Anchors Away: The Perils of Our Shipbuilding Imbalance
Two historical scenarios suggested by two keen observers of global politics highlight the need for the United States to revive its defense industrial base. James Holmes, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College who is fast becoming America’s modern-day Mahan, writes in The National Interest that if war breaks out in the western Pacific Ocean, the United States vis-à-vis China will be in a position similar to Imperial Japan’s in World War II. The U.S. Navy today, like Japan’s Navy was at the beginning of World War II, is “qualitatively peerless but unsupported by a broader defense-industrial base,” while China today, like the United States was in the early stages of World War II, is qualitatively inferior but backed by a stronger industrial base than the United States. In World War II, the navy with the broadest industrial base won the war.
Holmes calls this an “acute case of role reversal.” At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan, Holmes writes, “fielded the best maritime fighting force in the world on a ship-for-ship, plane-for-plane, munition-for-munition basis.” During the first six months of the war, Holmes continues, the Japanese Navy “rampaged across the Indo-Pacific.” But as the chief strategist of the Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, knew, America’s defense industrial base dwarfed Japan’s. Unless Japan knocked the U.S. out of the war early, it was destined for defeat as the industrial might of America produced ships, submarines, and planes whose numbers overwhelmed Japan. “The industrial mismatch,” Holmes notes, “produced catastrophic results for Japan.”
In World War II in the Pacific, numbers were decisive. “The Imperial Japanese Navy,” writes Holmes, “had little capacity to regenerate lost strength, chiefly because of industrial and logistical shortfalls.” America’s navy, on the other hand, even with losses, kept growing and becoming more powerful due to our massive industrial base.
Today, it is the United States that has a qualitatively superior navy but a fragile industrial base, while China boasts a large navy and a shipbuilding capacity more than two hundred times greater than ours.
Today, it is the United States that has a qualitatively superior navy but a fragile industrial base, while China boasts a large navy and a shipbuilding capacity more than two hundred times greater than ours. If current trends continue and numbers play the decisive role in a future Pacific War, the U.S. may find itself on the losing side. (RELATED: Military Incompetence Has a Price Tag)
The second historical scenario is offered by Sir Niall Ferguson, who worries that a Chinese blockade of Taiwan could lead to another Cuban Missile Crisis, but this time the roles would be reversed. China today could quarantine Taiwan the way the U.S. quarantined Cuba in October 1962. To break such a quarantine, the United States today, like the Soviet Union in 1962, would have to risk all-out war with a power that has the advantages of geographical proximity and theater naval superiority backed by a more resilient industrial base. Ferguson says that if China blockades Taiwan, historians will refer to it as the “Taiwan Semiconductor Crisis,” and the stakes and the risks will be even greater than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (RELATED: Xi Jinping: ‘The Reunification of Our Motherland Is Unstoppable’)
The United States was on the winning side of the Second World War and emerged unscathed from the Cuban Missile Crisis because of sheer relative military power, sometimes coupled with skillful diplomacy. Numbers mattered in both historical situations. In World War II, we became the arsenal of Allied victory, not as Franklin Roosevelt said, the “arsenal of democracy.” We provided war material to democracies like Great Britain, to autocracies like Nationalist China, and to the totalitarian dictatorship of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. We were almost too late in forging our unparalleled defense industrial base because for the first seven years of his presidency, FDR neglected our defenses despite prescient warnings from then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Douglas MacArthur and British Member of Parliament Winston Churchill, then in his “wilderness” years. (RELATED: Churchill’s Citadel: His ‘Wilderness Years’ Headquarters)
Several years ago, historian Arthur Herman, in his magnificent book Freedom’s Forge, told the story of what he characterized as the “remarkable mobilization of American industry, technology, and material production” that produced nearly 70 percent of all Allied military equipment used in World War II. The numbers Herman cites are astounding: 86,000 tanks, 8,800 navy ships, 286,000 warplanes, 5,600 merchant ships, more than 430 million tons of steel, more than 40 billion rounds of ammunition. Numbers produced by industrial might mattered.
Numbers also mattered during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The U.S. Navy had 900 warships in October 1962, while the Soviet fleet had far fewer, which were engaged mostly in coastal defense. The U.S. also had a significant superiority in nuclear weapons and delivery systems, on the order of a 17 to 1 ratio in 1962. In 1962, our defense industrial base was still strong and resilient.
James Holmes believes we still have time to rectify the growing shipbuilding imbalance between China and the United States. The Trump administration and members of both political parties in Congress, he writes, understand that “American sea power has a problem.” President Trump’s National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy call for a revival of our domestic industrial base. Both strategy documents make clear that this effort “will require nothing short of a national mobilization — a call to industrial arms on par with similar revivals of the last century that ultimately powered our nation to victory in the world wars and the Cold War that followed.”
But we must not delay. We need to remember the immortal words of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who once noted: “The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words: Too Late. Too late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy; too late in realizing the mortal danger; too late in preparedness; too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance; too late in standing with one’s friends.”
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