As China has doggedly pursued its stated goal of fielding a modern, capable, “world class” military, the U.S. has watched Beijing's navy grow. Meanwhile, America’s naval fleet has shrunk, plagued by construction delays, maintenance backlogs, and funding shortfalls.
The U.S. National Defense Strategy labels China as the U.S. military’s “pacing threat” while the Pentagon’s latest unclassified report on China’s military power notes that, numerically, China has “the largest navy in the world with an overall battle force of over 370 ships and submarines, including more than 140 major surface combatants.”
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A separate report by the bipartisan U.S. Strategic Posture Commission says China’s fleet is expected to grow to 400 ships by 2025 and 440 ships by 2030 as its navy seeks to achieve “command of the seas.”
By comparison, the U.S. Navy has 290 ships, and it has yet to come up with a viable plan to meet the six-year-old congressionally mandated requirement to build a 355-ship fleet.
“Our fleet is going in the wrong direction,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said at a September hearing. “American command of the seas is increasingly at risk.”
Wicker cited a recent memo from the Office of Naval Intelligence that suggested China's shipbuilding capacity is more than 230 times America’s.
“I can hardly believe I'm speaking these words, 230 times larger,” Wicker said at the confirmation hearing for Adm. Lisa Franchetti to be chief of naval operations. “These are not comforting thoughts when we consider the growing number of general and flag officers who warn that China could be capable of invading Taiwan in the next two to four years.”
The U.S. Navy has a twofold problem; too many of its ships are past their prime and require costly and time-consuming repairs, and new ships are increasingly expensive and taking too long to build.
There are three variations of the Navy’s proposed 30-year shipbuilding plans, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates would require an increase in the Navy’s budget from the current $245 billion to between $315 billion and $330 billion in 2023 dollars in 2053.
While ship construction is done at private shipyards under contract, most maintenance is done at one of the Navy’s four public shipyards in Norfolk, Portsmouth, Puget Sound, and Pearl Harbor.
But a June report by the Government Accountability Office found conditions at Navy shipyards were “poor,” with much of their equipment “outdated.”
“The Navy reports that without improvements to shipyard infrastructure, it will be unable to support almost a third of the planned maintenance periods for aircraft carriers and submarines through 2040, hindering fleet readiness,” the GAO report said.
“Our naval forces continue to maintain a high operations tempo across all areas, and demand is overwhelming for attack submarines, cruisers, destroyers, and strike fighters,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), Armed Services chairman. “As a result, deferred ship maintenance, reduced steaming and flying hours, and canceled training and deployments have created serious readiness problems within the Navy.”
Maintenance delays at Navy shipyards are legion, embodied in the sad saga of the USS Boise, an attack submarine that had been in dry dock for eight years.
“It is unacceptable,” Franchetti said at her confirmation hearing.
“The reason why I bring it up,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said, "is because I think it points to the fact that we do have to have a very serious discussion about our capabilities to maintain the fleet we've got, let alone expand the fleet.”
“There are even some ships like the USS Vicksburg that have been in repair and modernization for seven years,” Wicker said. “It's as if the Navy never really means to get the Vicksburg back in action.”
The need for additional maintenance shipyards is only half the problem.
“We need better submarine-building capacity,” former Sen. Jon Kyl, vice chairman of the U.S. Strategic Posture Commission, told Congress last month. “We lack the industrial base to do that right now to get it done on time. That problem has to be addressed urgently, and if we start now, we might be ready by the time we have to develop those new weapons.”
Currently, the U.S. can’t build submarines fast enough to replace the aging fleet, especially the ballistic missile submarines, considered the most survivable leg of the nuclear triad.
Most ships are built with an expected 30-year lifespan, and that’s especially true for submarines with hulls that have to survive the tremendous ocean pressure of repeated deep dives.
The current goal is to build one Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine and two Virginia-class attack submarines a year by 2028, which would be possible because of a $3 billion boost in the industrial base included in President Joe Biden’s supplemental budget request, along with an additional $3 billion kicked in by Australia, which if part of a new partnership with the United States and United Kingdom to acquire nuclear-powered subs.
Under that plan, the U.S. would have a fleet of 55 submarines by 2035, while China would have 80.
“Fifty-five relative to 80,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) mused at a House Seapower Subcommittee hearing last month. “You could argue that ours will still be far more capable at that time. But still, that's a concerning trend.”
“There's no comparison between our submarines and China’s,” Vice Adm. William Houston, commander of Naval Submarine Forces, assured Gallagher. “The majority of Chinese submarines are diesel. Ours are all nuclear, highly capable, and multimission. Our submariners are world-class. It is not a comparison.”
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“The rejoinder is that ours is far more capable, which is true, but at some level, like the numbers do matter, right?” Gallagher scoffed.
“If you analyze the empirical record going back the last 2,000 years, no technologically superior but numerically inferior Navy has ever defeated a technologically inferior but numerically superior Navy,” he said. “So, that's the concern at the heart of the question, if our fleet size continues to shrink.”