China’s growing challenge to U.S Naval power

[beijingwalker]

China’s growing challenge to U.S Naval power

PETER O’CONNOR
Contributing Columnist

Aboard the USS ENTERPRISE – Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told sailors aboard the country’s oldest aircraft carrier that the U.S. is committed to maintaining a fleet of 11 of the formidable warships despite budget pressures, in part to project sea power against Iran.

Panetta also told the crowd of 1,700 gathered in the hangar bay of the USS Enterprise that the ship is heading to the Persian Gulf region and will steam through the Strait of Hormuz in a direct message to Tehran.” (Wikipedia)

This quote from our recent SECDEF was delivered almost two years ago. Since then ENTERPRISE has completed her Gulf deployment, returned to Norfolk, and commenced her decommissioning. That 11 Carrier Strike Groups number is now real as that oldest carrier was towed to Newport News Shipyard to continue her dismantling and defueling. The keel for ENTERPRISE was laid at Newport News in 1958.

I have been privileged to go to sea aboard this carrier, and to write about her crew of sailors and marines in these pages. Two of those columns I filed from that storied warship from sea.

So what has that to do with the title of today’s piece? President Obama has pledged to ‘rebalance’ U.S. Forces in favor of Asia. I read in the Journal recently a report on China’s growing naval prowess. (China’s Growing Challenge to U.S. Naval Power, by Seth Cropsey, Wall Street Journal 6/21/13) That WSJ Article highlights, “Beijing builds while America’s fleet shrinks. No wonder our Western Pacific allies are nervous.”

“China will be participating in U.S. led naval exercises near Hawaii, part of an effort to improve military relations with China. The exercises include Australia, Canada, South Korea and Japan. That’s all well and good, but it is ludicrous to imagine that any of this will moderate Beijing’s vaulting ambitions in the Western Pacific. In addition to China’s long-standing threat to Taiwan, Beijing has made no secret of its desire for hegemony in the South and East China seas.” We have discussed some of these incidents in these pages.

Cropsey continues, “These ambitions are backed by an extensive program of Chinese military modernization. According to a report last month by the U.S. Defense Department, Beijing continues to build up its medium-range and long-distance missile arsenal, anti-ship cruise missiles, space weapons and military cyberspace capabilities. China is also improving its fighters, building three classes of attack submarines, and has commissioned its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning. It is, in short, building an advanced system of weaponry capable of striking Asian states from afar.”

Even more, “Facing this growing military might in the Western Pacific is a U.S. fleet less that half the size it was at the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. The plan to build the 306-ship fleet that the Navy says is necessary to accomplish all its missions rests on assumptions about shipbuilding costs that the Congressional Budget Office and Congressional Research Service agree are unrealistic.” We all might remember President Reagan’s plan to build and maintain a 600 ship U.S. Fleet. Things sure have changed!

Still more, “The growing disparity between Chinese and U.S. military investment will eventually alter the balance of power in the Western Pacific. This shift will likely lead either to military conflict or to tacit American acknowledgement of Chinese dominance. A war would be disastrous, but Chinese dominance would not bode well either.” The Journal author posits, “The U.S. ability to shape the international order would end with Chinese supremacy in the most populous and economically vigorous part of the world.”

“The budgets needed to achieve the Navy’s goals were unlikely even before sequestration.” We all remember that latest Administration budget exercise. “The defense budget since 9/11 has averaged 4.1% of GDP. Under the budgets projected by the Obama administration, the figure is projected to drop to 2.5% in less than a decade.”

If our apparent unilateral disarmament occurs, and if Defense leadership continues to stick to a near equal division of dollars among the military services, our sea power available in what has been our lake will decline significantly. Or, in order to maintain strong Pacific forces, the U.S. might be forced in other areas of strategic concern to abandon its naval presence – say the Caribbean or Persian Gulf.

Seth Cropsey concludes, “Such a shell game is not in the best interest of U.S. strategy. Neither is it in the interest of the international order that America has helped to establish and maintain in the decades since World War II. What ultimately matters for the U.S. and for a stable world order is America’s ability to maintain a distributed and powerful presence across the globe.”

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” — Wendell Phillips, (1811-1884), abolitionist, orator and columnist for The Liberator, in a speech before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society in 1852, according to The Dictionary of Quotations edited by Bergen Evans