Panoceanic Navy Strategy | USNI Proceedings

“National Policy and the Panoceanic Navy” (U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 2026) argues that the U.S. Navy must abandon its transoceanic model of power projection and adopt a new panoceanic doctrine centered on sea control and sea denial. Commander Jeff Vandenengel explains that China’s rise and its naval expansion have eroded U.S. command of the sea and invalidated the strategic assumptions that guided naval policy since World War II.

Vandenengel frames this shift as part of a new “Pacific Phase” of national policy defined by great power competition with China. Emerging technologies and multi-domain threats make sea control more difficult, so the Navy must adapt with distributed forces, new weapons, and organizational change. Moreover, the Navy must shift its focus to securing maritime trade routes, denying adversary movement, and supporting a broader strategy of denial to defend America’s vital interests.

Part I: The Mission

Today, the nation’s primary threat has shifted from the Soviet Union to China, which has an economy, military, and set of ambitions that make it a fundamentally different and more menacing adversary… China’s construction of a fleet and military designed to challenge the U.S. Navy has degraded U.S. command of the sea to its lowest point in 80 years, undermining the transoceanic Navy’s strategic concept and ability to contribute to national policy… In its place a new doctrine is taking shape, the theory of the panoceanic Navy, shifting away from projecting power ashore and toward reestablishing command of the sea to enable the flow of friendly military forces and trade while denying that movement to the adversary.

The Navy has numerous problems it is addressing, including shipbuilding capacity, maintenance delays, and personnel retention. However, it has just one crisis now affecting every aspect of the service and its ability to contribute to national objectives: It no longer enjoys the uncontested command of the sea that has underpinned its strategic concept since 1945… The point is not whether the U.S. Navy or PLAN would prevail in a fight for the seas, it is that there could be such a fight at all; that someone has built a fleet to challenge the U.S. Navy and that U.S. naval supremacy is no longer a given… The Navy’s task is now the same as it has been for all navies faced with credible adversaries: acquire command of the sea to enable the flow of friendly military forces and trade while denying that movement to the enemy… to establish sea control where possible and sea denial where required.

Part II: The Fleet

Instead of the transoceanic Navy, the ‘panoceanic Navy’ features a service shifting away from projecting power ashore to reestablishing Mahanian command of the sea to enable the flow of friendly military forces and trade while denying that movement to the enemy… This fundamental change in mission requires rethinking the fleet architecture that can best execute the Navy’s new mission.

For the panoceanic Navy, the seas are again the site of decisive action, meaning those floating bases will be challenged… The proliferation of sensors, networks, and weapons gives adversaries that opportunity… As a result of those trends, the best option for the panoceanic Navy is distribution. That allows for platforms of smaller size and signature and with lower individual costs, leading to a larger fleet that is collectively harder to target and that retains a greater proportion of its combat effectiveness when it inevitably suffers individual platform losses.

The sea is back to being the site of decisive action, and so the Navy’s main geographic focus must be in the Pacific. There will be other areas of competition, but this region has the world’s most important trade routes and is where China’s core ambitions and U.S. interests intersect. Over the long term, neither the U.S. Navy nor the PLAN can hope to exert global influence if it cannot conduct its primary mission against its primary adversary in the primary theater.

“The Future of Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles in the Maritime Battlespace” similarly highlights that emerging technologies are reshaping naval warfare and eroding traditional advantages at sea. Low-cost autonomous platforms and distributed capabilities now allow weaker actors to contest maritime space, reinforcing Vandenengel’s panoceanic argument that sea control is no longer assured and that naval power is becoming more diffuse and networked. This technological shift connects directly to the strategic environment described in “Beyond Swarming,” which examines how adversaries operate in gray-zone conditions using maritime militias and coercive tactics that fall short of open conflict, demonstrating that competition for control of the sea often occurs before war begins. Read together, these articles complement the Proceedings piece by illustrating both the technological and strategic realities driving the transition to a panoceanic Navy, where distributed forces, persistent competition, and contested seas define the modern maritime battlespace.

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