Since the end of World War II, the United States has used its massive seapower to dominate the world’s oceans, projecting its power and ensuring the freedom of the seas from other countries that oppose the idea of mare liberum first proposed by Hugo Grotius. Lincoln P. Paine perhaps summarized this preponderance of U.S. naval power the best:
“As was true of Portugal in the sixteenth century, the U.S. fleet exists to project power and safeguard trade, not to fight fleets of comparable capabilities because there are none.”
U.S. dominance on the high seas allowed the emergence of a new liberal world order based on international trade, which resulted in massive growth in the world’s economy never before seen in human history.
And yet, nearly 80 years later, the U.S. Navy is just a shell of its former self. Decades of continuous sea blindness, increasingly isolationist tendencies, and post-Cold War budget cuts have left the Navy continuously shrinking year by year. The U.S. Navy went from a massive fleet of 1,248 ships in 1946 down to just 275 ships in 2016.
Even though the number of ships in the fleet has increased a little bit since then to 297 ships, and although this smaller fleet has much greater firepower at its disposal compared to the 1946 fleet, this massive downsizing of the U.S. Navy has meant that it no longer has enough ships to deploy and respond to crises all around the world, let alone to be engaged in combat in multiple theaters all around the world’s oceans.
These inadequacies in fleet numbers were very obvious when the ongoing conflict in Gaza forced the United States to deploy two Carrier Strike Groups (CSGs) to the 5th Fleet area of operation, resulting in the absence of any aircraft carrier in the Indo-Pacific region as the other carriers are either in maintenance, just returned from a deployment, or in workup exercises. The lack of U.S. aircraft carriers – a powerful symbol of power projection – deployed in the Indo-Pacific region comes just as China once again ratchets up pressure on U.S. allies in the region, such as the Philippines.
For U.S. allies, the dwindling U.S. presence in the region, symbolized by the lack of U.S. carrier groups present in the Indo-Pacific in the face of China’s aggressive actions, could signal a declining U.S. resolve and capability in guaranteeing its allies’ safety, which could force them to be more accommodating toward Beijing’s demands. In the opposite direction, the same lack of confidence in U.S. commitment to its allies and its extended deterrence could also force U.S. allies in the region to develop their own nuclear weapons program to reduce their dependence on the seemingly unreliable U.S. alliance commitment. Meanwhile, the United States’ inability to show its power in the region while China is pushing its neighbors around could also encourage Beijing to act aggressively against U.S. allies, further destabilizing the Indo-Pacific region.
The problem is that rectifying this ship shortage issue is not as simple as ordering more ships from the shipyards, mainly because there is not enough shipbuilding capacity left in the United States to begin with. The liberalization of the economy under the Reagan administration has shattered civilian shipbuilding capacity in the country, as U.S. civilian shipyards simply lost out to foreign competitors that still received subsidies from their governments to price U.S. shipyards out of the market.
Just 10 years later, it was the turn of the naval shipyards to suffer. Along with the euphoria emanating from the collapse of the Soviet Union came massive budget cuts in defense spending and the cancellation of many defense projects, forcing the various defense companies to merge and consolidate. While the resulting mergers helped save the U.S. defense industry from total collapse, they also resulted in a massive loss of industrial capacity.
In recent years, the shipbuilding industry has also suffered from losing many skilled workers to other industries that offer better pay. This situation further reduces shipbuilding capacity and prolongs the maintenance period of existing warships, since there are just not enough workers to work on them. This issue then cascaded as ships in maintenance occupied the docks that could be used to build new warships to complement or replace older ships whose maintenance demand can only go upwards as time goes on. As a result, fewer than 40 percent of U.S. Navy ships completed availability repairs on schedule, and almost all new shipbuilding programs faced one to three years of delays.
While currently, the Pentagon has put into place some programs to help attract talent into the shipbuilding industry and laid the foundation for the revival of U.S. shipbuilding, the effects of these efforts will only be felt in the long term. After all, it takes time to build a new dry dock and recruit and train new workers to replace aging workers and grow the industrial base. At the same time, the urgency of replacing older warships and maintaining the existing fleet still exists. To fulfill these requirements, the U.S. Navy must look at options other than the already stretched-out domestic shipbuilding industries.
The United States could look to its allies in the Western Pacific for answers. Both South Korea and Japan have immense shipbuilding capacity and are somewhat desperate for new customers as Chinese shipbuilders are beginning to eat up their market share in recent years. The United States could contract these shipbuilders to help maintain U.S. Navy ships to ease pressure on domestic shipyards and increase force readiness. After all, it is very illogical for ships from the U.S. 7th Fleet that are already based in Japan to go all the way across the Pacific to conduct some maintenance while Japan and nearby South Korea have the shipyard capacity and capability to perform such maintenance.
The U.S. Navy could even go one step further and order new warships from South Korean and Japanese shipyards, especially as the shipyards in both countries have already proven that they have the capability and experience needed to build new Aegis destroyers or frigates for the U.S. Navy based on their previous experience building Aegis destroyers for their respective navies. The Sejong the Great class for the Republic of Korea Navy and the Kongo, Atago, and Maya classes for the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Forces are based on the design of the Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyers, which currently form the backbone of the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet.
While certainly there will be some political considerations that need to be addressed if the U.S. Navy really were to order a new warship from South Korean or Japanese shipyards, Washington must realize that without any drastic action taken, the U.S. Navy will only grow ever smaller as older ships need to be decommissioned and new ships cannot be produced at a rate fast enough to replace them, let alone to expand the Navy’s fleet to fulfill the tasks assigned to them.