The whole network. Thirteen Google systems across the Pacific, 37 landing points in 16 territories. Solid lines are in service, dashed lines are under construction, and dotted lines are announced.

The modern economy runs on data. Corporations, militaries and private citizens all depend on it. Between satellites and undersea cables, the world is connected as never before. What gets less attention is who owns that infrastructure, and what placement and access it buys them.

While Google is its own actor, with its own capital and its own interests, it is also subject to geo-economics. The United States determines who may supply the equipment and where the next interconnection points will be located. Australia influences and funds the island routes and reserves a say over who else builds in Papua New Guinea. A proposed landing in Hong Kong was refused outright. Many parties exercise leverage, and all want the benefits undersea cables bring.

The asset

Of thirteen Google systems in the Pacific, eight are Google’s entirely: Topaz, Tabua, Bulikula, Halaihai, Honomoana, Taihei, Proa and Curie.

The public record understates the significance of this ownership. Google announced Bulikula as a cable connecting Guam and Fiji. It runs 20,354 km and lands at eight points in five territories — Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, the Northern Marianas and Hawaii. A single cable, in this case, is significantly more than it sounds once mapped.

Much of the network is being built. Four systems — Tabua, Bulikula, Honomoana and Proa — are under construction, roughly 51,700 km between them, commissioning segment by segment through 2026 and beyond. Their US landing points come up across 2026, and the island landings follow. When these cables will be complete is uncertain. Proa has already slipped from the first quarter of 2026 to late 2026 or early 2027.

Why satellites do not replace cables

Roughly 99 percent of intercontinental traffic runs undersea, and satellites carry well under one percent. Starlink’s own network update puts the entire constellation at “~450 Tbps — Cumulative Capacity Launched To-Date,” while Google’s Topaz carries 240 Tbps of design capacity on a single cable — about half the entire constellation. Low Earth orbit is not a redundant layer for subsea capacity but rather a thin emergency margin, and Tonga spent 38 days living on it after the Hunga Tonga eruption cut its cable in January 2022. This network flow has significant implications for the US government, especially for communications with key allies and US territories in the region during wartime. Adversary attacks on the cable network would no doubt precede conflict. Public records show that that risk is certainly on people’s minds.

The kill switch

Google’s US–Taiwan segment operates under a National Security Agreement with the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Defense. The provisional agreement is public in full.

• Google must be able to interrupt traffic within 24 hours of notice.

• The administrator with exclusive authority to de-provision the segment must be a US citizen who is not a dual citizen, approved by all three departments.

• Every network operations center touching it must be physically in the United States and staffed by screened personnel.

• Google must file a restoration plan for the wet infrastructure.

The agreement also directs Google to “pursue diversification of interconnection points in Asia, including but not limited to Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.” The two final agreements, both dated 16 December 2021, are docketed but withheld.

Capacity is reported to the government, not to the public. Under 47 CFR §43.82 every licensee files an annual Circuit Capacity Report. In the 2024 edition, Curie, Echo, FASTER, and PLCN are all marked with asterisks — “filer requested confidential treatment” — while the note below confirms that the published regional totals include the withheld figures.

The United States has the power to turn Google’s private cable on and off and required a repair plan as a condition of the license. This requirement highlights the importance of the undersea cable network as national infrastructure with military implications.

Who paid

The White House fact sheet “Delivering on the Next Generation of Innovation and Partnership with Australia,” dated 25 October 2023, states that the United States “is engaging with Google to scale a series of significant private-sector consortium investments in subsea cables.” Nine Pacific Island countries are named as beneficiaries: the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

Monetary support comes from multiple governments: $65m combined from the United States and Australia.

Three Google-built domestic cables are funded through Australia’s Pukpuk Treaty commitments, signed in Canberra on 6 October 2025 and in force from 8 July 2026 — Papua New Guinea’s first alliance and Australia’s first in seventy years. Annex B, Article 4(5), requires the parties to “mutually determine any involvement in or contribution to that critical infrastructure by others.” Article 11(1) permits Australian Defense personnel to install and operate their own communication systems in Papua New Guinea, including cables.

Every new island route is wholly Google’s. The cable landing licenses show it holds assets through one company per jurisdiction — Starfish Infrastructure in Delaware is the licensee on all six new systems, with seven further subsidiaries behind it, one for each jurisdiction the cable touches. All are indirect wholly-owned subsidiaries of Google LLC. This information is all publicly disclosed, with every entity named in a public license.

In this case, Allied development finance is capitalizing private assets. State money, private title, geo-economics.

New builds are under Google’s sole control

Figure 1. Cumulative route-kilometers, split by whether Google owns the system outright or shares it.

Consortium mileage plateaus at 59,532 km after 2025 with no plans to grow. Every kilometer from 2026 onward — 51,742 km in that year alone — is wholly Google-owned. This shift demonstrates that the ownership model has changed.

Readers can see the owner lists as a decoupling strategy due to China’s rise and the US pivot to the Pacific. In 2010, Unity was a six-way consortium. FASTER in 2016 had China Mobile and China Telecom as co-owners. PLCN and Echo are Google and Meta. Apricot adds only allied carriers. Everything from 2026 is Google alone.

Given the foreign ownership, FASTER could likely not be licensed today. China Mobile was denied §214 authority in 2019, China Telecom Americas had its authority revoked in 2021, and China Unicom Americas in 2022.

The corollary matters for the island states. Under the consortium model, national carriers took equity. Under this one, they do not. Announcements name FINTEL, APTelecom, and Vocus as Tabua partners, but the license states that Yellowfin holds 100 percent of the Fijian portion. The island states are landing parties and customers, not owners.

The Hong Kong issue

The license layer. Hong Kong carries three filed-and-never-built systems; Taiwan carries four that were built.

Google filed for three Hong Kong cables and built none: PLCN, HK-G and Bay to Bay Express.

On 17 June 2020, the White House, through the NTIA, recommended the FCC partly deny PLCN — as to its Hong Kong connection and as to its foreign owners, Hong Kong-based Pacific Light Data Communication and “China-based ultimate parent entity Dr. Peng Telecom & Media Group.” It recommended granting the US–Taiwan and US–Philippines portions, which contained no PRC-based ownership, on the condition that mitigation agreements be in place. The applicants withdrew in August 2020 and refiled without Hong Kong. The system entered service in 2022 on its Taiwan and Philippines legs.

Subsequent rules codified the case. The FCC’s Order of 7 August 2025 defines “foreign adversary,” places Huawei, ZTE, and HMN Tech on the Covered List, and triggers presumptive disqualification for a Chinese stake below 10 percent.

In this way, Google did not choose its Pacific geography. Due to US government intervention, Taiwan inherited the traffic; and the security agreement then directed where the next interconnection points would be located.

Challenges with repair and sustainment

The four Pacific maintenance zones, with the worst-served point on each route marked. Zone bounds are published as prose, so the fills are approximate and they overlap.

In the event of a natural disaster or sabotage, Google’s undersea network cannot be repaired quickly.

The ICPC registry lists 17 cable ships across 12 baseports in the whole Pacific basin. One covers the entire South Pacific — Reliance, at Noumea. One covers the Pacific coast of the Americas — Global Sentinel, at Portland, Oregon, itself a hundred miles up the Columbia River. No cable ship is based in Samoa, Fiji, Guam, Hawaii, or French Polynesia, and none is based anywhere in South America.

Figure 2. Steaming days to the worst-served point on each route. Transit only, at 11 knots, assuming a ship idle in port with spares loaded.

Every route here is sampled every 50 km along its real published geometry from TeleGeography; each sample is measured to the nearest of those 17 baseports, and the worst sample on the route is reported — converted to days at 11 knots. The mean across the eleven scored routes is 8.6 steaming days. Tahiti, the densest island node in the network, is 9.5 days from the only ship in the South Pacific.

Those numbers are a best-case scenario. They assume a ship in port, idle, loaded, and sailing straight, and they exclude mobilization, spares, weather windows, permits, and any queue behind other faults. Tonga’s outage lasted 38 days, with only 20 on station — roughly 18 days of overhead on top of a modeled transit of a few days.

There is redundancy in the networks that mitigates some risk. Bulikula carries five spare branching units, and its license reserves one for Tuvalu’s own Vaka system: designed-in capacity for landings that do not exist yet. But the island nodes are stacked rather than diverse. Papenoo and Faratea, both on Tahiti, each carry three Google systems. Guam takes 18 distinct cables across five landing points. Route diversity on a map is not diversity on the seabed when the routes converge on the same island.

Additionally, Google does not own or operate the existing cable ships. Three of the four Pacific maintenance zones are party to the Pacific and Indian Ocean Cable Maintenance Agreement, under which a zone hit by simultaneous faults can call for vessels from another — and a cable owner buys into an agreement rather than commands a vessel. The North America Zone — Alaska to Mexico and out to the mid-Pacific — carries one dedicated maintenance vessel against 31 owner-operators. The South Pacific agreement, which covers more than 51,000 km of cable for 14 operators, is not a party to it.

Google has bought redundancy in the cable and not in the capacity to fix it. This lack of a repair fleet is a capital decision it owns and could fix to ensure network survivability.

What four ships would buy

Figure 3. What four more cable ships would buy, and where they would be homeported.

The obvious answer is for Google to buy its own repair ships. Four hulls would be a six percent increase in a world fleet of 63. The repair reach model demonstrates that baseport selection is critical to reducing risk.

Four ships at Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and Australia cut the mean worst-point reach by 23 percent, from 10.5 days to 8.0 days. Four at Hawaii, Tahiti, Valparaíso and Guam cut it by 38 percent, to 6.4 days. Neither set dominates: Alaska sits near the middle of the Japan–US trunks and is the faster of the two on four of the thirteen routes. But the first set never reaches Curie or Halaihai. Both land at Valparaíso; no cable ship is based on that coast, and the first set moves neither of them. A ship at Sydney changes nothing on any route, because every worst point is already nearer an existing baseport. The question for Google is where it sees the greatest risk, whether man-made or natural.

Even if Google buys four hulls, a ship is not a full repair capability in itself. It needs a spares depot with the right cable and jointing kit beside it; a capability Google should also consider.

The bottom line

The undersea cable network is real power, and it is genuinely Google’s — an impressive data empire. It is also an asset the United States licenses, conditions, funds through allies, and has already redrawn once. It cannot be repaired quickly, and satellite fallback will not replace its capacity. Google owns the cables. It does not own the ocean, the ships, or the permissions, and in a contested Pacific those may decide whether owning the cables means anything.

For educational purposes only. Always do your own research.

For more of my work, check out this article on French Maritime Power:

Expeditionary Capitalist

French Maritime Power

Three conditions must be met at once for a country to be a true maritime power. It has to be able to fight at sea. It has to move cargo at a global, commercial scale. And it has to be able to build and repair the ships that do both without asking anyone’s permission…

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a month ago · 21 likes · 1 comment · Sean Harper

Few countries manage all three. The United States has the navy and the yards, but no globally competitive merchant fleet. Britain has a weakening navy and sold most of the yards. Germany builds ships but has no navy to project power. China holds all three outright, and Japan and South Korea arguably do as well.

France holds all three. It is the only country in Europe that does, and it is the only country other than the United States operating a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier with catapults. What follows is the shape of its maritime position — and then the three places where it needs shoring up in the next decade.

Figure 1- The French Maritime Empire

To follow along with the analysis, find the interactive map of French Maritime Power here.

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Part One — Three Pillars

One: a navy that can go anywhere

As of 1 April 2025, the Marine nationale had 136 hulls in commission across 31 homeports, displacing roughly 413,950 tons at full load, with five further warships and one uncrewed surface vessel in trials.

Four of those hulls carry the deterrent. The Triomphant-class boats maintain a continuous at-sea patrol that has not lapsed since 1972, powered by reactors designed and built by France, and a fifth-generation replacement — SNLE 3G, the lead boat named L’Invincible by the President in March 2026 — is under construction at Cherbourg for commissioning in 2036. One hull carries fixed-wing airpower: the Charles de Gaulle, nuclear-powered, catapult-equipped, and outside the United States Navy, the only carrier in the world that is both.

The carrier strike group is expeditionary strike power. The reach behind it is wider still: France holds a sovereign exclusive economic zone of 9,529,864 square kilometers across 18 zones, with a further 571,983 square kilometers under overlapping claims. Metropolitan France accounts for 3.7 percent of it. No other country holds sovereign waters and sovereign territory in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific simultaneously, with the bases, airfields, and homeports to go with them.

That distribution is backed by permanent presence in high-traffic sea lanes. Ten maritime chokepoints carry the bulk of seaborne energy and containers. France has basing near four — Bab-el-Mandeb through Djibouti, Hormuz through Port Zayed in Abu Dhabi, the Strait of Dover through Cherbourg, and the Mozambique Channel through Mayotte and Réunion. Djibouti holds around 1,500 personnel and is becoming the headquarters for French operations in Africa; Abu Dhabi holds around 700 across three sites and hosts the ALINDIEN command. Almost no European state has a permanent armed presence on any chokepoint. France has two of the most contested ones.

And the fleet is being replaced rather than run down. Twenty-three hulls are on order across eight programs. The next-generation carrier was greenlit in December 2025 — 78,000 tons, 310 meters, two K22 reactors, three electromagnetic catapults — for assembly at Saint-Nazaire starting in 2032 and service starting in 2038.

Two: a commercial fleet with global weight

The commercial side is not subordinate to the naval one. It brings revenue to the national treasury that funds the navy, and, in terms of global market share, it is the stronger of the two.

CMA CGM is the third-largest container line in the world. It operates 683 ships and more than four million TEU of capacity — about 12.7 percent of everything afloat in the container trades — behind MSC and Maersk and ahead of COSCO, on revenue of $55.5bn in 2024. It is a French family firm headquartered in Marseille. No other European country outside Denmark and Switzerland has anything comparable, and neither of those has a navy to protect maritime commerce.

The ports have moved with it. HAROPA — Le Havre, Rouen and Paris operating as one authority — passed three million TEU in 2024, a rise of 18.7 percent. Marseille-Fos handles roughly 70 million tons a year and supports some 41,500 jobs. Port Réunion moves about 375,000 TEU and handles 99 percent of the island’s trade, which is what an overseas EEZ looks like when it is working commercially rather than sitting on a map.

Then there is the part of the commercial maritime power few consider. Sixty-two submarine cables land on French sovereign territory across 86 landing stations, and 37 of them have a French owner somewhere in the consortium. Orange Marine operates six cable ships and a survey vessel — roughly fifteen percent of the world’s cable-laying fleet — and has laid more than 288,000 kilometers of cable. The modern economy runs on undersea cables, and cables are laid and repaired by a small global fleet of specialist ships. France owns a sixth of that fleet.

Three: a sovereign industrial base

Twenty-four sites make up the French maritime industrial base: ten with French state-majority ownership, nine French-private or employee-owned, and five with a foreign parent.

What matters is which ten are state-held. Naval Group is 62.49 percent state-owned, with Thales holding 35 percent, employs 15,261 people and turned over €4.31bn in 2024. Chantiers de l’Atlantique is 84.3 percent state-owned, employs 3,913 people, with more than 7,000 on-site daily, including subcontractors, and turned over €2.54bn. Between them, France builds ballistic-missile submarines, nuclear attack submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, frigates, amphibious assault ships, replenishment vessels — and the largest cruise ships in the world, in the same 900-meter dock that will assemble the next carrier. There is no foreign veto anywhere in that list.

Exports keep the yards full. Naval Group delivered Kimon, the first FDI frigate for the Hellenic Navy, in December 2025, without interrupting French hulls. The order book also covers Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Romania, Malaysia and Morocco. Foreign navies pay to keep Lorient working between French orders, and they amortize the capital sunk into the yard across more hulls than the French fleet plan alone would ever justify. Export work is not a sideline to sovereign capacity. It is what makes sovereign capacity affordable.

One qualification belongs here rather than in a footnote. Sovereignty over newbuild does not extend to ship repair. The largest commercial dry docks in France — at Brest, Dunkerque and Marseille — are Dutch- and Italian-owned.

The same concentration that makes the base sovereign also makes it narrow. Cherbourg is the only yard in France that can build a submarine. Toulon is the only site capable of refueling and overhauling the nuclear carrier. The 900-meter dock at Saint-Nazaire is the only one capable of assembling the next carrier. And Lorient is the only yard in France that builds surface combatants — not one of several, the only one.

What is changing

From November 2023, French frigates in the Red Sea spent four months doing something the fleet had not done at that intensity in decades: sustained air defense, at sea, against cheap mass. Drones and anti-ship missiles fired by a non-state actor at merchant traffic transiting Bab-el-Mandeb, night after night, at a unit cost several orders of magnitude below the interceptors used against them.

Nothing in that engagement suggested the French Navy was badly built. Its ships worked, its crews performed, and the Alsace intercepted three ballistic missiles. What it did was apply pressure to three specific things at once — how many escorts there are, how much firepower each one carries, and how long the support system can hold at tempo. Those are the three places France is brittle. None of the three is visible on a map.

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Part Two — Three Places France is Brittle

One: hulls

Fifteen first-rank escorts, 80,300 tons, 19.4 percent of fleet tonnage. Six multi-mission frigates of the Aquitaine class, five light stealth frigates of the La Fayette class, two Horizon air-defense frigates and two enhanced air-defense FREMM. A sixteenth, the first Amiral Ronarc’h-class frigate, is in trials.

France plans to hold at fifteen rather than grow. The FDI class replaces the La Fayettes one for one — five ordered against five retiring, the fifth ordered in March 2026 for delivery in 2032. Admiral Nicolas Vaujour put the format to the National Assembly’s defense commission in October 2024: « Le format actuel est de quinze frégates de premier rang. »

That ceiling is a policy choice, not an industrial limit. Naval Group says Lorient can build two FDI a year. The French order book calls for five in seven years. Holding the escort force flat through 2032, while the threat that emptied its magazines persists, is a mistake.

Fifteen escorts cover a carrier and amphibious group of four hulls and 107,000 tons — more tonnage than the escorts themselves — along with a 9.5 million square kilometer EEZ and standing commitments in the Gulf and Indian Ocean through ALINDIEN. They are split across two coasts, five at Brest and ten at Toulon.

Lorient can build two FDI a year. France is buying five in seven years. The limit is the plan, not the yard.

Sovereign capacity has concentrated France’s shipyards. Cherbourg, Toulon, Saint-Nazaire and Lorient each hold a monopoly on something, and a single site is a single point of failure in war. But that is a resilience risk, not the reason the escort force is fifteen. The yard has headroom. The plan does not.

Two: magazines

Over those four months in the Red Sea, two French frigates fired 22 Aster surface-to-air missiles. A standard Aquitaine-class FREMM carries sixteen. There is no way to reload a vertical launch cell at sea, in any navy in the world, so a frigate that empties its magazine leaves the theatre to refill it.

The published figure of “fifteen first-rank frigates” also conceals how differently those ships are armed. Sylver launch cells come in lengths. An A43 cell takes the Aster 15, with a reach of roughly 30 kilometers. An A50 takes the Aster 15 or the longer-ranged Aster 30, at roughly 120 kilometers. An A70 takes the naval cruise missile and no air-defense round at all.

Six of France’s fifteen first-rank escorts can fire an Aster 30. Four carry the short-range round only. Three of the La Fayettes traded an aging Crotale for Mistral 3 launchers with a range of about six kilometers, and the other two — Surcouf and Guépratte — had the Crotale removed and received nothing in its place.

The long-range naval air-defense force of the French Republic is six hulls and 192 cells.

France reached this conclusion. Under the 2024–2030 military programming law, the Aster magazine of the FDI class was doubled from sixteen cells to thirty-two: with hulls four and five built to the new standard, the third upgraded on entering service, the first two retrofitted afterward. The supply side moved with it — MBDA raised Aster output by half between 2022 and the end of 2025 and plans to double 2026 production again, with a second assembly line in Italy.

France was quick to realize it needed to amend its munitions plan.

Three: surge capacity

French naval readiness is good. Admiral Vaujour told the defense commission on 16 October 2024:

« La Marine peut être fière d’obtenir 75 à 80 % de disponibilité des frégates en parc. »

Seventy-five to eighty percent availability across the frigate inventory beats most European navies and is not a weakness. Note the precise phrase — « disponibilité des frégates en parc ». Some reporting glosses this as availability within ten days’ notice, a fair reading but the outlet’s framing rather than the Admiral’s, and neither formulation is the same thing as fully mission-capable with every system working.

What matters is how the rate is bought. The Admiral named the mechanisms himself in the same session:

« Nous avons donc mis en place les bâtiments à double équipage. Cela a permis d’augmenter les jours de mer. »

« Nous avons fait un effort colossal pour le MCO. Nous avons poussé les industriels à s’améliorer. »

Dual crewing increases sea days per hull by assigning two crews to one ship. Continuous maintenance replaces long cyclical refits. And the Senate’s review of military maintenance records that the verticalized support contracts notified in 2022 and 2023 — more than two billion euros, with frigates the largest single line — hand inventory management to the contractor on a just-in-time basis, precisely to avoid the cost of holding stock.

Every one of those is an efficiency measure that removes slack. Dual crewing means there is no reserve of ships in port or sailors on shore duty ready to rotate into combat. Just-in-time spares mean there is no shelf of parts. Continuous maintenance means no yard period can be deferred to buy time, because none is already being deferred.

France is not brittle due to non-availability. It’s brittle because it cannot surge. A fleet can be simultaneously well-maintained and unable to fight for long.

A navy sized for presence and forward deployment in peacetime is right to buy availability this way, and France has bought a great deal of it. What the arrangement does not answer is what happens in the second month of an escalating shooting war.

Conclusion

France is a strong maritime nation by every structural measure that matters. It fields the only nuclear catapult carrier outside the United States Navy and a deterrent patrol unbroken since 1972. It owns the third-largest container line on earth and a sixth of the world’s cable-laying fleet. It builds submarines, carriers, frigates and the largest cruise ships afloat in yards it controls outright. It holds sovereign water in three oceans and permanent bases on two of the world’s most contested straits. Few countries hold that combination; no other European country holds any version of it.

The three brittle places are narrow and addressable by comparison, and two of them are the direct price of the strengths. A sovereign escort yard is a single escort yard. A fleet optimized for standing presence is a fleet without slack. Only the magazine problem is a straightforward gap that France is already correcting.

Not addressed in this article, French sealift for expeditionary land operations. French land forces can be moved by sea only with difficulty. The amphibious force is real — three Mistral-class ships, 64,500 tons, able to land a battalion with its vehicles. Everything heavier rides on merchant hulls, and there are almost none. Of roughly 1,245 French-controlled ships, 21 are roll-on/roll-off and 35 RoPax: 4.5 percent, averaging 19 and 28 years. Requisition runs through the TRAMIN mechanism under article L2213-5 of the Code de la défense. Owning the world’s third-largest container line does not produce a sealift fleet.

For educational purposes only. Always do your own research.

Sources

Fleet, tonnage, EEZ, industrial base, and program figures are computed from the mapped dataset and the Marine nationale ship list (EMM circular n°469, fleet as at 1 April 2025). EEZ areas are from the Marine Regions World EEZ dataset (VLIZ), legal limits. Program and basing data are current to mid-2026.

Readiness and fleet format

Assemblée nationale, Commission de la défense nationale et des forces armées, compte rendu n°7 — audition of Admiral Nicolas Vaujour, 16 October 2024

— same session, PDF

Opex360, 19 October 2024 — reporting on the audition, and the source of the ten-day gloss

Sénat, rapport r24-004 — Maintien en condition opérationnelle des équipements militaires

Red Sea operations and magazines

Meta-Defense, 27 March 2024 — Red Sea after-action review on French frigate air defenses

Militarnyi — Alsace intercepts three ballistic missiles in the Red Sea

Defense News, 11 January 2024 — French Navy defends use of million-euro missiles against drones

Naval News, November 2025 — France to double Aster missile capacity on FDI frigates

Meta-Defense, 16 April 2026 — with 32 Sylver A50 silos, the fifth FDI changes its operational status

Zona Militar, 18 October 2025 — Alsace Aster 30 intercept of a supersonic sea-skimming target

Defense News, 26 March 2026 — MBDA to double Aster air-defense missile output in 2026

MBDA — on track with its acceleration of Aster missile production

Class armament

Aquitaine — 16 × Sylver A43 plus 16 × A70

Alsace — 32 × Sylver A50, A70 cells deleted

Bretagne — 16 × Sylver A50

Alert5, 9 October 2018 — A50 installed on the last two FREMM

Horizon class — 48 × Sylver A50 within PAAMS

La Fayette class — no vertical launch system; Sadral / Mistral 3 on three hulls

There are 294 private shipbuilding & repair facilities across 34 states. Strip out small craft, barges, and recreational vessels, and you’re left with 19 Tier 1 newbuild yards.

Add the 4 naval yards and the Coast Guard yard, and that’s the actual strategic maritime industrial base.

Filter 294 facilities by tier, category, region, and ownership:

U.S. Maritime Industrial Base — Expeditionary Capitalist

For educational purposes only. I have found these ideas personally useful in my career. Always do your own research.

The above visualization shows how the domains layer from space above down to cyberspace, which connects all domains. I have added a littoral subdomain linking land and sea operations, the purview of the United States Marine Corps. Also included is an air assault subdomain, delineating the low-altitude portion of the air domain, which is filled with small- and medium-sized unmanned aerial systems in places like Ukraine.

Understanding this framework is critical for non-defense, expeditionary practitioners who operate in these domains and will be influenced by state and non-state military actors in them.

For educational purposes only. I have found these ideas personally useful in my career. Always do your own research.