The seeds of World War III — which ended with America’s humiliating retreat from everything west of Hawaii in the Pacific and recognition of Communist Chinese hegemony over the region — were planted in the 1990s.
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That’s when this country stopped being a serious nation.
The details hardly matter, but the short version is that the U.S. Navy was outfought and outthought by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), which used sheer numbers and daring initiative to dictate the timing and outcome of the war. Only the not-so-veiled threat of a nuclear exchange stopped PLAN before their landing ships reached Joint Base Pearl-Hickam on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.
That’s all fiction, of course, but the part where we stopped being serious 30 years ago is established fact.
Just one shipyard in Shanghai is building 13 large surface warships simultaneously. As China carries out one of the largest military build-ups in history, the U.S. is not keeping pace. Countries do not build huge militaries quickly for no reason. pic.twitter.com/sgsdZERk4s
— Mike (@Doranimated) June 16, 2024
While Congress dithers over maybe ordering an extra guided missile destroyer (called a “DDG” and our primary surface warship) or another nuclear-powered attack sub (SSN) to its existing order of a measly six (!!!) ships and subs for 2025, Communist China is building 13 surface combatants at just one shipyard.
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“The US Navy’s latest budget request marks a new low in terms of ship buys for the service,” Naval News warned last March.
PLAN already outnumbers the U.S. Navy but its ships tend to be smaller and less capable. That is changing in a hurry. Soon, PLAN will “outweigh” our navy as it continues building DDGs, aircraft carriers, and other warships at a pace we’ve forgotten how to maintain.
None of this is a shock, either. Beijing has been indulging in an unprecedented “peacetime” naval buildup for 20 years, right out in the open. In his latest substack, milblogger CDR Salamander detailed the massive investments China has made since 2005 in its warship-building capacity. Sal did it using open-source satellite photos, so, as I said, none of this comes as any surprise to Washington.
Thanks to base closures and an almost criminal neglect by Congress of our naval infrastructure, we lack the ability to expand our shipbuilding and maintenance to match pace with China. We can’t even properly repair and refit the ships and subs we do have — and what we have are too few.
This country’s wealth has been built on overseas trade since before we were the United States. We were lucky in that, once passions had cooled and we’d patched things up with our British cousins, the Royal Navy helped protect our trade as well as Britain’s own. That lovely arrangement lasted for about a century.
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World War II made us the world’s preeminent naval power, and all we had to do — to maintain our trade and, just as importantly, to keep the peace — was not piss it away.
We’re pissing it away as I write these words.
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