Navy’s Latest Shipbuilding Plan Is Not Good News For The Industrial Base
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The U.S. Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan calls for reducing the number of manned warships in the fleet to 280 later in the decade, at a time when the number of warships in the Chinese fleet is expected to grow beyond 400.
U.S. warships typically are more capable than their Chinese counterparts, but when you factor in the concentration of Beijing’s fleet in or near home waters while the U.S. fleet must cover the entire world, it appears U.S. naval power in the Western Pacific is headed for marked inferiority.
Local allies, meaning mainly Japan, can help to even up the regional balance at sea, but proximity to China’s growing arsenal of land-based antiship missiles and aircraft means that America’s local maritime dominance is steadily slipping away.
The U.S. Navy’s repeated failure to propose fleet levels adequate to cope with the future capabilities of what the Chief of Naval Operations calls “our pacing threat” belies the notion that seapower can preserve U.S. influence in the Western Pacific.
The Biden administration probably needs to begin planning for the permanent deployment of U.S. Army ground forces in Taiwan, at least one armored brigade, because the force the Navy is proposing may not be able to deter or defeat Chinese aggression.
Navy officials tell an improbable story of why they need to shrink today’s fleet in order to “build back better” in the future, but the threat is looming now, and there are no guarantees the Navy will reach that golden future before China acts on its promise to “reunite” with Taiwan.
Some senior U.S. military officers believe China may move later in this decade—long before the naval renaissance envisioned in Navy plans.
If you follow coverage of naval issues, then you have probably heard these warnings many times; so rather than repeat the concerns of strategists, I would like to focus on a different facet of the latest shipbuilding plan—the impact on the domestic industrial base.
Because America has not been competitive in the construction of commercial oceangoing vessels since President Reagan wiped out federal subsidies in 1981 (without seeking reciprocal action from other nations), the U.S. today only has a handful of shipyards capable of building complex naval warships.
These yards typically specialize in a one or two types of ship. For instance, Electric Boat in New England and Newport News in Virginia’s Tidewater only build nuclear-powered vessels. Bath Iron Works in Maine and Ingalls Shipbuilding in Mississippi only build conventionally-powered warships.
The parent companies of all four yards, General Dynamics
GD
Unfortunately, the Navy’s constantly shifting plans provide little incentive to invest in what seems to be a low-margin, unpredictable business. It isn’t clear, for example, that Bath Iron Works has made any money on its recent destroyers.
In the case of Ingalls Shipbuilding, a bigger and more modern facility, planning for the future has all the predictability of trading cryptocurrencies.
The 2023 plan proposes to wipe out a program for a dozen LPD amphibious warships to replace ancient docking landing vessels used by the Marine Corps—even though the same plan proposes retirement of four of the older ships.
All of the newer ships were supposed to be built at Ingalls, as was a larger LHA amphibious assault vessel that now looks to be delayed.
That in itself presents a big blow to the shipyard, but it is just the beginning. Plans to build a next-generation frigate at a second yard, which Ingalls had a good chance of winning, now are in abeyance, as are plans to build a next-generation destroyer.
Meanwhile, the yard is facing shutdown of production for the Coast Guard’s national security cutter.
If all the Navy’s plans for shrinking the fleet actually are implemented, Ingalls will have to spread overhead costs across a smaller portfolio of programs, driving up the cost of each ship it actually produces.
The Navy plan talks a good game about building unmanned warships and light amphibious connectors for supporting distributed maritime operations, but its isn’t clear when or where these will be produced; probably not at Bath, Ingalls or any traditional shipyard.
All of which makes the opening remarks of the Chief of Naval Operations at a May 11 congressional hearing rather curious:
“Over the past two decades, the PRC has built a comprehensive, anti-access system of sophisticated sensors and long-range precision weapons. Backed by a robust industrial base and the largest shipbuilding infrastructure in the world, the PRC has extensively modernized its military and tripled the size of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy [PLAN].”
If all that is true, why isn’t the U.S. Navy sending a stronger signal about its own plans to the domestic shipbuilding industrial base?
The Navy’s shipbuilding plan says that it “continues to evaluate industrial base health” and is providing $2.4 billion for capital investments and workforce development.
That assertion might seem credible at Electric Boat, which will be strained to capacity turning out nuclear-powered attack subs and a new generation of ballistic-missile subs over the next 15 years, but if you are engaged in building surface warships or amphibious vessels, the plan looks worrisome—and that’s before Congress works its magic on the 2023 budget.
The truth of the matter is that all the back and forth over naval ship construction goals has done little to sustain the industrial base beyond the submarine sector.
At a time when China’s Navy looks poised to surge to well over 400 warships, the U.S. fleet hasn’t managed to get above 300 for two decades, and now the Navy wants to shrink the fleet further.
That is no way to maintain a robust industrial base.
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