By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Threat Posed by Beijing’s Fast-Growing Navy

Over the past few years, concerns about China’s navy and its potential threat to U.S. interests have steadily grown. Two decades ago, the U.S. Navy had 282 battle-force ships against the Chinese Navy’s 220, but by the mid-2010s this advantage had disappeared. Today, Chinese ships outnumber those of the U.S. Navy by 400 to 295. If the United States shipbuilding pace remains unchanged, this so-called ship gap will only continue to grow.

Of course, raw numbers do not reflect the quality or capabilities of a navy’s vessels, nor do they reflect a military’s strategies, its relevant land-based capabilities, or other factors that can influence naval warfare. U.S. ships are typically larger than Chinese vessels and have superior sensors, electronics, and weapons. For example, the Chinese submarine force consists mostly of conventional diesel-powered submarines, whereas the 49 attack submarines in the U.S. Navy are nuclear-powered and far more capable. Similarly, the U.S. Navy has a greater number of aircraft carriers and larger, more powerful warships, such as cruisers and destroyers. In addition, U.S. ships are operated by better-trained crews under the command of more experienced officers. The U.S. Navy demonstrated excellent tactical skills during recent operations against the Houthis in the Middle East, for instance—a real-world experience that the Chinese Navy lacks.

But the massive industrial shipbuilding capacity that has given China its numerical edge also offers important advantages in a long war—advantages that superior quality or skill can only partly offset. China has the world’s largest shipbuilding industry by a huge margin, launching more tonnage every year than the rest of the world combined. According to the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, China’s capacity in this sector exceeds the United States by a factor of more than 200. Most of China’s current production comprises commercial shipping vessels; modern warships are much more complex to build, but in the course of a long war commercial shipyards in China could learn to do so. This vast industrial potential would give China an ability to rapidly expand or replace losses to its fleet that the United States simply could not match.

A similar pattern of strengths and weaknesses defined the United States and imperial Japan in World War II’s Pacific theater. At the outset of that conflict, it was the U.S. Navy that was less skilled and experienced than its counterpart but was backed by a much greater industrial capacity, allowing it to outbuild and overwhelm its enemy in a long war. Today with China, the situation is reversed. The United States needs to recognize the consequences of its inferior industrial capacity and quickly act to address this deficiency, including by expanding its shipbuilding portfolio and operations and perhaps even by stockpiling critical shipbuilding materials for potential wartime construction. The United States should look at China’s navy and see the terrifying potential of its former self. And it should respond now, while it still can.

 

Blast from the Past

Historically, naval warfare has been extremely destructive. From the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the Cold War, forces defeated in a battle at sea lost almost a third of their battle squadrons on average; 13 percent of the time, the losing side was annihilated altogether. And even materially superior forces can lose battles. In 1941, when the United States entered World War II, the U.S. Navy outnumbered the Imperial Japanese Navy. And yet the United States suffered a series of costly early defeats, including the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequent battles in the Badung Strait, the Java Sea, and the Sunda Strait, in the waters around the Dutch East Indies (present day Indonesia).

To avoid a death spiral, in which early losses create disadvantages that precipitate more losses, navies in major wars need to be able to quickly replace destroyed naval vessels with new ones. In the early 1940s, the United States was able to do just that. The United States launched so many new ships that in the year after Pearl Harbor it was able to more than double the size of its fleet, even as the navy continued to absorb major losses. By contrast, Japan’s limited industrial capacity could only barely replace what its navy was losing in battle, let alone increase its fleet.

Such advantages in wartime shipbuilding can transform a protracted conflict. When it entered World War II, the U.S. Navy had seven large aircraft carriers and one escort carrier; by the end of the war, it had 28 large and 71 escort carriers. In 1940, the United States had no amphibious ships; by the end of the war, it had 2,547. In August 1945, the U.S. fleet was more than 20 times larger than Japan’s, and the vast majority of it comprised ships that did not exist when the war began. It was this new navy, built in the course of the war, that crushed the Japanese.

Japanese leaders recognized the United States’ superior industrial potential and knew that American shipbuilding would outpace their own in a long war. Still, they hoped that a combination of high-quality ships and highly trained sailors could offset this disadvantage and enable quick victories. The Japanese then planned to construct a chain of island fortifications across the Pacific that would dissuade a U.S. counteroffensive and force an early settlement on Japanese terms. The war began the way the Japanese expected. Their night-fighting proficiency, torpedoes, and fighter-aircraft designs played crucial roles in a series of early Japanese victories. But instead of settling, the United States fought on. Unable to end the conflict swiftly, Japan became stuck in a long war of attrition in which its inferior industrial potential proved fatal.

Similar dynamics are at play in today’s naval competition between China and the United States, with the sides reversed. Like Japan in World War II, the United States seems to be driven by an assumption that superior weapons and training will compensate for its slower shipbuilding and allow its outnumbered fleet to quickly prevail in a war at sea with China. The Chinese navy, by contrast, resembles the U.S. fleet in the runup to Pearl Harbor: qualitatively less capable than its prospective opponent but with a far greater shipbuilding capacity that during a war could allow it to rapidly recover from early losses and, over time, overwhelm even a more skilled opponent whose production simply could not keep up.

 

Mind the Gap

A crucial problem for U.S. shipbuilding is its increasingly long production. Most modern warship designs take much longer to build than their World War II counterparts; at the same time, U.S. industry has become less efficient, not more. It now takes 11 years to build an aircraft carrier in the United States and nine years to build either a nuclear attack submarine or a destroyer. These timelines have grown considerably over the past 15 years, as U.S. shipbuilders have struggled to recruit and retain skilled workers, which makes it hard for American shipyards to meet increasing demands from the navy. During World War II, an aircraft carrier could be built in a little over a year; a submarine in the same era might take a few months. If today’s U.S. Navy suffers heavy losses in the early phase of a war, it will be a very long time before the defense industrial base can construct replacements, much less expand the fleet. If an aircraft carrier were lost in battle today, it may not be replaced for decades—or ever.

Compounding this issue is the steady progress that China is making in eroding the United States’ qualitative edge. China’s Type 055 Renhai-class destroyer, for instance, is roughly the equal of current U.S. cruisers and destroyers. In 2020, the Office of Naval Intelligence told Congress that Chinese naval ships are now “in many cases comparable” to their U.S. counterparts and that China was “quickly closing the gap” in design quality. Beijing is building more aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, too, and in about half the time it currently takes U.S. shipyards to build the same types of vessels. China’s vastly superior industrial capability extends to munitions, as well, magnifying U.S. vulnerabilities in a drawn-out war.

Not all wars are long. Many recent war games in the Taiwan Strait imagined short conflicts, with the campaign ending in a few weeks. Some recent wars have indeed been brief: the 1990–91 Gulf War ended in fewer than seven months; the 2008 Russo-Georgian War ended in 16 days; and the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, in 2020, lasted about a month and a half. But there are many counterexamples. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, for instance, few expected Ukraine to be able to defend itself against a materially superior enemy for more than three years. Imperial Japan certainly had not planned on a nearly four-year struggle with the United States after Pearl Harbor. By assuming that future wars will be short, the U.S. Navy is exposing its fleet—and thus U.S. interests—to significant risks.

Perhaps China’s wartime shipbuilding industry would not survive long enough to build a fleet of crushing size. In World War II, Japan’s limited reach meant that shipyards in the continental United States produced ships mostly without enemy interference. Today, shipyards on China’s Pacific coast would be more exposed to U.S. attack. Then again, this would mean penetrating the Chinese mainland’s air defense umbrella with enough ordnance to destroy or decisively degrade an enormous and widespread industry—a massive undertaking for U.S. forces operating thousands of miles from the U.S. mainland. Such an attack could also provoke retaliation, potentially causing China to escalate against the U.S. homeland, perhaps with nuclear weapons.

To solve these problems by attempting to match a Chinese shipbuilding capacity that outpaces that of the United States by 200 times is impractical. But perhaps U.S. allies could take up some of the slack. South Korea and Japan are the second- and third-largest shipbuilders in the world, respectively, and the domestic production capacity of each dwarfs that of the United States. But their exposure to Chinese attack and what are likely to be their complex political stakes in different scenarios of Chinese-U.S. conflict create uncertainties that pose strategic risks for the United States.

Other options could include stockpiling during peacetime critical components needed for shipbuilding, such as propellor shafts or nuclear propulsion components; in the event of war, the U.S. Navy could draw from these supplies to speed construction. The United States could also create industrial capacity greater than what is needed in peacetime to allow expansion during a war. The U.S. Navy may also consider enlarging its shipbuilding portfolio to include new ships—such as a small, missile-armed combatant similar to the many corvettes that the Chinese build—and calling on shipyards that aren’t already building navy or Coast Guard ships to produce them. Buying relatively inexpensive unmanned vessels to use in innovative ways alongside regular navy ships would be another way to source from different shipyards. In addition, the United States could arm more of its ships that don’t currently carry missiles, such as its amphibious or support vessels, or even prepare to convert merchant ships to carry missiles, as a way to rapidly increase the fleet with which the Chinese navy would have to contend.

Debates over the balance of the Chinese and U.S. navies must be broadened to consider the dynamics of competitive production in long wars at sea. Historical analogies can influence sound defense policy decision-making only so much. But they can help identify potential errors—such as being caught in a long naval war against a larger adversary, and without an industrial capacity to truly compete.

 

 

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