Chinese naval forces will have about 150 more ships on the water than the U.S. Navy by 2028, according to Defense Department officials.
“By 2028, we will have approximately 291 ships or so,” U.S. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro told a Senate panel on Tuesday. “I can’t predict exactly what the Chinese will have, but estimates are upward of 440 or so.”
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Del Toro provided that comparison as Navy and Marine Corps leaders pitched Congress on a $255.8 billion budget for fiscal 2024. They justified that number with a series of warnings about the centrality of naval power in the competition with China — “We find ourselves at an inflection point, one that demands we renew our commitment to naval primacy,” as Del Toro testified — but the officials acknowledged that President Joe Biden’s budget request doesn’t even keep up with inflation.
“No, it’s not,” Del Toro told the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I believe it’s about 2% below inflation.”
That estimate understated the gap between the budget and inflation
, he added, clarifying that “2% below inflation” means 2% below the roughly 4.6% inflation rate that federal officials had predicted over the last two years.
“What’s the actual inflation rate?” Sen. Lindsey Graham
(R-SC) asked.
“It’s somewhere in the 6% range,” Del Toro said. “Predictors are often wrong.”
That gap between inflation expectations and reality was thrown into stark relief by the portrait of Chinese Communist naval power conjured by the Navy’s top officer.
“In only two decades, the PRC has tripled the size of its Navy and is on pace to quadruple to over 400 ships by 2030,” Adm. Michael Gilday, the chief of naval operations, told the appropriations panel in his prepared statement. This fleet, he emphasized, is a key part of an initiative “to displace the U.S. Navy from the waters in the Western Pacific” while empowering China to take “actions just short of war” that impose Beijing’s will on U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific.
“Without question, the PRC’s investments in offensive warfighting systems, across all domains, are aimed at the heart of America’s maritime power,” he testified.
Del Toro concurred. “We find ourselves at an inflection point, one that demands we renew our commitment to naval primacy,” his prepared statement warned. “The People’s Liberation Army Navy has added over one hundred combatants to its fleet [over the last two decades] a naval buildup that is a key component of its increasingly aggressive military posture. … The PRC is conducting active, aggressive maritime activities in the South China Sea and beyond that have the potential to undermine our system of international law, including the freedom of the seas, a foundational U.S. interest.”
Yet the Navy leaders struggled to resolve the tension between the balance of naval power and the budgetary plans. U.S. forces need “373 manned and 150 unmanned” ships, according to Gilday. Naval officials have provided Congress with three different possible ship-building plans, only one of which meets that target.
“Underlying all of them is an effort to build a fleet whose firepower is greater and distributed among more ships than in today’s fleet,” the Congressional Budget Office said in a recent analysis. “By 2052, the fleet would number 316 ships under Alternative 1, 327 under Alternative 2, or 367 under Alternative 3. However, the fleet would become smaller in the near term under all three alternatives. Over the next five years, the Navy would retire 17 more ships than it would commission, causing the fleet to reach a low of 280 ships in 2027 before growing again.”
The Pentagon wants to retire eight surface ships, including three aging cruisers and two relatively new littoral combat ships that “are less lethal, less capable, and far more expensive to sustain” than what Navy officials now think they need. The other potential retirees would come from the Navy’s array of dock landing ships for amphibious warfare.
“Undertaking the repair of these ships, with potential cost growth, would tie up funding, shipyard capacity, and take an enormous personal toll on our sailors assigned to the projects,” Del Toro testified before acknowledging that “this request brings us below the 31 amphibious ships we are required to maintain” by federal law.
That legal requirement is not just a paperwork problem. “The absolute minimum of L-class amphibious ships the nation needs is 31,” Gen. David Berger, the commandant of the Marine Corps
, said during his appearance alongside Del Toro and Gilday. “That is the warfighting requirement. … Divesting without replacing creates unacceptable risks.”
Berger and the other officials adopted a unified posture, but they acknowledged the dilemmas that Navy planners face.
“We can’t buy back time. For 20 years, we were focused on ground wars. And understandably so, the Navy wasn’t the priority,” Gilday said. “So keeping old ships keeping all ships that are not usable or workable is not going to make us a stronger Navy.”
The admiral noted that “right now, we have 56 ships under construction and another 76 that are under contract.” And Del Toro added that “we have a shipbuilding industry problem currently,” but Graham faulted the officials for backing a budget proposal that doesn’t call for new ships to be built as quickly as possible.
“The budget you’re supporting is below inflation, and you’re telling us [that] to get to where we want to go, we’ve got to be above inflation by 5%,” he said. “If this is a good budget, I would hate to see a bad budget.”
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Del Toro suggested that the numerical size of the fleets isn’t the only factor in assessing naval power. “I will add that our ships are extremely more modern than they ever have been and lethal,” he told Graham earlier in their exchange.
Graham took little consolation in that reminder. “Let’s hope so,” he said. “If not, we’re in a world of hurt.”
