The US Navy is shrinking at precisely the wrong time. Its biggest rival, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (Navy), PLA(N), is growing bigger and more powerful by the day – a naval expansion that has profound implications for the freedom of Taiwan, the security of the wider Asia-Pacific region and the whole global economy.
America’s naval crisis has deep roots – a tangle of misplaced strategic priorities, botched privatisation efforts and bad ship designs reaching back to the 1990s or even earlier. It predates, by decades, the politicians and military officials who are now presiding over it.
But today’s leaders – President Joe Biden, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday – could, if they had the gumption, slow or even reverse the maritime decline. We know this because lawmakers from both major political parties routinely intervene in the US Navy’s annual shipbuilding plans and add back ships the Navy wanted to cut.
This year is looking no different. The Navy in March asked Congress for $29 billion for nine new ships. That’s too few to keep pace with the decommissioning of old ships, and lawmakers know it.
“The Navy’s shipbuilding plan is a blueprint to end America’s command of the sea,” Roger Wicker, a Republican senator from Mississippi, said then.
The fleet’s disastrous shrinkage isn’t inevitable. But if lawmakers don’t intervene to alter the USN’s latest long-term shipbuilding plan, which service leaders released on Tuesday, the fleet will shed another eight of its 293 front-line warships before it finally starts growing again – slowly – around 2028.
The problem for America, Taiwan and the whole free world is that those five years could prove critical. The PLA(N) surpassed the US Navy in one important metric – the number of ships – back in 2021. That shift in the naval balance of power has coincided with Beijing’s escalating belligerence toward Taipei. Authoritarian China can bully democratic Taiwan because it has the muscle to back up its threats.
It’s true that Beijing’s 340 or so ships on average are smaller and somewhat less sophisticated than American warships. And the Chinese navy has just two small aircraft carriers – plus a third, bigger carrier under construction – while the USN has 11 huge supercarriers. American ships have better weapons and better sensors.
But the PLA(N) has a huge geographic advantage. It only deploys its ships in the Western Pacific around Taiwan, whereas America patrols all the world’s oceans. Even reinforcements from the Australian and Japanese fleets might not save the USN from being outnumbered in a pitched battle over Taiwan.
It didn’t have to be this way. The US Navy, like every other major Cold War navy, cut way back on its spending after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The US fleet had more than 500 front-line warships in the early 1990s. Ten years later, it was down to around 300.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan prolonged the decline. The Pentagon spent more on ground forces, less on ships. And many of the ships the U.S. Navy did buy in the early 2000s turned out to be deeply flawed. The Zumwalt-class stealth destroyers had so many experimental technologies that their price spiraled to more than $7 billion apiece. The fleet ended up with just three of the high-tech vessels instead of the 32 it needed to replace older ships.
The contemporaneous Littoral Combat Ship program was meant to produce a class of 50 or more inexpensive, flexible, fast ships for near-shore warfare. But their engines were unreliable, their anti-submarine gear didn’t work and their air defences were dangerously light. The Navy paid for 35 of the $600-million ships then immediately decided they weren’t suitable for war.
The fleet has already decommissioned three of the virtually brand-new Littoral Combat Ships, and has asked lawmakers for permission to mothball another 11. Some LCSs could leave the fleet without ever having deployed on a front-line patrol.
The twin failures of the Zumwalt and Littoral Combat Ship programs robbed the US fleet of an entire generation of new ships, and forced it to hold onto older ships long past their time. Now there are dozens of 1980s-vintage submarines, cruisers and amphibious ships that are so worn out that they haven’t deployed in years.
The Navy doesn’t want to pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to fix the old ships – not when its four government-owned shipyards are already struggling to chip away at a years-long maintenance backlog. It’s worth noting that just 30 years ago, the Navy owned a dozen shipyards. But successive presidential administrations rushed to give them away for private development.
A constellation of seven private shipyards builds America’s new warships. They too are struggling to keep up. Navy leaders acknowledge their own culpability in the industrial backlog. Naval shipbuilding is a highly skilled vocation. If the government doesn’t keep those workers employed with enough good work, year after year across generations, the workers move on to other careers.
The post-Cold War naval doldrums idled too many skilled shipwrights and hollowed out the workforce. Now that the yards desperately need workers, the Navy is relearning an old and obvious lesson: shipwrights don’t grow on trees.
“The build-up in the 1950s and 1980s, followed by ‘bust’ periods of little production, each led to the loss of portions of our shipbuilding industrial capacity,” the USN admits in this week’s new shipbuilding plan.
This is a problem the PLA(N) doesn’t have. It’s been methodically expanding its industrial base and associated workforce for 30 years: long-term investment that explains why, today, Beijing effortlessly builds two or three dozen new ships every year. That’s twice what Washington manages.
Not coincidentally, that’s the same 30-year period the U.S. Navy has spent squandering its maritime inheritance. The only reason the American fleet isn’t even smaller is that, year after year for at least a decade, Congress has added money and ships to the Navy’s budget requests. Last year Biden and fleet leaders asked for eight new front-line ships for $28 billion. Congress made it 11 for $32 billion.
Expect lawmakers to continue their long tradition of trying to save the US Navy from itself.
It’s harder to forecast whether it’ll be enough to save Taiwan and the whole Western Pacific from Chinese domination.
