USN Shipbuilding

We are rapidly running out of runway to maintain our maritime supremacy against China.

I originally wanted to do this as a cross-post but ran out of characters, so will have to just turn it into a post.

This piece on USN force structure and shipbuilding by Bryan McGrath is excellent. We are rapidly losing whatever window we might have to meaningfully be prepared to compete with China in Asia in the late 2020s/early 2030s due to a combination of lack of funding and institutional fecklessness. Congress should take a long hard look at our trajectory and take fairly significant steps to address this.

Some of these steps are underway, such as the PPBE commission and the Commission on the Future of the Navy, but more needs to be done. At a minimum, it would be good to establish a dedicated funding mechanism for ensuring the necessary money is available for shipbuilding. I'm somewhat solution agnostic here (maybe a toll on any imports brought in on Chinese-built ships), but the main thing is to give industry certainty around funding levels to help bring in investment. Note that this doesn’t have to be a commitment to multiyear buys or extended outlays - those can continue to be negotiated - but it would be a guarantee that no matter the budget shenanigans going on that the SCN budget would be protected and grow appropriately to meet China’s challenge.

There’s so much more that needs to be done to address this, but right now the main thing is to get there to be adequate urgency around that amongst Congress, OSD, and the White House. Just as it took until the Russian invasion of Ukraine to awaken policy makers to the issues in our munitions industrial base, I am deeply concerned that we’ll only realize we’ve lost control of the seas when our navy gets overwhelmed somewhere in the South China Seas, at which point it will be too late. Given the long lag of shipbuilding, we need to be addressing this now.