Discovered by China in shipbuilding, the US is looking to build up its defense base to avoid war

WASHINGTON (AP) – The United States is lagging far behind China in shipbuilding, lawmakers and experts have warned, as the Biden administration tries to build the country's ability to develop and produce weapons and other war-fighting equipment.

Speaking at a meeting of Congress on Thursday, Rep. John Moolenaar, the Republican chairman of the Chinese Communist Party's House Select Committee, said the country did not have the power to “prevent and win a war” with China and called for action.

“Bold policy changes and significant resources are now needed to restore deterrence and prevent confrontation” with China, Moolenaar said.

China's navy is now the largest in the world, and its shipbuilding capacity, estimated to be 230 times larger, than that of the US.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking Democrat on the committee, told Fox News last week that “for every submarine we can produce, China can produce 359 in one year.”

The US government has come to see China as its “challenge”, and officials have warned that Beijing is pursuing a military build-up at a time of historic peace, raising concerns about how the US will respond and ensure victory in the event of a conflict in Indo. -Pacific, where tensions are high in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.

Krishnamoorthi on Thursday warned that a weak industrial base could lead to violence and said strengthening is needed to avoid a war with China.

“History tells us that we need a healthy defense industrial base now to deter violence and ensure that the world's dictators think again before dragging the US and the world into yet another catastrophic war,” Krishnamoorthi said.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan called it a “routine project” to fix the problem after America's shipbuilding industry “collapsed” in the early 1980s.

“The other thing is that we don't have the backbone of a healthy naval base to put our shipbuilding up,” Sullivan said Wednesday at the Aspen Security Forum in Washington. “And that's part of the weakness of what we're competing against and why this is going to be a production project that needs to be addressed.”

The challenge to shipbuilding has been “enormous,” stemming from the collapse of the US manufacturing sector, which saw workers cut and suppliers leave, Sullivan said.

And it's part of a broader problem of a fragile US military industrial base, as demonstrated in the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, Sullivan said, when Kyiv in eight weeks “burned a year's worth of US 155-millimeter weapons production.”

“Decades of underinvestment and consolidation had severely eroded our defense industrial base, and there was no way around it,” Sullivan said.

The head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Samuel Paparo, warned last month that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are consuming a large number of US weapons and could hamper the ability of the military to respond to China in the event of a conflict.

He said that providing or selling air defenses worth billions of dollars to both Ukraine and Israel hinders the US's ability to respond to threats in the Indo-Pacific.

“Now it's eating into the stock, and to say otherwise would be dishonest,” he told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington on Nov. 19.

Several researchers at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies say that China's military buildup could soon allow the country to defeat the US, especially in the event of a long-term conflict.

“China's massive shipbuilding industry would provide a huge advantage in a war lasting a few weeks, allowing it to repair damaged ships or build new ones faster than the United States,” researchers wrote in June.

On Thursday, the panel of the conference heard proposals from experts who say that it will take time to rebuild the base of the defense industry, but in order to fix it quickly, the US can create new things to make low-cost and independent programs and affect the resources of its partners.

“We need to look at co-production whether it's Australian weapons or Korean shipyards,” said William Greenwalt, a non-resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

“We need to get the numbers as soon as possible,” he said.