WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is seriously lagging behind China in shipbuilding capacity, lawmakers and experts have warned, as the Biden administration tries to boost the country’s ability to develop and produce weapons and other defense equipment to repel war.
Speaking at a congressional hearing Thursday, Rep. John Moolenaar, Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said the country does not have the ability 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.
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China’s navy is already the largest in the world and its shipbuilding capacity, estimated at 230 times, dwarfs that of the United States.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking Democratic member of the committee, told Fox News last week that “for every ocean-going ship we can produce, China can produce 359 in a single year.”
The U.S. government has come to view China as its “stimulus challenge,” and officials have warned that Beijing is pursuing the largest peacetime military buildup in history, raising concerns about how states -United would react and ensure victory in the event of conflict in India. -Pacific, where tensions are high in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.
Krishnamoorthi warned Thursday that a weak military-industrial base could incite aggression and argued that strengthening it was necessary to avoid war with China.
“History tells us that we need a healthy defense industrial base now to deter aggression and ensure that the world’s dictators think again before dragging the United States and the world into another disastrous conflict said Krishnamoorthi.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan called it a “generational project” aimed at solving the problem after the U.S. naval industry “hit rock bottom” in the early 1980s.
“Part of the reason for this is that we don’t have the backbone of a healthy commercial shipbuilding base on which to base our shipbuilding,” Sullivan said Wednesday at the Aspen Security Forum in Washington. “And that’s part of the fragility of what we’re facing and why this will be such a generational project to solve.”
The challenge in shipbuilding has been “particularly immense,” due to the weakening U.S. manufacturing base where the workforce has shrunk and suppliers have left, Sullivan said.
And it’s part of the broader problem of America’s weakening military industrial base, as manifested in the weeks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Sullivan said, when kyiv, in eight weeks, “burned the equivalent of a year’s production of American 155-millimeter artillery.”
“Decades of underinvestment and consolidation have seriously eroded our defense industrial base, and there was no way around it,” Sullivan said.
The head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Samuel Paparo, warned last month that wars in Ukraine and the Middle East were eating into critical U.S. weapons stockpiles and could hamper the ability to the army to respond to China in the event of conflict.
He said the supply or sale of billions of dollars in air defenses to Ukraine and Israel was hampering the United States’ ability to respond to threats in the Indo-Pacific.
“It’s eating away at stocks now, and to say otherwise would be dishonest,” he told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington in November. 19.
Several researchers at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said China’s rapid military buildup could allow the country to prevail over the United States, particularly in the event of a protracted conflict.
“China’s enormous shipbuilding industry would provide a strategic advantage in a war lasting a few weeks, allowing it to repair damaged ships or build replacements much more quickly than the United States,” they write. researchers in June.
The congressional panel on Thursday heard suggestions from experts that it would take time to rebuild the defense industrial base, but that for faster solutions, the United States could innovate to make low-cost, autonomous systems and exploit the resources of their 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 quickly as possible,” he said.
