The Navy is failing to build warships on time or on budget.
Putting campaign donations and local employment interests above national security, members of Congress have been unwilling to take bold action to fix things. An absence of skilled workers, inefficient unions, and COVID-19-related challenges have further complicated matters. The next president and Congress thus face a choice. Either they accept China’s dominance of the western Pacific Ocean or they do the once unthinkable and appropriate funds to build warships in the dockyards of allied nations such as South Korea, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
Time is not a luxury America can afford.
China is surging the development of an advanced and highly capable navy. Chinese President Xi Jinping is also surging his intimidation of Taiwan and the Philippines, conducting increasingly bold blockade exercises against the former and aggressively harassing the latter in its own exclusive economic zone. Taiwan’s defense budget is utterly inadequate, something that must change to persuade a future American president that its defense is worth the lives of thousands of U.S. military personnel. Similarly, while Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos is a courageous leader and strong American ally, the Philippines must expand its military basing rights if it wants greater U.S. military support against China.
Still, the fundamental point is that these various concerns are all interconnected. China is doing what it is doing because Xi wants to secure economic, resource, and political hegemony over the Western Pacific. If Xi succeeds, he’ll be able to dominate multitrillion-dollar annual trade flows, the political sovereignty of multiple democratic nations including Japan, and vast influence over the economies and politics of other nations across the globe. Those nations will find they need Xi’s permission to trade and prosper. And ideological delusions to the contrary, Chinese Communist Party permission slips are never free.
This reality means that a stronger Navy is more critical to America’s national security than it ever has been. Again, however, time is not on America’s side.
China is building warships at a scale that utterly dwarfs that of the United States. Some of the warships that the Chinese military is putting out to sea are capable of directly challenging their U.S. Navy counterparts. The Chinese Navy’s superb Type-055 Renhai class air defense cruisers offer one such example. But where China is building many of these and other warships simultaneously, the U.S. is struggling to get even one Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and one Virginia-class attack submarine out each year. The Chinese Navy is on a trajectory to vastly overmatch the U.S. Navy in force scale. Relative distances between repair facilities during any future conflict also manifestly favor Beijing over Washington.
Even assuming that Congress invests significant new funds to boost the nation’s shipbuilding industry and related skills base, the dividends of any such investment won’t be felt until the end of the decade. Further complicating matters, Navy personnel are exhausted at being forced to stay out at sea because replacement vessels aren’t available. These extended tours are making already severe maintenance even worse and they are greatly complicating the Navy’s readiness to surge forces into the Pacific during a crisis.
A solution to this crisis is needed, and allies have the answer. South Korea is foremost among them.
South Korea’s shipbuilding industry is world-leading, fusing a skilled and efficient workforce with modern technology. The result is that South Korean shipbuilders such as Hyundai are building highly capable warships at far lower cost and far greater speed than their American counterparts. The Wall Street Journal recently documented how great these discrepancies truly are. And South Korea’s shipbuilding industry isn’t messing around. Its Sejong the Great-class destroyers are behemoths capable of pummeling an enemy and surviving deep inside a contested battlespace. It’s not just South Korea that offers solutions to America’s naval shrinkage crisis.
As the Hudson Institute’s William Schneider has outlined, certain political reforms would allow Japan’s heavy-capacity shipbuilding industry to also help fill U.S. warship needs. I understand that the U.K. also has spare capacity to begin construction of different U.S. warships and variants via its modular warship construction industry. Other high-end warship manufacturers in Europe, such as Italy’s Fincantieri, also stand out in this regard.
Unfortunately, it won’t be enough just to issue new shipbuilding orders abroad.
Another complication is the Navy’s fetish for micromanaging and constantly changing its warship design requests. This approach sends both delays and costs soaring. While the Navy’s new Constellation-class frigates are based around the far cheaper but impressive FREMM frigate system, for example, they have become far more costly and far more delayed in delivery due to constant design changes. The Navy needs to accept what will suffice from its warships, not what dreams are made of. It also needs to take a far more proactive approach to replacing leaders, including admirals, who fail to improve on construction timelines and budgets.
Alarmingly, the Navy relieved two top commanders at a major naval repair facility in Japan last weekend. The inside-the-fleet rumor is that the two officers are suspected of financial impropriety with contract decisions. While the Washington Examiner has seen no evidence of this, the Navy’s “Fat Leonard” corruption scandal means it most certainly cannot be ruled out.
The Navy also needs to reduce its “show the flag” deployments around the globe and reduce deployments in Europe and the Middle East in favor of allied navies doing more. These deployments take too many resources away from the Pacific and worsen crew fatigue and ship maintenance schedules.
Another problem is that Congress continues to view shipbuilding primarily through an economic and political prism rather than as an urgent national security concern. Protectionist policies proffered by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) have only worsened matters in this regard. Baldwin claims that her “Buy American” mandates protect American industry and jobs, but in the end, they only drive up costs for the Navy, worsen supply chain shortages, delays, and costs, and hurt the very same allies that America would rely upon during war. Baldwin deserves a medal from the Chinese Communist Party for what she has done.
This doesn’t mean that the U.S. should neglect its own shipbuilding industry to the benefit only of foreign ones. On the contrary, Congress should make massive investments and long-term minimum fee contracts to provide the incentive and infrastructure for American shipbuilders to build and hire at scale. Far greater incentives are also necessary to boost the domestic supply chain for workers at the lower-to-middle skill level of the naval construction workforce.
It’s not surprising that job vacancies are rampant when employment listings for General Dynamics Electric Boat, which builds America’s nuclear submarines, offer paltry starting salaries: “Hourly Rates from $20.53 – $24.53.” Nearby stocking and unloading jobs with Walmart in Connecticut compete with or exceed those salary offers.
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Nevertheless, embracing a build-at-home and build-abroad tandem approach would accomplish two key purposes. First, it would allow the Navy to bolster its force more quickly so as to better deter and, if necessary, defeat China in war. Second, it would bolster U.S. alliances by clarifying Washington’s recognition that if allies are willing to support it in contesting Chinese aggression, it will support those allies.
The simple truth is that the U.S. doesn’t have enough warships and won’t have enough for the foreseeable future. And the gap with China is only getting worse. We don’t want to go to war with China with a Navy that is too small.