With the upcoming 250th anniversary of the U.S. Navy this week, the importance of maritime power was made manifest over the course of the past two weeks through a series of revelations from two very different perspectives.

The first was on September 22, 2025, when the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) announced that its second domestically-built aircraft carrier, and third overall, the Fujian (CNS-18), had, for the first time, successfully launched and recovered fighter aircraft (the J-35 and J-15T) and fixed-wing aircraft (the KG-600) via an electromagnetic aircraft launch and recovery system (EMALS)—a system that had been pioneered by the U.S. Navy and installed aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford since its commissioning in 2017 at a cost of $13 billion.

Most important from the video footage released on Chinese social media, and later by the PRC Ministry of Defense, was that the PRC conducted the first-ever launch and recovery, by any nation, of a 5th Generation stealth fighter, the J-35, using the EMALS technology—a capability that the U.S. Navy has yet to achieve aboard the EMALS equipped USS Gerald R. Ford with the U.S. 5th Generation F-35/Lightening II stealth fighter. The success of the PLAN’s training event in the South China Sea clearly demonstrates that the Fujian and the PLAN have reached a new level of combat readiness and power projection capability—ahead of the U.S. Navy.

The fact that the PRC was able to achieve this milestone ahead of the U.S. marks a strategic turning point in the PRC’s two-decade commitment to building China’s maritime power—a power focused on victory at sea. Not only has the PLA Navy surpassed the U.S. Navy in the number of ships and total tonnage produced, but it is now outpacing the U.S. in the latest in naval technology that the U.S. had prided itself on being ahead of Beijing since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Following this unprecedented launch and recovery of aircraft aboard the Chinese carrier Fujian, it was later revealed in open-source reporting that the PLAN was testing two extra-large unmanned undersea vehicles (XLUUVs) off Hainan Island in the South China Sea. Over 40 meters long, “these machines are about the size of a crewed attack submarine and are ten to twenty times larger than the uncrewed submarines the United States and Europe are experimenting with”—again, another visible demonstration of how the PRC has been able to steal technology and skip ahead of the U.S. As with moving from aircraft carrier ski jumps to EMALS, bypassing steam catapults, which the U.S. Navy spent nearly 80 years perfecting through blood, sweat, and tears, in what the Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll, has called the “fast following” skills of the CCP’s espionage and technology prowess—or what may be more appropriately termed “fast forwarding” through the use of stolen technology and intensive focus of national effort by the PRC.

And then this week, a PLA Navy unmanned trimaran warship built to be a networked ocean killer capable of launching anti-ship and air missiles, deploying torpedoes, and carrying drones for recon or strike missions, was unveiled to the public. Initial assessment is that this new unmanned 500-ton warship is designed as part of a distributed “kill‑web,” where multiple small vessels act together to overwhelm defenses through functions as sentry, ISR node, or ASW platform, supporting manned ships without replacing them. These new smaller, stealthy warships will be hard to hit and are already reshaping the concepts of traditional naval combat and are once again a demonstration of the PRC’s “fast following” prowess, as the sclerotic U.S. Pentagon acquisition system has been unable to field fully operational naval programs from the Ford-class carrier, the Littoral Combat Ship, or the Zumwalt-class cruiser over the past 15 years.

Against this backdrop of new PRC maritime power were President Trump’s words to the assembled Flag and General Officers at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico on 30 September. While most of the focus of his speech and that of the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, has been about the restoration of America’s warfighting ethos, the president’s remarks about naval power are worthy of repeating and assessing.

Regarding victory at sea, the president said these words regarding the issue of battleships: “It’s something we’re actually considering… the concept of a battleship, nice six-inch side, solid steel, not aluminum, aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. Starts melting as the missile’s about two miles away. No, those ships, they don’t make them that way anymore.” He expounded further with, “I look at those ships; they came with the destroyers alongside of them, and man, nothing was gonna stop them.”

The president presciently remarked that his comments about bringing back battleships will be dismissed as “some people would say, ‘No, that’s old technology,’ I don’t know, I don’t think it’s old technology when you look at those guns.” Yet the president’s remarks about the importance of having combat warships that can fight and survive in a battle against an enemy fleet are precisely what have been missing from the Navy for far too long.

Compare the president’s call for ships that can defend themselves while taking the fight to the enemy fleet with the approach ground forces have taken over the course of the past 35 years of fighting in the Middle East. When U.S. Army soldiers were being killed in Humvees destroyed by enemy improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the leaders of the Army didn’t shrink and say, “Well, the enemy can hit us with these IEDs, so we had better retreat from the threat.” Instead, Army, Pentagon, and Congressional leaders doubled down on putting armor on these vehicles and their soldiers in order to protect them and continue to take the fight to the enemy.

There is an interesting correlation between the past 35 years of building the “Woke Department,” as described by Secretary Hegseth, and the concurrent downsizing and weakening of the U.S. Navy. The more our admirals adopted political correctness, the more they were inclined not to pursue victory in war at sea.

So, as we see the PRC’s 25-year naval modernization program create the largest and possibly the most lethal navy on the planet, the challenge now for this administration and the new War Department is how to Make America’s Navy Great Again (MANGA). We must not retreat from the fight but must steam into battle prepared to fight and win, and only by focusing on “Victory at Sea” can we achieve that goal.

James E. Fanell served as a career naval intelligence officer whose positions included senior intelligence officer for China at the Office of Naval Intelligence and chief of intelligence for CTF-70, Seventh Fleet, and the U.S. Pacific Fleet. He is the co-author of the book Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure.