Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) warned Tuesday in an op-ed that China is on a “fast track” to become the world’s dominant naval power if the United States does not spend more on ship building.
Rubio, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an op-ed published in Defense News that China is on track to have more than 440 ships in five years, while the U.S. Navy is on track to have 291.
“In other words, China is on a fast track to displace America as the world’s dominant naval power,” he wrote, calling the U.S. “woefully underprepared.”
“Too few people fully understand or appreciate the fact that our ships do more than defend allies and partners from invasion; they also guarantee freedom of navigation on the open seas,” he said.
“For decades, the U.S. Navy has eliminated piracy, prohibited extortion and ensured that virtually every country on the planet has the ability to trade — and it has asked nothing in return. That will end if Beijing uses a more powerful force to overturn our maritime supremacy,” he said.
He said just one of China’s 13 naval shipyards has greater productive capacity than all seven of the U.S.’s shipyards combined, and slammed President Joe Biden for requesting a budget for the Navy and Marine Corps in 2024 that is 2% below inflation.
Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam (CG 54) off the coast of Japan near Mt. Fuji. (Mass Communication Specialist Seaman David Flewellyn/U.S. Navy via AP)
“In other words, the White House wants to cut the Navy’s funding when it’s already losing ground. It makes no sense when the production of the Columbia-class submarine is 10% behind schedule and that of the Virginia-class submarine is ‘significantly behind,'” he said.
He criticized the Pentagon for spending more and more taxpayer dollars on “obscure experiments conducted by third-party contractors under the guise of research and development” instead of “basic tasks like shipbuilding.”
The Virginia-class fast attack submarine USS Colorado (SSN 788) is seen before at the commissioning ceremony at Naval Submarine Base New London in Groton, Conn., March 17, 2018. (Dana Jensen/The Day via AP, File)
“In short, the government can and should invest in technological innovation, but not at the expense of production. America won World War II in large part because it outcompeted and outproduced the Axis on the factory floor. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of overspecialization that doomed our enemies in the past,” he said.
He called on the Biden administration to reorder their priorities and accelerate U.S. shipbuilding.
He concluded, “President Theodore Roosevelt once said: ‘A good navy is not a provocation to war. It is the surest guaranty of peace.’ If so, we are setting ourselves up for conflict. That needs to change.”
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