US Navy sailors man the rails during the USS Gerald R. Ford’s (CVN-78) departure from Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, in May 2023. The US has by far the world’s largest navy by tonnage, but there are other ways to measure naval strength. (US Navy/Mass Communication Spc. 2nd Class Jackson Adkins)

These Are the World’s Five Strongest Navies

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Unsurprisingly, the United States and China have the world’s two strongest navies—but several far smaller nations punch well above their weight.

Nearly every great power in world history has tried to build a strong navy as part of its military clout. As naval historians such as Alfred Thayer Mahan have observed, sea power has played a decisive role in world history, and nations with strong navies tend to play an outsized role in geopolitics. From the 1500s onward, the Spanish Empire’s dominance of the sea gave it access to the wealth of the New World; the Spanish Armada’s defeat at the hands of the British Royal Navy in 1588 marked the demise of Spain as a great power, and in turn led in turn to the rise of the British Empire. For centuries afterwards, the British “ruled the waves”—until they were themselves displaced by the United States at the start of the 20th century.

Today, the United States dominates global seapower, but has increasingly attempted to fend off the rising naval strength of China, aided by the latter’s tremendous industrial base. Whether America succeeds or not is certain to play a fundamental role in the outcome of the 21st century. Beneath the overarching US-China competition, other regional rivals—Greece and Turkey, India and Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia—also prepare their navies for use against each other. A common feature of the world’s largest navies is that each has an external rival it is preparing to counter, or to defend against.

How Should We Rank Naval Power?

Ranking the world’s navies is inherently tricky, and size and power are two different measurements. For size, is it more accurate to measure by total tonnage, or by total number of ships? And how is a navy’s size relevant, if it is not always linked to the actual “power” that its ships have?

There are no obvious answers to these questions, and they have led to disputes about how ships from different nations stack up to one another, and how to weigh competing traits like speed and firepower against each other. Ultimately, the only concrete, final way to determine whether one great power navy is “stronger” than another is for the two of them to go to war—not a prospect that anyone should want in the nuclear age. Even then, many other factors—access to information, leadership decisions, sailor and officer training, and a million other small things beyond the ships themselves—play a decisive role in naval battles.

To avoid subjectivity, most rankings focus on either a navy’s sheer numerical hull count or its total aggregate tonnage. Both of these metrics, however, fail to paint a proper picture of combat effectiveness. China dominates the former, while the United States and its 11 Ford-class and Nimitz-class supercarriers dominates the latter.

The World Directory of Modern Military Warships (WDMMW) uses a True Value Rating (TvR) that goes beyond raw ship counts to measure fleet effectiveness through modernization, logistics, attack and defense capabilities, and hull inventories. Using TvR offers a greater insight into global naval power than a dry look at the number of ships would. Moreover, it elevates two surprise contenders into the global top five.

Tonnage: ~428,000........

© The National Interest