On screens, modern fleets look almost infinite. Software suites shuffle modular hulls, containerized weapons and swarms of drones into thousands of force packages, each tuned by algorithmic war‑gaming and Monte Carlo simulation. Digital twins track every notional ship and sensor, lowering strategic entropy and promising planners a menu of options that no admiral in history could have held in mind at once.
The ocean deletes that illusion fast. Hydrodynamics, thermal limits and structural fatigue define how much steel, radar aperture and missile mass a single hull can carry. Naval architects still live under Archimedes’ principle and boundary‑layer drag, no matter how agile the software. Endurance is ruled by fuel burn, crew circadian rhythm and maintenance cycles, not by lines of code. Every uncrewed surface vessel still needs bandwidth, relay nodes and underway replenishment; autonomy does not cancel logistics or the tyranny of range.
Modularity and drones change the marginal cost of adding capability, so staffs can recombine a small inventory into many scenarios on paper. Yet magazines empty, satellite links saturate and command teams hit cognitive overload long before the scenario tree is exhausted. The result is a quiet arms race between simulation capacity and practical seamanship, in which the map of possible fleets keeps expanding while the literal waterline barely moves.
