how many frigates they have, but how much UNREP capacity they can deploy at a given time. Your CVNs are worthless without enough T-AOs.
I included the big phibs not because I think they would be amazingly useful in a shooting war. If anything, it's because they are an important part of the navy as a whole, and including them was a reminder of that. I probably should have put in UNREP auxiliaries, too, but I'm not sure Seaforth had that number and I didn't feel like chasing it down.
A more generic way of saying that would be "ships of significant combat capability" which just happens to roughly mean that for today's conditions (though Corvettes that are short range Frigates probably should count, supersized FACs of course are not warships).
redRover:
OTOH an invasion fleet is going to have to deal with the stuff that can't operate in blue water.
Seconding Anonymous above. What is the strategic purpose? These vessels can indeed be ignored if the question is no-local-bases intervention into an Emutopia-Kiwiland conflict. On the other hand, if the plausible operational theatre is on the doorstep of their bases, they very much count. (And quite obviously that is the reason why China built them.)
@anon
True, but the lack of T-AOs basically makes them a defensive force, which is valuable as defense and to protect the country, but I don't think makes them particularly powerful. The ne plus ultra of a navy (or indeed the military more broadly) is being able to project power at a distance, not just be a very tough thorn to invade. (c.f., the investment in inflight refueling and forward operating bases by USAF - other countries have fighters and missiles, but almost nobody can project them more than a few hundred miles beyond their borders with any regularity or intensity. The French have 15 tankers, the RAF 14, and JASDF 10. USAF has ~500)
@Basil
I'm not saying that various naval officers tasked with planning a war with China should pretend that their FAC force doesn't exist. That's obviously kind of silly. But it's even more silly to treat each FAC as equivalent to a carrier, and for the purpose of making a general evaluation of naval strength for the public, I think it's very defensible to treat FACs as "rounding error, ignore". Note that I very much did not say that the SSKs were irrelevant, just that they were sharply limited in role.
@redRover, I think amphibs in a peer to peer naval conflict would have about the same value as the escort carriers in WW2. A handful of F-35Bs or a dozen helicopters would be enough air power to make a difference against a squadron of FACs, covering your supply ships against a couple of long range bombers. Not every action needs a capital ship.
FACs are not a purely Soviet/Chinese invention; NATO members Finland, Norway, and Greece all use them. At the very least a FAC should count as a coastal defence missile battery, and (as currently being demonstrated on the Black Sea) those are not of neglible value against warships.
@Hugh Fisher
For an LHA like USS America, I agree. For an LSD, disagree. USS Comstock doesn’t have the internal weaponry, sensors, or helipad real estate to do those things in a meaningful way. The San Antonio’s at least have VLS and better radar.
"How valuable are ‘big amphibs’ outside of the flat-tops in peer/near peer naval warfare?"
The objective in naval warfare is not to sink the enemy's warships, that's merely a means to that end. If you sink every single one of the enemy's warships, and that's all that you do, then that's probably no more than a draw.
People fight wars at sea to influence events on land. And while there are several ways to accomplish that, e.g. interdicting trade, nothing influences events on a piece of land more than invading it. So the ships that can do that, are a strong indicator that someone is fighting to win. Even if they never sink a single enemy warship.
The amphibs with docks, LxD, could also be repurposed as USV tenders, in the style of the torpedo boat tenders from the 19th C. Ukraine has shown that USV long range cruise weapons (are they torpedoes or missiles?) can be useful. An amphib has the volume to carry a good number of USVs plus the various operators and technicians and I would assume they also have lots of comms gear. (Even if not currently designed for USV control.)
As John reminds us the LxDs would still retain their original usefulness for delivering troops, but the history of naval warfare is also full of new roles being found for existing ships.
@John S
I agree strategically and in principal, but I am less sold on the actual tactical value of them in peer warfare. Contested landings over the shore (either via LCAC or helicopter) seem very susceptible to peer defenses making them unsustainable. Which doesn’t negate their value against non-peer opponents or in secondary theaters, but I think it limits their value for the same reason that FACs are limited - they’re not front line assets in the way that CVNs or DDGs are.
More practically, if I think about all of the reasons Bean laid out for the ‘carriers aren’t dead’ series, most of those don’t apply to the amphibious fleet - there are only so many places that they can reasonably attack, and they need to remain within a reasonable distance of their forces ashore. That makes surveillance and targeting the ships much easier, to say nothing of the helicopters that actually go over the shore. Against Iraq or maybe even a rural part of Russia, sure. Landing in Hainan or Hong Kong, less so.
@Hugh
I'm not saying that FACs are 100% useless. There's a reason I included them on my chart. But I do think that the ratio of combat power to hull number is low enough that if you insist on a single hull count, you should not count them, because it's distorting more than informative.
I am pretty sure all of those cases were ships in or near port, which makes the problem of finding the target much, much easier. These kind of things are going to fundamentally have the torpedo problem of being not much faster than the target, which in turn brings up all sorts of problems if the target is free to maneuver. These are much less of an issue if the target is pierside, or on patrol just off the pier. That said, it's something I might experiment with just to make the enemy honor the threat, but it has a lot of very obvious limitations.
@redRover
Navies have a lot of value outside of peer warfare. I know that sounds obvious, but it's something a lot of people forget, and something we very much should keep in mind for this kind of thing.
Trying to get a seven together for a round of SSC diplomacy. Link here https://www.backstabbr.com/game/SSC-Diplomacy-2025/5968099650961408/invite/46QTOZ
Naval Gazers very welcome to join.