The Denial Navy: A Strategic Concept for American Maritime Security
The MOC
By
Haddon Antonucci
August 28, 2025
Congressional staff gathered on the rough steel flight deck of the USS Enterprise, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier under construction at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia. The thrum of motors filled the hot air as a foreman explained how the shipyard is installing a munitions elevator to improve sortie throughput. It was the final day of the “Congressional Maritime Intensive,” hosted by the Navy League’s Center for Maritime Strategy.
The Intensive was a master class. A cohort of military and government officials, allies, contractors, and two dozen congressional staffers spent three days engaging in an unrestrained discussion of the key maritime strategic questions facing the United States of America. Everything was on the table: shipbuilding, naval doctrine, geopolitics, and more.
An early subject of discussion was a theory presented by Samuel Huntington in a 1954 United States Naval Institute paper on the Navy’s “strategic concept.” Its raison d’être. Alfred T. Mahan convinced the world that naval aptitude is essential for great powers to protect their interests. Huntington adapted this by postulating a Cold War “Transoceanic Navy” that could project power into Soviet Eurasia. Now, the post-post-Cold War era begs for a new doctrinal concept to guide the United States’ management of a surging maritime rival.
The People’s Republic of China is expanding a competing security umbrella across the world’s oceans to protect its economic empire. The trajectory of this expansion will not be contained in the near-term, and so if left unchecked, China will increasingly gain opportunities to project asymmetric force against the vital interests of the United States. The “Denial Navy” should serve as an adaptive bulwark against Chinese force projection by weaving together economic and security commitments from treaty allies into evolved and expanded capabilities that prevent China from gaining asymmetric advantages.
The Intensive cohort unanimously agreed that the United States must revitalize its maritime industrial base. There was less consensus on the critical pathways to that goal. The Navy pointed to inconsistent funding. Contractors pointed to insufficient workforce. Government watchdogs pointed to broken procurement practices. But there was a silver lining: our allies. South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines to name a few.
The combined shipbuilding tonnage of South Korea and Japan is on par with that of China.[1] These partners are now directing generational investments into the United States: Japan through the Nippon Steel merger with U.S. Steel, and South Korea through Hanwha’s acquisition of the Philadelphia Shipyard. The path toward fixing America’s dysfunctional maritime industrial base while strengthening national security is through similar cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Deals should ensure the development of American workers while exchanging market opportunities, infrastructure, and technology with treaty allies.
On the security front, AUKUS, the British, American, and Australian effort to produce an Australian nuclear-powered submarine and other technological cooperation, is the model for allied production and joint operation. The United States will leverage the industry, workforce, and infrastructure of Australia and the UK toward improving the security of key Indo-Pacific waters. Similarly, recent agreements with the Philippines give the U.S. access to some of the best force projection real estate in the Pacific. Positive security arrangements based on resource sharing and joint operations ought to be proactively sought with our treaty allies.
China has developed capabilities that compromise the United States’ strategic depth in the Pacific and abroad. A growing number of naval vessels, ports and overseas installations, a deep-sea cable-cutting vessel, and long-range precision strike to name a few. These tools create opportunities for China to asymmetrically project force and thereby dictate outcomes through coercive leverage. A wargame analyst at the Intensive event assessed that China’s hypersonic strike capability already stretches thousands of miles off its mainland, and that this would almost certainly extend to the continental United States in the coming decades. The prescription was to achieve a symmetric threat and impose “mutual sea denial,” the conceptual inspiration for the Denial Navy suggested by this essay. In the example of long-range strikes, denial can be achieved through deterrence when the U.S. is able to reciprocally strike with equal or greater impact. Simultaneously, denial can also be advanced by reducing the impact of Chinese strikes through improvements to the resilience or evasiveness of assets. The Denial Navy must lead the United States and its allies in anticipating, preempting, constraining, undermining, mitigating, and ultimately outmatching all forms of asymmetric Chinese force projection that might allow it to dictate security outcomes. This principle applies in both deterrence and hot war scenarios.
These realities stimulated proposals for the evolution of the U.S. Navy from all corners of the Intensive cohort. An increased emphasis on submarines, which evade detection, achieve surprise, and deny China the comfort of dependable force projection. Development of a distributed long-range precision strike capability in the Pacific to reciprocate against potential aggression and improve response resilience. Full nuclearization of our carrier strike groups to improve speed, evasiveness, versatility, and logistics. Saturation of the maritime environment with a vast number of unmanned systems. Joint allied Coast Guard operations to push back on gray zone intrusion tactics. Resilient satellite constellations for dependable C5ISR. Defensive and offensive cybersecurity, electromagnetic, and information warfare tactics. Sophisticated missile defense systems à la the “Golden Dome.” All these capabilities advance the denial strategy by increasing the cost, limiting the impact, and undermining the reliability of Chinese force projection. To meet the pacing challenge, we must accelerate this technological evolution. Executing this generational transition and meeting the denial mission requires that the United States weave its network of treaty allies into an integrated military-industrial apparatus.
We must prepare for prolonged contests in the Pacific and across the seas of the world. Our objective should not be to wholly prevent China’s involvement in global affairs. Nor is it reasonable to expect complete containment of Chinese security operations. But the United States must deny China the opportunity to asymmetrically project force against the Nation’s vital interests. The Denial Navy should serve as the bulwark, integrating allies into an impenetrable mesh of economic, technological, and military capabilities that will preserve a free world. Organizations like the Center for Maritime Strategy have an essential role to play in unifying our government and our allies toward this mission.
Haddon Antonucci serves as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy for Congressman Jeff Van Drew (NJ-02), who serves as a member of the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee. He participated in the Center for Maritime Strategies’ 2025 Congressional Maritime Intensive. All opinions included in this article are his own and do not reflect the positions of his office.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.
Center for Maritime Strategy
By Haddon Antonucci
Congressional staff gathered on the rough steel flight deck of the USS Enterprise, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier under construction at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia. The thrum of motors filled the hot air as a foreman explained how the shipyard is installing a munitions elevator to improve sortie throughput. It was the final day of the “Congressional Maritime Intensive,” hosted by the Navy League’s Center for Maritime Strategy.
The Intensive was a master class. A cohort of military and government officials, allies, contractors, and two dozen congressional staffers spent three days engaging in an unrestrained discussion of the key maritime strategic questions facing the United States of America. Everything was on the table: shipbuilding, naval doctrine, geopolitics, and more.
An early subject of discussion was a theory presented by Samuel Huntington in a 1954 United States Naval Institute paper on the Navy’s “strategic concept.” Its raison d’être. Alfred T. Mahan convinced the world that naval aptitude is essential for great powers to protect their interests. Huntington adapted this by postulating a Cold War “Transoceanic Navy” that could project power into Soviet Eurasia. Now, the post-post-Cold War era begs for a new doctrinal concept to guide the United States’ management of a surging maritime rival.
The People’s Republic of China is expanding a competing security umbrella across the world’s oceans to protect its economic empire. The trajectory of this expansion will not be contained in the near-term, and so if left unchecked, China will increasingly gain opportunities to project asymmetric force against the vital interests of the United States. The “Denial Navy” should serve as an adaptive bulwark against Chinese force projection by weaving together economic and security commitments from treaty allies into evolved and expanded capabilities that prevent China from gaining asymmetric advantages.
The Intensive cohort unanimously agreed that the United States must revitalize its maritime industrial base. There was less consensus on the critical pathways to that goal. The Navy pointed to inconsistent funding. Contractors pointed to insufficient workforce. Government watchdogs pointed to broken procurement practices. But there was a silver lining: our allies. South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines to name a few.
The combined shipbuilding tonnage of South Korea and Japan is on par with that of China.[1] These partners are now directing generational investments into the United States: Japan through the Nippon Steel merger with U.S. Steel, and South Korea through Hanwha’s acquisition of the Philadelphia Shipyard. The path toward fixing America’s dysfunctional maritime industrial base while strengthening national security is through similar cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Deals should ensure the development of American workers while exchanging market opportunities, infrastructure, and technology with treaty allies.
On the security front, AUKUS, the British, American, and Australian effort to produce an Australian nuclear-powered submarine and other technological cooperation, is the model for allied production and joint operation. The United States will leverage the industry, workforce, and infrastructure of Australia and the UK toward improving the security of key Indo-Pacific waters. Similarly, recent agreements with the Philippines give the U.S. access to some of the best force projection real estate in the Pacific. Positive security arrangements based on resource sharing and joint operations ought to be proactively sought with our treaty allies.
China has developed capabilities that compromise the United States’ strategic depth in the Pacific and abroad. A growing number of naval vessels, ports and overseas installations, a deep-sea cable-cutting vessel, and long-range precision strike to name a few. These tools create opportunities for China to asymmetrically project force and thereby dictate outcomes through coercive leverage. A wargame analyst at the Intensive event assessed that China’s hypersonic strike capability already stretches thousands of miles off its mainland, and that this would almost certainly extend to the continental United States in the coming decades. The prescription was to achieve a symmetric threat and impose “mutual sea denial,” the conceptual inspiration for the Denial Navy suggested by this essay. In the example of long-range strikes, denial can be achieved through deterrence when the U.S. is able to reciprocally strike with equal or greater impact. Simultaneously, denial can also be advanced by reducing the impact of Chinese strikes through improvements to the resilience or evasiveness of assets. The Denial Navy must lead the United States and its allies in anticipating, preempting, constraining, undermining, mitigating, and ultimately outmatching all forms of asymmetric Chinese force projection that might allow it to dictate security outcomes. This principle applies in both deterrence and hot war scenarios.
These realities stimulated proposals for the evolution of the U.S. Navy from all corners of the Intensive cohort. An increased emphasis on submarines, which evade detection, achieve surprise, and deny China the comfort of dependable force projection. Development of a distributed long-range precision strike capability in the Pacific to reciprocate against potential aggression and improve response resilience. Full nuclearization of our carrier strike groups to improve speed, evasiveness, versatility, and logistics. Saturation of the maritime environment with a vast number of unmanned systems. Joint allied Coast Guard operations to push back on gray zone intrusion tactics. Resilient satellite constellations for dependable C5ISR. Defensive and offensive cybersecurity, electromagnetic, and information warfare tactics. Sophisticated missile defense systems à la the “Golden Dome.” All these capabilities advance the denial strategy by increasing the cost, limiting the impact, and undermining the reliability of Chinese force projection. To meet the pacing challenge, we must accelerate this technological evolution. Executing this generational transition and meeting the denial mission requires that the United States weave its network of treaty allies into an integrated military-industrial apparatus.
We must prepare for prolonged contests in the Pacific and across the seas of the world. Our objective should not be to wholly prevent China’s involvement in global affairs. Nor is it reasonable to expect complete containment of Chinese security operations. But the United States must deny China the opportunity to asymmetrically project force against the Nation’s vital interests. The Denial Navy should serve as the bulwark, integrating allies into an impenetrable mesh of economic, technological, and military capabilities that will preserve a free world. Organizations like the Center for Maritime Strategy have an essential role to play in unifying our government and our allies toward this mission.
Haddon Antonucci serves as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy for Congressman Jeff Van Drew (NJ-02), who serves as a member of the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee. He participated in the Center for Maritime Strategies’ 2025 Congressional Maritime Intensive. All opinions included in this article are his own and do not reflect the positions of his office.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.
[1] United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Review of Maritime Transport 2022: Navigating Stormy Waters, https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2022_en.pdf (accessed August 16, 2025).