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China Can Sink American Ships Faster Than America Can Replace Them
Aerospace & Defense
Jun 21, 2020,08:00am EDT
During a long war with China, the U.S. Navy probably wouldn’t be able to work fast enough to fix or replace the ships the Chinese sank or damaged.
That’s not alarmism. Rather, it’s the cool conclusion of two rather boring studies by industrial and military groups in recent months.
After decades of government neglect, American shipyards barely can build and repair the ships the U.S. fleet already has, to say nothing of the additional ships it would need—quickly—to keep fighting a determined, high-tech foe with major industrial resources of its own.
Heart-rates surely spiked across Washington, D.C. on Wednesday when Paul McLeary, a reporter for Breaking Defense, got his hands on a draft report by U.S. Marine Corps commandant David Berger.
Berger, a major military reformer, has been studying the U.S. shipbuilding landscape as part of his wide-ranging effort to transform the Marine Corps into a lighter, more mobile force that can range across the Pacific Ocean, occupying small islands in order to fire long-range anti-ship missiles at Chinese vessels.
If the United States and China got into a serious, long-lasting fight, the American fleet would start to shrink as ships got sunk or damaged, Berger warned. The Chinese fleet on the other hand would be in a better position to make good its losses.
“Replacing ships lost in combat will be problematic, inasmuch as our industrial base has shrunk, while peer adversaries have expanded their shipbuilding capacity,” Berger wrote. “In an extended conflict, the United States will be on the losing end of a production race—reversing the advantage we had in World War II when we last fought a peer competitor.”
For all its import, Berger’s study isn’t revealing anything new. A January report from the Virginia-based National Defense Industrial Association stated essentially the same thing. America’s According to the NDIA, the U.S. shipbuilding industry has just enough capacity to cover a doubling of its workload. Any increase above 100-percent of its current work would exceed its capacity.
To put that into context, the industry’s current workload is the result of the roughly 10 new warships the Navy annually has ordered in recent years. In other words, the big shipyards the fleet counts on to assemble its major warships could, in a pinch, build around 20 new ships at a time instead of just 10.
That is to say, the Navy could, in theory and in a reasonable span of time, replace or repair just 10 ships. If Chinese forces sink more than those 10 American vessels, the overall U.S. fleet will begin to shrink.
How likely is the Chinese military to take out 10 American warships? In 2015, the California think-tank RAND gamed out war scenarios in the western Pacific. The think-tank estimated that a single barrage of around 50 DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missiles could take out a single American ship. China possesses hundreds of DF-21Ds and other anti-ship ballistic missiles.
And don’t forget China’s fleet of around 70 submarines. RAND estimated that, by 2017, China’s subs combined would get around four torpedo or missile shots per week at any American aircraft carrier sailing in the western Pacific.
Add up those risks and others, and it’s not hard to see how, over the course of weeks or months, the Chinese navy could inflict serious damage on the U.S. Navy—damage that could result in a major industrial mobilization in the United States. The question is just how quickly, and to what extent, American shipyards could expand to replace losses.
To be clear, industrial capacity and wartime force-projection are complex subjects that defy easy explanation in short surveys. And there are additional factors in the Navy’s ability to replace losses, such as the large number of recently-decommissioned warships that the fleet keeps in reserve and which, in an emergency, could recommission for front-line service.
But it’s hard to dispute that, for a major maritime power, the United States in 2020 lacks adequate shipbuilding infrastructure. As recently as the late-1970s, the U.S. shipbuilding industry was thriving, thanks in large part to subsidies and financing guarantees that were part of Pres. Richard Nixon’s economic and military platforms. There were, at the time, 22 large shipyards in the United States.
Pres. Ronald Reagan withdrew the subsidies and guarantees in the early 1980s. “The shipbuilding industry in the United States collapsed and, in the five years that followed, employment fell by a third and the number of active shipyards was reduced by 40 percent,” Tim Colton and LaVar Huntzinger explained in a 2002 report for the Center for Naval Analyses in Virginia.
The industry further shrank following the end of the Cold War and the subsequent decline in U.S. defense spending. Meanwhile, countries willing to heavily subsidize their shipbuilding industries—Japan, South Korea and China—came to dominate the international market for large commercial vessels. America’s own shipyards soon were building only military ships and smaller commercial vessels.
Today 14 companies build ships of any size for the Navy, Coast Guard and other government agencies. Ten of those companies also build commercial vessels. Just six shipyards—five of them belonging to either General Dynamics GD or Huntington Ingalls Industries—construct large warships. Every year on average, the Navy doles out to each of this big yards contracts for one or two new ships.
Those same yards, plus four yards the Navy itself owns, also repair existing ships. But those repairs almost never finish on time, further underscoring the industry’s limited spare capacity. One ship maintenance center the U.S. Government Accountability Office studied in early 2020 was only able to complete three out of 24 ship-repairs on schedule.
China apparently does not have the same capacity problem. After a decade of explosive growth starting in the early 2000s, the Chinese shipbuilding industry now includes nearly 50 major shipyards, 12 of them belonging to the two major state-owned enterprises, China State Shipbuilding Corporation and China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation.
China’s naval buildup has both benefited and benefited from the industrial expansion. The Chinese fleet grew by half between 2005 and 2019 while the U.S. fleet expanded by around 10 percent.
Today the United States and China operate roughly the same number of warships—300—although the Chinese ships typically are smaller and less heavily-armed than their American counterparts are. The U.S. fleet can deploy with around 12,000 large missiles. Chinese ships in total can carry 5,200 equivalent munitions.
But the industry that supports the Chinese fleet is newer, bigger and potentially more capable of fixing and replacing combat-damaged ships than is the industry behind the American fleet.
So if the United States and China get into a major war, the Chinese could win by steadily chipping away at America’s own front-line naval strength while more easily making good its own losses.
In the naval-war numbers game, the United States loses.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davida...r-than-america-can-replace-them/#d3c54806b45c
Aerospace & Defense
Jun 21, 2020,08:00am EDT
During a long war with China, the U.S. Navy probably wouldn’t be able to work fast enough to fix or replace the ships the Chinese sank or damaged.
That’s not alarmism. Rather, it’s the cool conclusion of two rather boring studies by industrial and military groups in recent months.
After decades of government neglect, American shipyards barely can build and repair the ships the U.S. fleet already has, to say nothing of the additional ships it would need—quickly—to keep fighting a determined, high-tech foe with major industrial resources of its own.
Heart-rates surely spiked across Washington, D.C. on Wednesday when Paul McLeary, a reporter for Breaking Defense, got his hands on a draft report by U.S. Marine Corps commandant David Berger.
Berger, a major military reformer, has been studying the U.S. shipbuilding landscape as part of his wide-ranging effort to transform the Marine Corps into a lighter, more mobile force that can range across the Pacific Ocean, occupying small islands in order to fire long-range anti-ship missiles at Chinese vessels.
If the United States and China got into a serious, long-lasting fight, the American fleet would start to shrink as ships got sunk or damaged, Berger warned. The Chinese fleet on the other hand would be in a better position to make good its losses.
“Replacing ships lost in combat will be problematic, inasmuch as our industrial base has shrunk, while peer adversaries have expanded their shipbuilding capacity,” Berger wrote. “In an extended conflict, the United States will be on the losing end of a production race—reversing the advantage we had in World War II when we last fought a peer competitor.”
For all its import, Berger’s study isn’t revealing anything new. A January report from the Virginia-based National Defense Industrial Association stated essentially the same thing. America’s According to the NDIA, the U.S. shipbuilding industry has just enough capacity to cover a doubling of its workload. Any increase above 100-percent of its current work would exceed its capacity.
To put that into context, the industry’s current workload is the result of the roughly 10 new warships the Navy annually has ordered in recent years. In other words, the big shipyards the fleet counts on to assemble its major warships could, in a pinch, build around 20 new ships at a time instead of just 10.
That is to say, the Navy could, in theory and in a reasonable span of time, replace or repair just 10 ships. If Chinese forces sink more than those 10 American vessels, the overall U.S. fleet will begin to shrink.
How likely is the Chinese military to take out 10 American warships? In 2015, the California think-tank RAND gamed out war scenarios in the western Pacific. The think-tank estimated that a single barrage of around 50 DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missiles could take out a single American ship. China possesses hundreds of DF-21Ds and other anti-ship ballistic missiles.
And don’t forget China’s fleet of around 70 submarines. RAND estimated that, by 2017, China’s subs combined would get around four torpedo or missile shots per week at any American aircraft carrier sailing in the western Pacific.
Add up those risks and others, and it’s not hard to see how, over the course of weeks or months, the Chinese navy could inflict serious damage on the U.S. Navy—damage that could result in a major industrial mobilization in the United States. The question is just how quickly, and to what extent, American shipyards could expand to replace losses.
To be clear, industrial capacity and wartime force-projection are complex subjects that defy easy explanation in short surveys. And there are additional factors in the Navy’s ability to replace losses, such as the large number of recently-decommissioned warships that the fleet keeps in reserve and which, in an emergency, could recommission for front-line service.
But it’s hard to dispute that, for a major maritime power, the United States in 2020 lacks adequate shipbuilding infrastructure. As recently as the late-1970s, the U.S. shipbuilding industry was thriving, thanks in large part to subsidies and financing guarantees that were part of Pres. Richard Nixon’s economic and military platforms. There were, at the time, 22 large shipyards in the United States.
Pres. Ronald Reagan withdrew the subsidies and guarantees in the early 1980s. “The shipbuilding industry in the United States collapsed and, in the five years that followed, employment fell by a third and the number of active shipyards was reduced by 40 percent,” Tim Colton and LaVar Huntzinger explained in a 2002 report for the Center for Naval Analyses in Virginia.
The industry further shrank following the end of the Cold War and the subsequent decline in U.S. defense spending. Meanwhile, countries willing to heavily subsidize their shipbuilding industries—Japan, South Korea and China—came to dominate the international market for large commercial vessels. America’s own shipyards soon were building only military ships and smaller commercial vessels.
Today 14 companies build ships of any size for the Navy, Coast Guard and other government agencies. Ten of those companies also build commercial vessels. Just six shipyards—five of them belonging to either General Dynamics GD or Huntington Ingalls Industries—construct large warships. Every year on average, the Navy doles out to each of this big yards contracts for one or two new ships.
Those same yards, plus four yards the Navy itself owns, also repair existing ships. But those repairs almost never finish on time, further underscoring the industry’s limited spare capacity. One ship maintenance center the U.S. Government Accountability Office studied in early 2020 was only able to complete three out of 24 ship-repairs on schedule.
China apparently does not have the same capacity problem. After a decade of explosive growth starting in the early 2000s, the Chinese shipbuilding industry now includes nearly 50 major shipyards, 12 of them belonging to the two major state-owned enterprises, China State Shipbuilding Corporation and China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation.
China’s naval buildup has both benefited and benefited from the industrial expansion. The Chinese fleet grew by half between 2005 and 2019 while the U.S. fleet expanded by around 10 percent.
Today the United States and China operate roughly the same number of warships—300—although the Chinese ships typically are smaller and less heavily-armed than their American counterparts are. The U.S. fleet can deploy with around 12,000 large missiles. Chinese ships in total can carry 5,200 equivalent munitions.
But the industry that supports the Chinese fleet is newer, bigger and potentially more capable of fixing and replacing combat-damaged ships than is the industry behind the American fleet.
So if the United States and China get into a major war, the Chinese could win by steadily chipping away at America’s own front-line naval strength while more easily making good its own losses.
In the naval-war numbers game, the United States loses.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davida...r-than-america-can-replace-them/#d3c54806b45c
