China’s navy has risen rapidly in recent years and is upsetting the balance of military power in the Western Pacific, having caught up with, and even surpassed, the United States in individual areas. The U.S. Biden administration will face the daunting challenge of maintaining its maritime superiority over China and continuing to expand its navy as it strives to contain the Epidemic and revive its economy.
U.S. operations in the Pacific have not been challenged in any way since World War II, but with the rapid rise of the Chinese navy, China is believed to have the capability to challenge U.S. maritime dominance in the Western Pacific, including around Taiwan and in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.
The U.S. Department of Defense, in its “2020 China Military Power Report,” notes that China has caught up with, or even surpassed, the U.S. military in three areas, the first of which is warship construction. China already has the world’s largest navy with 350 surface ships and submarines, including more than 130 major surface combatants, the report said. The United States, on the other hand, has about 293 naval surface combatants as of early 2020.
Craig Singleton, a researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, said that overall, there is no doubt that the U.S. Navy remains the most powerful in the world, but there are some individual areas where China may be starting to gain a slight advantage.
China now has the largest navy in the world, larger than the United States,” he told the Voice of America. There are a lot of high-tech, advanced submarines, destroyers and amphibious ships in the fleet. The U.S. Navy is getting smaller and its ships are getting older. Building new ships is costly.”
A Congressional Research Service report late last year said the U.S. Navy faces the challenge of maintaining wartime control in the blue-water waters of the Western Pacific for the first Time since World War II. The report, titled “China’s Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Naval Capabilities,” said the size of the Chinese navy is expected to reach 425 warships by 2030. A report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) says that between 2014-2018, China launched more new submarines, warships, amphibious ships and support vessels than the total number of active warships of the German, Indian, Spanish and British navies.
Bryan Clark, a senior naval fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, said a large Chinese fleet would mean an even greater challenge for the United States. That means the U.S. Navy will have a greater challenge in protecting regional partners and allies, such as Taiwan,” he told Voice of America. Because the PLA will have a lot of ships seizing control of the waters around Taiwan, or the Senkaku Islands, and also the Spratly Islands, because China has not only militarized those islands, but also has a much larger navy. These places are in danger.”
A study released last week by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a U.S. think tank, noted that the Chinese navy’s ocean-going fleet is active not only in the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean, but also in the Mediterranean and Baltic. The report said Phil Davidson, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, had highlighted in late 2019 that the Chinese Navy had made more formation voyages in the past 30 months than in the past 30 years. ToshiYoshihara, one of the report’s authors and a professor in the Department of Strategic and Policy Studies at the U.S. Naval War College, in another report last year titled “Which Way Does the Dragon Go? China has built and deployed the world’s largest maritime fleet in just 20 years, exceeding the expectations of every strategic security planner in the United States.
30-Year Shipbuilding Plan
To maintain U.S. naval dominance, the former Trump administration released a 30-year shipbuilding plan last year12 that proposes to build the U.S. fleet to 355 ships by the 2030s and a superfleet of 405 ships by fiscal year 2051. In a statement, the Defense Department said that to ensure superiority over China and Russia, the U.S. needs a modern combat force to carry out missions in the Pacific. It is unclear whether or how the new U.S. administration will move forward to implement this plan.
To achieve this plan, the U.S. Department of Defense has proposed a significant increase in shipbuilding appropriations. The Navy early last year proposed a five-year budget of $102 billion for shipbuilding between fiscal years 2022 and 2026, and in the new plan proposed a significant increase of $45 billion on top of that, to $147 billion, an increase of more than 40 percent.
In the face of such a large budget, some observers pointed out that the new administration is facing a series of major issues such as economic recovery and combating climate change, the U.S. Navy’s ship expansion plan is likely to face the challenge of funding shortfalls. A commentary on the Forbes website last week said the plan is out of touch with political reality.
Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, a U.S. think tank, said in the commentary that the federal government, which is currently borrowing trillions of dollars a year to avoid permanent damage to the economy from a global epidemic, will at best be on par with current military spending in the future.
The Congressional Research Service noted in a report late last December that this plan to build 355 warships would mean an average annual increase in the Navy budget of $12 billion to $13 billion over the next 10 years.
Asked at the Senate Armed Services Committee’s nomination confirmation hearing last week whether he supports the 30-year shipbuilding plan, retired Army Adm. Lloyd Austin, the nominee for U.S. defense secretary, said he had not yet seen the plan but was familiar with its plans to build a fleet of up to 405 ships by 2051. Pressed on whether he would ask for funding for that, Austin did not answer directly. He said the U.S. has the most powerful navy in the world today, and it is critical to continue to maintain its combat effectiveness. If the nomination is approved, he said, he will work with Navy leadership to deepen understanding of the issues involved.
Despite the cost of the plan, Brent Sadler, a senior fellow for naval affairs at the Heritage Foundation, said the plan only plans for shipbuilding goals through 2026 and does not include a specific budget for long-term expansion of U.S. shipbuilding infrastructure capabilities. Sadler, who served in the Navy for 26 years, said there is no doubt that the new administration will face significant challenges in securing congressional appropriations, but he is hopeful that the new administration will continue to push to grow the Navy given the broad consensus on the China challenge. He cited the fact that many of the Trump Administration‘s ideas and concepts in the 2018 defense strategy actually came from the latter part of President Obama’s administration, only the Defense Department under then-Ashton Carter’s presidency did not put those ideas and concepts into words.
He told Voice of America, “I’m hearing language now that you would never have seen and heard in public four or five years ago in the Obama administration, the same people that I’m seeing a lot of now speaking out publicly.”
U.S. Secretary of Naval Operations Mike Gilday, who recently (1/12/2021) unveiled a 10-year plan for the Navy, said he was not trying to dramatize the issue, but the U.S. must be level-headed or “based on the trajectory that China is on right now, I think we may not recover in not recover within this century.”
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