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.

5. South Korea

• Total hulls: 147
• Tonnage: ~428,000 tonnes
• Personnel (Active Duty): ~80,000

The Republic of Korea Navy (ROKN) operates a relatively compact yet high-tech and ready fleet. Seoul’s naval strength is centered on its two multipurpose amphibious assault ships (de facto aircraft carriers), 13 guided-missile destroyers, 17 frigates, 3 corvettes, and 21 advanced diesel-electric submarines. South Korea also has access to one of the world’s largest shipbuilding industries, led by a triad of chaebol megacorporations—Hyundai Heavy Industries, Samsung Heavy Industries, and Hanwha Ocean. The presence of a gargantuan domestic shipbuilding industry would give South Korea an enormous advantage in a future military conflict, if push came to shove.

The ROKN has two distinct missions: to serve as a defensive shield against North Korea, and to serve as an offshore balancing asset for the United States against China. South Korea is deeply integrated into the US Navy’s support network in Asia, and regularly hosts US aircraft carriers, most recently the USS George Washington (CVN-73) in November 2025. Due to its state of more or less permanent hostility with North Korea, the ROKN is positioned on a high-alert wartime footing around the clock.

4. Indonesia

• Total hulls: 245
• Tonnage: 325,000 tonnes
• Personnel (Active Duty): ~65,000

While Indonesia has long been overlooked in global affairs, it is the fourth-largest country in the world by population, and its capital city of Jakarta is now widely considered the largest city in the world. Though Indonesia’s economy is still relatively small, with a GDP per capita of only around $5,300, the country has regularly posted strong numbers for economic growth. As Indonesia’s stature on the world stage has improved, it has deepened its defense investments—in particular attempting to modernize its navy and better stand up to China, whose infamous “nine-dash line” territorial claim in the South China Sea dips into Indonesian waters at its southernmost part.

The TvR rankings surprisingly catapult Indonesia’s naval power ranking into the top five. The Indonesian Navy (TNI-AL) has no aircraft carriers or destroyers, sharply limiting its power projection. It relies instead on a localized force structure of four attack submarines, seven frigates, 25 corvettes, and around 30 amphibious warfare ships.

Indonesia is well calibrated for archipelagic defense denial—a sensible strategy, given the country’s control over more than 17,000 islands scattered across Southeast Asia and Oceania. Though it would stand little chance against a larger navy like the US Navy or People’s Liberation Army Navy in open waters, Indonesia’s forces are extremely well-equipped to protect their own waters. And Indonesia retains tactical control over the Malacca and Sunda Straits, two of the most important waterways in the world and vital chokepoints for international shipping and power projection; a military conflict in Southeast Asia would have geopolitical consequences at least equal to, if not more important than, the current crisis in the Persian Gulf.

3. Russia

• Total hulls: 283
• Tonnage: 1,426,500 tonnes
• Personnel (Active Duty): ~200,000 (estimates vary)

Russia is by far the world’s largest country, spanning 6.6 million square miles (17.1 million square kilometers). It occupies 11 time zones from end to end, covering nearly half the Earth. As Russian president Vladimir Putin once observed, the sun never sets on Russia; by the time night falls on Kaliningrad, it is already dawn in Kamchatka.

For all its geographic vastness, however, Russia has long struggled as a sea power. In the west, its primary points of access to the ocean are St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad in the Baltic—both easily blockaded by NATO navies—and Crimea on the Black Sea, bottled up by Turkey, which controls access to the Mediterranean via the Bosporus. In the Pacific, it fares little better; its primary ports in the Far East are Vladivostok, Vostochny, and Nakhodka, all located behind the First Island Chain and easily cut off in the event of conflict with the United States and its allies. This unusual geography also means that Russia must essentially operate four parallel navies—for the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Arctic, and the Pacific—as well as a smaller flotilla for the Caspian Sea. These navies must operate independently of each other; it is usually not practical to reinforce one navy with ships from another.

Though it is far less capable than the US or China, Russia has kept one of the largest navies in the world in service, in part due to the need to maintain combat capabilities in all four areas. Across the four fleets, Russia currently has more than 250 active combat hulls. However, its surface fleet is severely crippled by industrial stagnation. Russia’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, has long been plagued by reliability issues; it has been out of service since 2017, and as the war in Ukraine has consumed more and more military spending, Russia appears to be on the verge of throwing in the towel on the forlorn aircraft carrier and sending it to the scrapyard.

Russia fares better in terms of its undersea fleet—an emphasis it has maintained since the Soviet era, recognizing the possibility for Soviet submarines to slip through European defenses and wreak havoc on the United States and its NATO allies in the Atlantic. Russia currently operates 12 active Delta IV-class and Borei-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) and 49 active attack/cruise missile submarines. Of the latter, the Victor III, Akula, and Yasen classes are nuclear-powered, giving them effectively unlimited range, while the Kilo and Lada classes are diesel-electric.

2. China

• Total hulls: 405
• Tonnage: 3,192,000 tonnes
• Personnel (Active Duty): ~384,000

China has a rich naval history. During the early 15th century, famed Chinese admiral Zheng He conducted seven “treasure voyages” across the known world, reaching as far to the west as the east coast of Africa and the Red Sea. However, Zheng’s voyages failed to impress the Ming Emperor, who ordered his ships burned upon his final return. So it was that Chinese naval power declined precipitously at almost the precise moment European naval power rose, with dramatic and unfortunate consequences for Chinese history.

China’s wars during the 19th and 20th centuries—against Japan, South Korea and a US-led United Nations coalition, India, and Vietnam—were fought almost entirely on land. In the post-1949 era, it possessed a second-rate green-water navy consisting mostly of secondhand Soviet boats, capable of fending off coastal threats—and potentially attacking Taiwan—but not power projection in any meaningful sense. This began to change in the 1990s, amid a broader change in Chinese foreign policy. Beijing has made it clear that it views naval development, and in particular the ability to stand up to the US Navy, as an indispensable part of its regional strategy; it has invested not only in power projection via aircraft carriers and surface vessels, but also in artificial islands across its near-abroad—most notably within the confines of the “nine-dash line” of the South China Sea it claims as its own, antagonizing nearly all of its smaller neighbors in the process.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has more hulls than any navy on Earth. With more than 400 active combat hulls, the PLAN has emphasized quantity as a counterweight to the longtime qualitative superiority of the US Navy. China’s naval power is currently centered on its three existing aircraft carriers—the Liaoning, the Shandong, and the Fujian—with a fourth under construction and a total of nine expected by 2035. To supplement its carriers, the PLAN also operates a massive screening force of 70-plus corvettes and other smaller attack vessels. Under the sea, it operates a mix of some 60 nuclear and diesel-electric submarines.

Though China’s total tonnage still falls well short of the US Navy, it has two major advantages. First, its domestic industrial base is far stronger, allowing it to rapidly close the distance in the event of a major war; its commercial shipbuilding capacity is thought to be some 200 times larger than America’s. Second, while the US Navy has a wide range of commitments around the world—the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific—China has the advantage of concentration; it can operate entirely in its own geographic backyard, with support from an ironclad anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) system. 

1. United States

• Total hulls: 232
• Tonnage: 8,266,000 tonnes
• Personnel (Active Duty): ~344,000

The relatively small number of hulls in the US Navy’s fleet—surpassed by Indonesia, as noted above—is somewhat deceptive. The United States is unmatched in terms of global power projection; no other nation comes close. The Navy currently operates 11 nuclear supercarriers, 10 in the aging Nimitz class and one in the new Ford class; each supercarrier is 100,000 tonnes or more, about twice as large as the PLAN’s Liaoning (~54,000 tonnes) and 20 percent larger than the Fujian (~80,000 tonnes). Although the earliest of the Nimitz class, USS Nimitz (CVN-68) is nearing retirement, a second Ford-class boat, USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79), waits in the wings to take its place—likely in the spring of 2027. Further Nimitz carriers will be replaced by Ford carriers on a one-for-one basis for the foreseeable future.

The strength of America’s supercarriers is supplemented by a large number of other combat vessels. In addition to the regular carriers, the Navy has 32 amphibious assault ships of various classes, functioning as aircraft carriers in miniature. To support them, it has 75 destroyers equipped with the AEGIS missile defense system—mostly in the Arleigh Burke class, with further vessels regularly entering service. And beneath the waves, the US maintains an all-nuclear undersea fleet of ballistic missile and fast-attack submarines: 14 Ohio-class nuclear-equipped SSBNs, four Ohio-class non-nuclear-capable guided missile submarines (SSGNs), and 53 non-nuclear-capable attack submarines in the Los Angeles, Seawolf, and Virginia classes.

For decades, the US has served as the guarantor of global maritime commerce. Whenever ships under any flag encounter trouble—from piracy off the coast of Somalia and the Gulf of Guinea to land-based threats in the Persian Gulf or Bab el-Mandeb—the US Navy is almost always the first number to dial. This has become a point of pride among Navy sailors, but also something of an Achilles heel; while the US remains the undisputed global blue-water leader, the force is stretched thin across multiple oceans. Despite its fairly large size, cutting-edge quality, and extreme technical proficiency, it is not entirely clear how the US Navy would fare in a great-power conflict against a near-peer adversary, or several adversaries put together. With growing defense budgets and advanced new ship and submarine programs, naval planners in Washington are hoping to rectify this.

A Comparison: The Five Largest Navies

Country	United States	China	Russia	Indonesia	South Korea
WDMMV True Value Rating (TvR)	1	2	3	4	5
Personnel	~344,000	~384,000	~200,000	~65,000	~80,000
Total Active Hulls	232	405	283	245	147
Tonnage	8,266,000	3,192,000	1,426,500	325,000	428,000
Aircraft Carriers	11	3	1	0	0
Destroyers	75	47	10	0	13
Frigates	0	49	12	7	17
Submarines	71	60	61	4	21
Other Ships	~75	~240	~200	~235	~100

About the Author: Harrison Kass

Harrison Kass is a writer and attorney focused on national security, technology, and political culture. His work has appeared in Tablet, City Journal, The Hill, The Spectator, and The Cipher Brief. He holds a JD from the University of Oregon and a master’s in Global & Joint Program Studies from NYU. More at harrisonkass.com.

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