Over the past two decades, China has become the dominant shipbuilder, while the United States’s efforts have been plagued by several problems.
Last year, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation built more commercial vessels by tonnage than the U.S. shipbuilding industry has built since the end of World War II, according to a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. China produces more ships than the rest of the world combined.
The Chinese military boasts the world’s largest navy based on the number of its vessels and is on pace to have 425 ships by 2030, while the U.S. Navy is projected to stay around its 300-ship fleet. Comparatively, last year’s Defense Department budget funded the production of six new naval ships, but the department also decommissioned 15 ships, effectively reducing the total number of ships in the U.S. Navy’s fleet by nine.
“China’s shipbuilding sector has undergone a striking metamorphosis. Twenty years ago, the country
was a peripheral player in the global shipyard business. Today, it dominates the industry,” the report said.
These problems regarding U.S. shipbuilding — schedule delays, cost overruns, and not providing the anticipated capabilities — have plagued the Navy for about two decades, Shelby Oakley, the director of Contracting and National Security Acquisitions at the Government Accountability Office, said on Tuesday.
Oakley was among a group of military and government leaders who testified in front of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces.
“The bottom line, marginal change will not fix the persistently poor outcomes, and more money alone is not the solution,” she told lawmakers. “If the Navy doesn’t look introspectively and make bold systemic changes, the consequences are only going to get worse. Technology is evolving fast, and our adversaries are not waiting around for us to catch up.”
The Navy “continues to expect different performance outcomes” despite “no basis for expecting industrial base outcomes to improve without changes,” a recent report from the Government Accountability Office found.
“It has taken us a long time to get into this situation and is going to take us a long time to get out of it. There is no silver bullet, no magical solution,” Dr. Eric Labs, senior analyst for naval forces and weapons at the Congressional Budget Office, added during the hearing. “It is going to take years if not decades of hard work and a lot of money to, if you’ll permit the metaphor, right the ship.”
President Donald Trump announced during his address to Congress last week that the White House would establish a White House Office of Shipbuilding.
“We are also going to resurrect the American shipbuilding industry, including commercial shipbuilding and military shipbuilding,” the president said. “We used to make so many ships. We don’t make them anymore very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon. It will have a huge impact to further enhance our national security.”
TRUMP’S PICK TO LEAD NAVY STRESSES ‘URGENCY’ IN FIXING SHIPBUILDING PROBLEMS
In late February, the president’s choice to lead the Navy, John Phelan, told Senate lawmakers that from his perspective, “a sense of urgency” is “missing” from the department’s efforts to build new ships and restore current ones.
“We’re just going along and everybody — it’s kumbaya. It’s almost as if you’re waiting for a crisis to happen, to ignite things. I think in the business of warfare, that’s a dangerous place to be. So I think why the president selected me is I will bring a sense of urgency to this,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing. “I will bring a sense of accountability to this.”
The committee voted on Tuesday in favor of bringing his nomination and that of Stephen Feinberg as the next deputy secretary of defense to the full Senate for a vote.
