The PLA(N) surpassed the US Navy in one important metric – the number of ships – back in 2021. The problem for America, Taiwan and the whole free world is that those five years could prove critical. But if lawmakers don’t intervene to alter the USN’s latest long-term shipbuilding plan, which service leaders released on Tuesday, the fleet will shed another eight of its 293 front-line warships before it finally starts growing again – slowly – around 2028. The fleet’s disastrous shrinkage isn’t inevitable. “The Navy’s shipbuilding plan is a blueprint to end America’s command of the sea,” Roger Wicker, a Republican senator from Mississippi, said then. That’s too few to keep pace with the decommissioning of old ships, and lawmakers know it. The Navy in March asked Congress for $29 billion for nine new ships. We know this because lawmakers from both major political parties routinely intervene in the US Navy’s annual shipbuilding plans and add back ships the Navy wanted to cut. It predates, by decades, the politicians and military officials who are now presiding over it.īut today’s leaders – President Joe Biden, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday – could, if they had the gumption, slow or even reverse the maritime decline. ![]() Its biggest rival, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (Navy), PLA(N), is growing bigger and more powerful by the day – a naval expansion that has profound implications for the freedom of Taiwan, the security of the wider Asia-Pacific region and the whole global economy.Īmerica’s naval crisis has deep roots – a tangle of misplaced strategic priorities, botched privatisation efforts and bad ship designs reaching back to the 1990s or even earlier. The US Navy is shrinking at precisely the wrong time.
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