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China and Russia have dramatically accelerated their naval shipbuilding and modernization programs in recent years, while the U.S. has struggled to improve its own capacity for warfighting missions and been tagged with a poor readiness rating from national security analysts.
The Chinese have made particularly notable strides, engaging in a maritime buildup that made global headlines a year ago when Pentagon officials sounded the alarm that Beijing’s total fleet roughly 350 warships had surpassed the roughly 300 maintained by Washington.
The U.S. force still vastly outstrips China‘s in terms of real power projection. America, for instance, has 11 active aircraft carriers compared with just two that Beijing has brought online since 2012.
However, the Chinese Communist Party makes no secret of its goal to build a “world-class” military by 2050, and U.S. analysts are increasingly wary that Washington may struggle to keep pace with China‘s rapidly expanding shipbuilding operations.
“They’ve got a lot of shipyards and a lot of capacity,” says Brent Sadler, a retired U.S. naval officer and analyst with the Heritage Foundation. “They’re building lots of ships.”
Sadler authored the U.S. Navy section of the Heritage Foundation‘s 2022 Index of U.S. Military Strength — an analysis that gets updated annually by the conservative Washington-based think tank.
For the second year in a row, the index gave America’s sea service overall scores of “marginal” and “trending toward weak,” with a specific naval capacity score of “weak” for 2022.
“A battle force consisting of 400 manned ships is required for the U.S. Navy to do what is expected of it today,” the index concluded. “The Navy’s current battle force fleet of 297 ships and intensified operational tempo combine to reveal a Navy that is much too small relative to its tasks.”
With regard to capability, the index asserted that the Navy’s “technological edge” is “narrow[ing] against peer competitors China and Russia.”
“The combination of a fleet that is aging faster than old ships are being replaced and the rapid growth of competitor navies with modern technologies does not bode well for U.S. naval power,” it warned.
Sadler told The Washington Times in an interview that a lack of ships is the most obvious reason for the poor rating. He suggested downward trends in U.S. capacity and capability can be reversed, but not without costs.
The 2022 Index of U.S. Military Strength put it even more bluntly. “Depending on the Navy’s ability to fund more aggressive growth options and service life extensions, its capacity score could be lower in the next edition,” Sadler wrote in the index.
A Navy spokesman declined to comment on the specifics of The Heritage Foundation analysis, although Pentagon officials have previously acknowledged that funding availability is the elephant in the room.
During an Oct. 27 online briefing sponsored by the Navy League, Rear Adm. John Gumbleton, deputy assistant Navy secretary for budget, said officials are juggling a number of balls on both the budget and modernization fronts.
He pointed to research dollars being soaked up by development of Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. At the same time, officials are trying to prioritize investments in the development of a next generation, large surface combatant ship, all while recapitalizing century-old dry dock facilities.
“All these are Navy challenges and our cross to bear, so to speak,” Adm. Gumbleton said. “But in a capital-intensive service where you’re trying to keep production of destroyers, frigates and aircraft carriers, it just speaks to the enormous challenge of trying to do this in a smart fashion.”
Republicans have complained that the $753 billion requested by the Biden administration for the total 2022 Pentagon budget was
inadequate in the face of growing threats from China and Russia. While the figure represented an increase from the Trump administration’s last defense budget of $740 billion, GOP lawmakers said it amounted to a cut when accounting for inflation.
Concern over the Navy budget, specifically, has been bipartisan in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. In September, the House Armed Services Committee secured a $24 billion increase to the $163 billion Navy budget.
“The President’s defense budget fails to adequately address the rising threats of China, Iran and Russia and I will not hesitate to break with my party if it’s in the best interest of our national security,” Rep. Elaine Luria, Democrat from Virginia and a retired naval officer, said after the extra funds were approved.
The Heritage Foundation index, meanwhile, outlined how challenges facing the Navy are not merely tied to matching potential adversaries ship for ship.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, the Navy had nearly 600 ships in the fleet and kept about 100 deployed at any one time. By July 2021, the fleet had dwindled to 297 warships, of which 83 were at sea or otherwise deployed, according to the index.
“The commanding officer’s discretionary time for training and crew familiarization is a precious commodity that is made ever scarcer by the increasing operational demands on fewer ships,” the index said.
Sadler said it’s a reality that adds strain to the service as a whole and increases the risk of mishaps.
In 2017, the USS John S. McCain and the USS Fitzgerald were both involved in collisions that resulted in the loss of 17 sailors. Investigators later noted that a lack of adequate seamanship and navigation skills played critical roles in both incidents.
The Heritage Foundation index said the incidents highlighted the importance of unit readiness and what can happen when that readiness takes a back seat to more immediate demands facing combatant commanders.
“If you don’t have enough ships and you don’t give the commanding officer enough [time] to get the crews proficient on fighting the ship, you have problems like the Fitzgerald and the McCain,” Sadler told The Times. “You need more numbers — not just to meet some potential war with the Chinese and the Russians — but also [to] provide commanders with enough discretionary time so they can go out, qualify their sailors and officers, and practice together.”
