In A War With China, Shipyards Are America’s Achilles’ Heel

If ships were smaller and easier to construct—if they were more like aircraft—then manufacturing a ship would come to resemble manufacturing an airplane. Fast design improvements would become thinkable even as mass production replenished numbers of hulls. Let’s revivify the marine industrial base—and put it

to work laying the keels for an anti-fragile fleet.

The United States could lose a Western Pacific naval war because Communist China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) can regenerate combat power more readily than the U.S. sea services can. Or, more precisely, China’s sprawling industrial base could replace hardware lost in action faster than could U.S. industry. That’s a message General David Berger, the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, will reportedly broadcast in a forthcoming directive entitled Naval Campaigning: The 2020 Marine Corps Capstone Operating Concept. Breaking Defense reported on an advance copy of Naval Campaigning last week.

Among the document’s money quotes: “Replacing ships lost in combat will be problematic, inasmuch as our industrial base has shrunk, while peer adversaries have expanded their shipbuilding capacity. In an extended conflict, the United States will be on the losing end of a production race—reversing the advantage we had in World War II when we last fought a peer competitor.” This is incontestable. In the Pacific, for instance, the U.S. economy was nine or ten times the size of Japan’s. Industry was already roaring by the time the United States entered the war. After all, the nation had commenced riveting together what amounted to a second complete U.S. Navy under the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940. That isn’t the case today.

General Berger may sound like a Cassandra spinning lurid prophesies. But remember, the Greek god Apollo blessed Cassandra with the gift of foresight. Her prophesies were accurate. Her curse—also courtesy of Apollo, whose amorous overtures she had rebuffed—was that no one ever believed her words, no matter how prescient they were.

One hopes Commandant Berger finds a more receptive audience. His chances are better than Cassandra’s. Like the mythical soothsayer, he is no stranger to stark forecasts. Unlike her, he wields substantial authority. He can impose his views on the Marine Corps for the most part. He enjoys a bully pulpit vis-à-vis the Pentagon and Congress, and he uses it to hold forth. Almost immediately after assuming his post last summer, Berger released Commandant’s Planning Guidance that scrapped cherished shibboleths. For instance, dogma long held that the U.S. Navy must operate thirty-eight lumbering amphibious transports to ferry sea soldiers to the shores of Tripoli or other distant battlegrounds in numbers large enough to accomplish their goals. Yet large surface vessels are increasingly vulnerable to shore missile batteries, missile-armed aircraft flying from airfields on land, and submarines and surface craft sporting anti-ship missiles of their own.

Traditional ways of amphibious warfare are less and less tenable.

Rather than cling to the past, says Berger, the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy should put their trust in swarms of lighter, fleet-of-foot yet heavy-hitting craft suitable for “standing in” within the PLA’s Western Pacific weapons engagement zone. Losing a big ship constitutes a major setback for a fleet made up of a few big ships. It subtracts a major percentage from the force’s aggregate fighting power. A fleet abounding in winsome ships, by contrast, can lose one or a few in action yet fight on. Each vessel embodies only a small fraction of the fleet’s fighting strength. It is expendable.

Marine “littoral regiments” embarked in stand-in vessels will flit from island to island, lofting anti-ship and anti-air missiles the PLA’s way in a fight. If successful the joint force will seal the first island chain to Chinese maritime movement—cramping China’s export-driven economy along with the PLA’s capacity to project military power outward. They will bring some pain. Robust capability backed by obvious willpower to use it may deter Beijing. Or, should deterrence crumple, resilient capability will bolster the sea services’ prospects of prevailing in action.

Two thoughts from masters of politics and strategy, old and new. First an old commentator. Berger is making a point about U.S. grand strategy with which maritime sage Alfred Thayer Mahan would wholeheartedly agree. In the nautical realm, peacetime grand strategy means marshaling national resources to fit out ships and other implements of maritime might. Mahan catalogs the “number of population” and “character and policy of government” among six determinants of a society’s fitness for sea power. America is standing into danger if it no longer meets these Mahanian standards.

By the number of population Mahan means more than raw numbers of people. He means a society needs the right demographic mix, including a critical mass of specialists in industries relating to the sea. And so it does. Great Britain commonly outfaced France at sea during the age of sail, even though the British Isles were home to fewer citizens. Yet Britons were more plentiful in trades necessary to field merchant and naval fleets. France had to worry about land defense and, oftentimes, was ruled by kings with a penchant for offensive land warfare. Royal preferences multiplied the demands on tradesmen while distracting the kingdom from seaward ventures. As an island state with its own moat, Britain had the luxury of concentrating on marine pursuits.

Source: nationalinterest.org

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