WASHINGTON — The U.S. severely lags behind China in shipbuilding capacity, lawmakers and experts have warned, as the Biden administration tries to build up the country’s ability to develop and produce weapons and other defense supplies to fend off war.
Speaking at a congressional hearing Thursday, Rep. John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said the country lacks the capacity to “deter and win a fight” with China and called for action.
“Bold policy changes and significant resources are now needed to restore deterrence and prevent a fight” with China, Moolenaar said.
China’s navy is already the world’s largest, and its shipbuilding capacity, estimated to be 230 times larger, dwarfs that of the U.S.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking Democratic member of the committee, told Fox News last week that “for every one oceangoing vessel that we can produce, China can produce 359 in one single year.”
The U.S. government has come to see China as its “pacing challenge,” and officials have warned that Beijing is pursuing the largest peacetime military buildup in history, raising concerns about how the U.S. would respond and ensure victory in case of a conflict in the Indo-Pacific, where tensions are high in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.
Krishnamoorthi on Thursday warned that a weak military industrial base could invite aggression and argued that strengthening it is necessary to avoid war with China.
“History tells us we need a healthy defense industrial base now to deter aggression and make sure the world’s dictators think again before dragging the U.S. and the world into yet another disastrous conflict,” Krishnamoorthi said.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan called it a “generational project” to fix the problem after the American shipbuilding industry had its “bottom fell out” in the early 1980s.
“Part of it is we don’t have the backbone of a healthy commercial shipbuilding base to rest our naval shipbuilding on top of,” Sullivan said Wednesday at the Aspen Security Forum in Washington. “And that’s part of the fragility of what we’re contending with and why this is going to be such a generational project to fix.”
The challenge in shipbuilding has been “especially immense,” stemming from the hollowing-out of the U.S. manufacturing base where its workforce shrank and suppliers left, Sullivan said.
And it is part of the broader problem of a weakened U.S. military industrial base, as manifested in the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, Sullivan said, when Kyiv in eight weeks “burned through a year’s worth of U.S. 155-millimeter artillery production.”
“Decades of underinvestments and consolidation had seriously eroded our defense industrial base, and there was no way around it,” Sullivan said.
The head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Samuel Paparo, warned last month that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East were eating away at critical U.S. weapons stockpiles and could hamper the military’s ability to respond to China should a conflict arise.
He said providing or selling billions of dollars worth of air defenses to both Ukraine and Israel were hampering U.S. ability to respond to threats in the Indo-Pacific.
“It’s now eating into stocks, and to say otherwise would be dishonest,” he told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington on Nov . 19.
Several researchers at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said China’s rapid military buildup could allow the country to prevail over the U.S., especially in case of a prolonged conflict.
“China’s massive shipbuilding industry would provide a strategic advantage in a war that stretches beyond a few weeks, allowing it to repair damaged vessels or construct replacements much faster than the United States,” the researchers wrote in June.
On Thursday, the congressional panel heard suggestions from experts who said it would take time to rebuild the defense industrial base, but for quicker fixes, the U.S. could innovate to make low-cost and autonomous systems and tap resources of its allies.
“We need to look at co-production of whether it’s munitions in Australia or shipbuilding in Korea,” said William Greenwalt, a non-resident senior fellow at the Washington-based think tank American Enterprise Institute.
“We need to get numbers as fast as we can,” he said.
