Massive Threat: China’s Shipbuilding Pace Surpasses US Navy

By James Holmes, Warrior Contributor, Navy

At last: I think a zombie has been slain. Zombie in this context meaning an idea that’s hard to kill. You shoot it down coming from one commentator or institution and ten or a hundred others repeat it anyway. It shambles on despite the headshot. This particular ghoul is the fallacy that a navy’s combined tonnage—the amount of water its hulls displace—is somehow the decisive factor in naval warfare. The number of ships in the inventory somehow doesn’t matter much.

This walking-dead talking point—that the navy that weighs the most wins—finds special favor among those averse to devoting more funding and resources to shipbuilding. It’s a kind of rhetorical fudge factor, letting skeptics argue that because the U.S. Navy outweighs likely antagonists, it’s therefore predestined to triumph—even though Congress and presidential administrations have shortchanged shipbuilding accounts for decades. All is well.

QED.

Well, no. You don’t hear this undead talking point much anymore, thankfully, now that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy has surpassed the U.S. Navy by ship count, a margin that will only widen in the coming years, while at the same time narrowing the gap in tonnage. Numbers and tonnage could ultimately be on China’s side. Sobriety may have taken hold regarding the naval balance. Admitting you have a problem represents the first step toward finding a solution.

And we do have a problem. This old, sore subject comes to mind now because of a story over at The War Zone last week spotlighting the disparity between U.S. and Chinese shipbuilding capacity. Joe Trevithick pores over a slide from an Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) presentation about the future of transpacific strategic competition. The slide purports to show that China can manufacture over two hundred times the shipping the United States can, measured by tonnage.

This is significant to say the least. It means China has amassed the capacity to outbuild the United States not just in warships but in merchantmen, and by a gaping margin. On the naval side, extrapolating from current trends, the PLA Navy will field well over 400 vessels by the mid-2030s while the U.S. Navy dawdles in the low 300s. Massive shipbuilding capacity, furthermore, means China will find it far easier to repair battle-damaged ships than will the United States, which is struggling to maintain the fleet it has—let alone regenerate combat power in a war.

Advantage: China.