WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. severely lags behind China in shipbuilding capacity, lawmakers and experts have warned, as the Biden administration tries to build up the country’s ability to develop and produce weapons and other defense supplies to fend off war.
Speaking at a congressional hearing Thursday, Rep. John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said the country lacks the capacity 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 prevent a fight” with China, Moolenaar said.
China’s navy is already the world’s largest, and its shipbuilding capacity, estimated to be 230 times larger, dwarfs that of the U.S.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking Democratic member of the committee, told Fox News last week that “for every one oceangoing vessel that we can produce, China can produce 359 in one single year.”
The U.S. government has come to see China as its “pacing challenge,” and officials have warned that Beijing is pursuing the largest peacetime military buildup in history, raising concerns about how the U.S. would respond and ensure victory in case of a conflict in the Indo-Pacific, where tensions are high in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.
Krishnamoorthi on Thursday warned that a weak military industrial base could invite aggression and argued that strengthening it is necessary to avoid war with China.
“History tells us we need a healthy defense industrial base now to deter aggression and make sure the world’s dictators think again before dragging the U.S. and the world into yet another disastrous conflict,” Krishnamoorthi said.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan called it a “generational project” to fix the problem after the American shipbuilding industry had its “bottom fell out” in the early 1980s.
“Part of it is we don’t have the backbone of a healthy commercial shipbuilding base to rest our naval shipbuilding on top of,” Sullivan said Wednesday at the Aspen Security Forum in Washington. “And that’s part of the fragility of what we’re contending with and why this is going to be such a generational project to fix.”
The challenge in shipbuilding has been “especially immense,” stemming from the hollowing-out of the U.S. manufacturing base where its workforce shrank and suppliers left, Sullivan said.
And it is 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 Kyiv in eight weeks “burned through a year’s worth of U.S. 155-millimeter artillery production.”