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elected president donald trump, fed up with America’s lagging shipbuilding capabilities, he offered an out-of-character solution to the problem: outsourcing production if the US can’t keep up.
“We’re going to do something with the ships. We need ships. And we might have to go a different route than you normally would,” the incoming president suggested to radio host Hugh Hewitt.
“We don’t build ships anymore. We used to build one ship a day. We don’t build ships anymore. We want to start that. And maybe we’ll use allies, too, in terms of building ships. I might have to.”
He pointed out The great overcoming of China of US shipbuilding capabilities.
“The China building, from what I’m hearing, every four days, they’re knocking out a ship. We’re sitting and watching, and we’ve suffered a lot.”
Trump threatens to build US ships overseas. (Reuters)
Trump’s stance is sure to put the shipbuilding industry and domestic labor groups on alert. But it comes as China’s shipbuilding capacity is more than 232 times that of the US, and the Navy has struggled for decades to build ships on time.
And it’s a departure from his campaign promise to bring manufacturing back to the US and unleash a general tariff on world imports in the US, along with a 60% tariff on all goods imported from China.
The Chinese navy is the largest in the world, with more than 370 ships and submarines. The US battle force includes 295 ships, including 11 active aircraft carriers. In 2017, Congress passed a law requiring the Navy to maintain and maintain 355 ships.
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Without revealing details, Trump hinted at a plan to grow the Navy’s fleet of ships.
“We’re going to announce some things that are going to be really good to do with the Navy. We need ships. We need to get ships. And you know, everybody said, ‘Oh, we’re going to build them.’ ‘ We might have to go to the others, make them an offer, and it’s fine to do that until we get ready,” he said.
The USS Ronald Reagan is shown above.
The US is also lagging behind in nuclear submarines, according to military experts. U.S. nuclear submarines peaked at 140 during the Cold War, according to retired Navy Capt. Jerry Hendrix. and senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute, in an op-ed for American Affairs.
“The bottom line is that the U.S. submarine force, the ‘tip of the spear’ of American power on which so many military plans depend, is unprepared to deal with today’s threat environment and there is no has taken decades — and a sequence of bad decisions — to fall into the current state of unpreparedness,” he wrote.
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The most recent figures show US submarine flight at 68, only 50 of which are classified in the “fast attack” category of hunter-killers.
China currently controls 46.59% of the global shipbuilding market. South Korea ranks second with 29.24% and Japan third with 17.25%. The US has a relatively insignificant control of the market at 0.13%. And it costs about twice as much to build a ship in the US as anywhere else in the world.
Congress’s annual defense policy bill authorized $33.5 billion for new ships and submarines.
According to a Navy report last year, several key shipbuilding programs are years behind schedule, largely due to a lack of workers.
Trump also called out the management of the Navy’s Constellation-class frigate program, accusing Biden-era officials of “gambling and manipulating,” driving up costs.
Speaking to Hewitt, Trump appeared to be referring to a deal the Pentagon reached with the US arm of Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri for the new class of ships by 2020.
Aerial view of the US Navy aircraft carriers USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower
“And they were going and doing a good job, and the generals, you know, Biden’s admirals and generals and all the people involved, they started playing around and tweaking and changing the design, and that, you know, that costs a lot of money,” Trump said.
“But generals or admirals came in and said, ‘Oh, why don’t we make it a little wider? Why don’t we do this? Why don’t we do that?’ And it was designed specifically for speed and stuff. When you start making it wider, it starts to make it slower,” he continued.
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“We had it on the ground and they made changes. They always have to make changes. You know, these guys go in there and think they’re smart, and in a lot of cases, unfortunately, they’re not, and take something and they get much worse.”
Then president Ronald Reagan he had a goal of 600 ships for the Navy when he took office, dedicated to rebuilding the nation’s fleet after the Vietnam War. But his administration also canceled a shipbuilding subsidy that decimated the commercial market, meaning that American shipyards were dedicated solely to meeting the needs of the military.
