Navy pushes to catch up to China’s superiority at sea

The U.S. Navy is gearing up for a major war in the South China Sea by the end of the decade, reshaping military posture and structure as it aims to catch up to a larger Chinese naval force.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti released a highly anticipated report this month that outlines seven strategies the Navy will follow to ensure the U.S. is prepared for a potential conflict with China by 2027. 

That’s the date Chinese leader Xi Jinping has told his forces to be ready for a potential invasion of the self-governing island nation of Taiwan, which Beijing sees as historically part of the mainland. 

The 2027 date does not mean a war will happen that year, but the Navy wants to ensure it is ready — if an enhanced U.S. force does not deter Xi from an invasion.

Franchetti’s strategic plan zeroes in on how the Navy, the key military branch in the event of a South China Sea conflict, can best prepare itself given multiple constraints, including a troubled shipbuilding industry and historically low recruitment.  

In a September event with the Center for Strategic and International Studies this month, Franchetti said her plan, which follows strategic guidelines called Project 33, addresses a “changing geopolitical environment” driven by China, domestic challenges and the shift in modern warfare.

“These are areas that I can put my thumb on a scale. We can make a difference in those areas, and will make meaningful contribution to our ability to be more ready by 2027,” she said. 

The strategy, focused on speeding up maintenance to retain a larger combat-ready force and deploying new technologies like autonomous drones, has won support from lawmakers on Capitol Hill who oversee the Navy and have been concerned about the U.S. falling behind China. 

Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), ranking member of the seapower subcommittee under the House Armed Services Committee, said Franchetti was “right on target” with her strategy, pointing to efforts to increase maintenance work at shipyards. 

“The Navy is not just talking about this, [and] I actually think there’s really been some really encouraging progress,” he said. “This is her document [that is] talking about 2027, which is really right around the corner. In my opinion, it’s being released in tandem with some really good work that’s being done to speed up the turnaround.” 

Through the strategy, the Navy is aiming to address one of its most troubling problems: Chinese military’s mass. 

China is expected to have 395 ships by 2025 and 435 ships by 2030, while the U.S. Navy operates 296 ships, and will likely have 294 by the end of fiscal 2030, according to the Congressional Research Service.  

Naval ships deployed by both China and the U.S. include large aircraft carriers, submarines, combat-built destroyer ships and agile amphibious assault ships, among others. 

While the disparity is concerning for the U.S., Franchetti lays out a plan for overcoming these numbers through joint warfighting, or the ability to connect all aspects of the U.S. armed forces under a coordinated military structure. 

Joshua Tallis, a senior research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, said “it would be wrong to simply count Chinese ships and U.S. ships and then assume that one country had the advantage over the other.” 

“The correct way to understand the U.S. Navy’s ability to counter that threat is to understand the U.S. Navy in the context of this much bigger joint warfighting ecosystem,” he said, adding the Navy strategy “is a strong step in the right direction.” 

Still, ship numbers do matter in Washington, which is actively trying to solve the problem ahead of a potential Chinese conflict. 

The U.S. shipbuilding industry is facing major challenges. In the 1980s, the U.S. had some 300 shipyards, and today, it has around 20. The U.S. has also shrunk its capacity for maintenance with fewer floating docks, called tenders, for destroyer ships and submarines. 

The decline is attributable to the end of the Cold War and the global war on terrorism, which saw less of a need for shipyards. But it means the U.S. is decommissioning ships faster than it is building them, shrinking the size of the fleet. The Navy has a five-year shipbuilding plan that would increase the fleet to a goal of 381 total ships over 35 years.

But the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in an August post that the Navy and Coast Guard shipbuilding efforts are both behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, with design and construction processes taking so long it sometimes delivers ships built with outdated systems.

Some experts have called for the U.S. to increase subsidization of a shipbuilding industry that is now handled almost exclusively by private contractors that are struggling with staff or other hurdles. 

And lawmakers are now making efforts to address the shipbuilding crisis. 

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) plan to soon introduce a bill to help restore shipbuilding capacity and make it more cost-effective, the lawmakers said at a Wednesday Center for Strategic and International Studies event. 

“The Chinese navy is growing and rapidly expanding,” said Waltz at the event, warning of a “deeper issue” if a war breaks out with China. “Why does this matter to everyday Americans? … 50 percent of global [economic output] is sitting in that area, and if China manages to control or coerce that area, that’s a huge step toward Xi’s stated goal of replacing the United States as a global leader.” 

Courtney, the seapower committee’s top Democrat, said the “committee is going to be pushing really hard” on shipyard modernization, citing Congress backing more submarine industrial investment as an example. 

We need to “get these yards to a place where they can really turn around and prepare us as fast as possible,” Courtney said. “I think you’re probably going to see a push to extend the scope of this policy into the full maritime industrial base.” 

But Franchetti hopes to work around the issue of shipbuilding by speeding up maintenance work on ships, aiming for an 80 percent surge in naval assets available for deployment. 

Steven Wills, a navalist at the Center for Maritime Strategy, questioned if the surging of ships was feasible, noting that more ships are already deploying much longer than during the Cold War. 

“That’s a big lift,” he said. “I’m not sure how we get there, considering that we have less than 300 ships, and we keep one-third of them always deployed.” 

“So that’s going to be a challenge,” he added. “I’m not sure how the Navy fully overcomes that.” 

Franchetti, in her strategy, also outlined how the Black Sea has been dominated by Ukraine in the war with Russia through a savvy use of drones. 

With artificial intelligence (AI) drones now a major initiative at the Pentagon, the Navy is also looking to harness that technology to counter Chinese mass in the event of a South China Sea conflict.  

The drones are part of a strategy the Navy is looking to use for sea denial, or ensuring China can’t control the maritime domain. Cheap clusters of such autonomous weapons could change Chinese dominance by mass in the sea.

Wills, from the Center for Maritime Strategy, said Franchetti was aiming to make uncrewed ships a “force multiplier” against China. 

“What the Navy’s going for here is you give each ship its own flotilla of uncrewed ships that come along with it, that have more missiles, maybe some self-defense weapons, maybe some electronic warfare gear, and that makes your individual Arleigh Burke-class destroyer a lot more powerful,” he said. 

The autonomous systems have been deployed for training purposes but have not been deployed or even purchased at scale, and there is no significant budget for the weapons yet. Analysts say the Navy may have to divert funding sources for the AI weapons in the future if the Pentagon budget is constrained. 

Other aspects of the Franchetti strategy call for increasing investment in infrastructure that the Navy uses, particularly in the Pacific, and modernizing maritime operation centers that act as headquarter stations for fleet commanders. 

But a key part of her strategy is recruitment and retention, because the Navy’s ships need sailors to operate them.

The Navy is struggling to meet its recruitment numbers, as fewer people enlist into the armed forces more broadly. In her strategic plan, Franchetti calls for a 100 percent rating fill for the Navy active and reserve components. 

The Navy is expected to meet its goal of 40,600 active-duty sailor recruits for this fiscal year, but it would be the first time in two years it met the target.

Franchetti also wants to enhance the quality of life for sailors, which could boost retention. The plan is to eliminate involuntary living requirements for sailors at homeport and to invest in quality housing. 

Tallis, from the Center for Naval Analyses, said the Navy will have to “keep up the pressure” on recruitment, but added that it was “valuable to think about recruitment and retention as two sides of the same coin.” 

“Just from a retention standpoint, I think a decent amount of that stems from some of these quality-of-service initiatives that have taken place over the last few years to try and balance the quality of life and quality of work, to make it easier for people to stay in the Navy,” he said. 

The U.S., however, is playing catchup to China, which boasts a relatively strong defense industrial base and a much larger military. Beijing heavily invests in its shipbuilding industry and is the world’s largest builder in that industry. 

China is likely prepared for what could be one of the more likely scenarios playing out in a Taiwan event: a Chinese blockade of the island nation. 

Andrew Erickson, a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute, said a blockade scenario “makes China’s sea forces all the more important to analyze.” 

“They are among the most relevant forces for operationalizing and implementing such a campaign,” he said. 

But Erickson added that China is also building out a robust anti-navy force that includes anti-ship ballistic missiles and drones, and that Xi has “confidence in the military industrial base” to produce his weapons. 

“We can see a marked contrast right now: China is building large numbers of the same systems,” he said. “They’re doing a lot of stuff at once.” 

While the world is hyper-focused on a potential conflict in 2027, Robert Murrett, a retired vice admiral, said the primary goal of the Navy is to deter a war. 

“The goal is to deter China and the biggest foreign policy challenge we will have for this generation is to make sure [Beijing understands] any conflict in Asia is not in their interest ,” he said.