WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. is seriously lagging behind China in shipbuilding capacity, lawmakers and experts have warned, as the Biden administration seeks to build up the country's ability to develop and produce weapons and other defense supplies to avert war to keep out.
During a congressional hearing, Rep. John Moolenaar, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said the country is unable to “deter and win a fight with China” and called for action.
“Bold policy changes and significant resources are now needed to restore deterrence and avoid a showdown with China,” Moolenaar said.
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China's navy is already the largest in the world, and its shipbuilding capacity, estimated to be 230 times greater, dwarfs that of the US.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the committee's top Democratic member, told Fox News last week that “for every ocean-going vessel we can produce, China can produce 359 in one year.”
The US government has come to view China as its “pace challenge,” and officials have warned that Beijing is pursuing the largest peacetime military buildup in history, raising concerns about how the US would respond and ensure victory in case of conflict in the Indian Ocean. -Pacific, where tensions are high in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.
Krishnamoorthi warned on Thursday that a weak military industrial base could provoke aggression and argued that strengthening it is necessary to avoid war with China.
“History tells us that we now need a healthy defense industrial base to deter aggression and make the world's dictators think again before dragging the US and the world into yet another disastrous conflict,” Krishnamoorthi said.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called it a “generational project” to solve the problem after the U.S. shipbuilding industry “hit rock bottom” in the early 1980s.
“Part of it is that we don't have the backbone of a healthy commercial shipbuilding base on which our naval shipbuilding can rest,” Sullivan said Wednesday at the Aspen Security Forum in Washington. “And that's part of the fragility of what we're dealing with and why this is going to be such a generational project to solve.”
The challenge in shipbuilding has been “especially immense,” due to the erosion of the U.S. manufacturing base, where the workforce shrank and suppliers left, Sullivan said.
And it's part of the broader problem of a weakened U.S. military industrial base, as manifested in the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, Sullivan said, when Kiev in eight weeks “burned through a year's worth of U.S. 155-millimeter artillery production .”
“Decades of underinvestment and consolidation had severely eroded our defense industrial base, and there was no way around it,” Sullivan said.
The head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Paparo, warned last month that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are eating away at critical U.S. weapons supplies and could hamper the military's ability to respond to China if a conflict were to occur. to arise.
He said supplying or selling billions of dollars worth of air defenses to both Ukraine and Israel is hampering the US' ability to respond to threats in the Indo-Pacific.
“It's hurting stocks now, and to say otherwise would be unfair,” he told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington on Nov. 11. 19.
Several researchers at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said China's rapid military buildup could allow it to gain the upper hand over the US, especially in the event of a protracted conflict.
“China's vast shipbuilding industry would provide a strategic advantage in a war that lasts longer than a few weeks, allowing the country to repair damaged ships or build replacements much faster than the United States,” the researchers wrote in June.
On Thursday, the congressional panel heard suggestions from experts who said it would take time to rebuild the defense industrial base, but for faster solutions the US could innovate to create cheap and autonomous systems and tap the resources of its allies.
“We need to look at co-production, whether it's munitions in Australia or shipbuilding in Korea,” said William Greenwalt, a nonresident senior fellow at the Washington-based think tank American Enterprise Institute.
“We need to get numbers as soon as possible,” he said.
