Posted on 10/25/2024 6:51:58 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The Navy is failing to build warships on time or on budget.
Putting campaign donations and local employment interests above national security, members of Congress have been unwilling to take bold action to fix things. An absence of skilled workers, inefficient unions, and COVID-19-related challenges have further complicated matters. The next president and Congress thus face a choice. Either they accept China’s dominance of the western Pacific Ocean or they do the once unthinkable and appropriate funds to build warships in the dockyards of allied nations such as South Korea, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
Time is not a luxury America can afford.
China is surging the development of an advanced and highly capable navy. Chinese President Xi Jinping is also surging his intimidation of Taiwan and the Philippines, conducting increasingly bold blockade exercises against the former and aggressively harassing the latter in its own exclusive economic zone. Taiwan’s defense budget is utterly inadequate, something that must change to persuade a future American president that its defense is worth the lives of thousands of U.S. military personnel. Similarly, while Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos is a courageous leader and strong American ally, the Philippines must expand its military basing rights if it wants greater U.S. military support against China.
Still, the fundamental point is that these various concerns are all interconnected. China is doing what it is doing because Xi wants to secure economic, resource, and political hegemony over the Western Pacific. If Xi succeeds, he’ll be able to dominate multitrillion-dollar annual trade flows, the political sovereignty of multiple democratic nations including Japan, and vast influence over the economies and politics of other nations across the globe. Those nations will find they need Xi’s permission to trade and prosper. And ideological delusions to the contrary, Chinese Communist...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
You highlight one of the reasons that China has 225 times the ship building capacity of the US.
Appropriate funds to build warships in the dockyards of allied nations such as South Korea, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
And while at it to speed up a few things just ship the prints of the plans to China about all the weak spots.
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