The U.S. Navy has begun developing a plan to implement its recently unveiled goal of expanding its fleet by dozens of ships, according to a service official.
“There are ongoing efforts right now to build a path to accelerate” ship construction, said Rear Adm. Jesse Wilson Jr., assessment division director for the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. “That information will be coming out soon.” 
The plan will focus on tapping “existing industrial base capacity that we know we can already ramp up with,” Wilson testified March 8 before the House Armed Services Committee’s seapower and projection forces panel
A force structure assessment completed in December calls for 355 ships, up from the 274 vessels the Navy has today and the 308 ships it is slated to grow to by fiscal year 2021.
Even with more ships, the Navy will face a host of challenges, including the need to improve its ability to find hostile ships before its forces are detected, said Charles “Chuck” Werchado, deputy director of the assessment division.
“Whichever side completes that targeting kill chain first and fires first almost always wins,” Werchado testified. “Let’s make us hard to find while we make ourselves more capable of finding them.”
The Navy also needs to improve its ability to share data among manned and unmanned vessels in what will likely be highly contested environments marked by cyber attacks against communication networks and jamming of Global Positioning System signals, said Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
“We have to assume that every time we go out, we’re going to get jammed,” added Werchado. “We might have people take out our satellites. At a minimum, there will be cyber attacks against our [unclassified] networks. So we should only train in areas where we can fight through a limited-data [situation]. So bringing [unmanned aerial vehicles] to do our own comms links, do our own surveillance, doing that organically is going to be huge.”
Wilson said a table-top, war-gaming exercise that recently began at the Center for Naval Analysis will help the Navy determine how to overcome such challenges.