China’s maritime power cause for action and alarm

By Jerry Hendrix

The People’s Liberation Army Navy is now, and has been for several years, larger than the US Navy with over 370 ships currently in commission. What’s more, in a few years, if it continues its current building rate, it will reach around 450 ships, making it larger than the US Navy and the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force combined.

However, Western commentators, especially those who don’t want to support larger defense and shipbuilding budgets, consistently argue that the navies of the United States and Japan are more technologically advanced and hence more lethal.

This argument, while true, actively ignores the fact that when Chinese maritime and naval sea power is considered in the aggregate, the technical superiority of the navies that would be expected to resist Chinese aggression is likely to be overwhelmed very quickly in any potential conflict.

In October 2023, I published a study that raised alarming questions about the declining conventional deterrent power of America’s naval presence.

The study, which sought to create a measurable model of naval presence, found that even when American ships were assigned a higher platform score than their direct Chinese counterparts, for instance a score of 1.0 for an American Burke-class destroyer versus a score of .75 for a PLAN Luyang III warship, the Chinese still came out ahead due to the larger size of their navy, the capacity of their industrial base and their proximity to the battlespace.

Follow my math here.

The US Navy presently has 73 Burke-class destroyers with about two-thirds of them assigned to the Pacific fleet, and is building two new ships a year, thus creating an aggregate score of 50. China currently has approximately 50 guided missile destroyers but is laying down six new keels per year at their Jiangnan and Dalian shipyards. At China’s current pace, it will have created a force of 80 modern destroyers within the next five years which will combine to create an aggregate score of 60, surpassing the United States.

Additionally, the Chinese shipbuilding base gives it a tremendous industrial advantage and amplifies its score. It can both build and repair ships faster than the United States. If a US ship is damaged in battle, there is not a robust ship repair capacity that could return that ship to the fight and the shipbuilding industrial base cannot rapidly scale to increase new ship construction. A ship damaged in battle will not return to the theater of war in a timely manner.

Finally, China would have another mathematical advantage in that it is fighting in its own backyard. Currently, the areas of competition where China is asserting illegal territorial claims that are at odds with America’s friends and allies are within the first island chain, especially around the island nations of the Philippines and Japan, with whom the United States has mutual defense treaties, and Taiwan, with which the United States has a long-standing security relationship.

If a ship is damaged in battle in these waters, it would need to transit to American bases in Guam, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, or the American west coast. Damaged Chinese naval vessels would need to simply pull into a nearby port or one of China’s 19 major shipyards.

Some recent voices have argued that the United States should plan to make better use of shipbuilding and ship repair capacity that exists within key American allies such as South Korea and Japan in Asia or even key shipyards in Europe for our ships based there.

This would make economic sense and certainly no one could question the loyalty of key allies who have consistently fought alongside US forces over the past seventy years, but there should be some acknowledgment that most of this industrial capacity lies under the missile threat rings of many Chinese missiles and aircraft.

Perhaps the US should more heavily leverage its recent AUKUS agreement with Australia to expand the repair capacity in that island-continent nation, which is well-placed geographically.

The United States should also seek to pursue repair capacity in the group of Freely Associated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau, with which it just recently signed a new Compact of Free Association. These islands, some of which lie just outside of the Chinese threat perimeter, possess some superb harbors and airfields but require investment to modernize their repair capacity.

In short, the US currently finds itself at a disadvantage vis-a-vis China in terms of industrial capacity. China already leads the world in sea power in the aggregate. But there are paths both through additional industrial investment at home and amongst its allies that could enable it to reestablish local naval dominance in the western Pacific.

The United States Congress should rapidly and enthusiastically pursue a “Ships Act” on par with the 2022 “Chips Act” that should have as its ends the modernization and expansion of the nation’s ship-building and repair capacity.

As part of this effort, the nation should be open to outside investment from foreign shipbuilding leaders in American shipyards. It should also seek to better leverage the repair capacity of foreign yards, perhaps by providing advanced surface-to-air defensive missile systems to protect those sites.

The threat is proximate and real, and time is late. Industrial investments in shipyards must be the national priority.

Dr Jerry Hendrix (PhD) is a senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute and a retired US Navy captain.