To Meet Communist China’s Naval Threat, Replace America’s System of Building New Ships

America is in crisis. It cannot build ships fast enough to keep up with the Communist Chinese. Our fleet has been steadily shrinking.President Reagan’s goal of a 600-ship navy is far from met. Today’s force has only 295 ships. Further, the current plan is to expand the fleet to 390 ships over the next three decades. Given the number of aging ships that will retire in that time, this will require an enormous expansion in American ship building capability.The Congressional Budget Office estimates this will take at least $40 billion a year, which is higher than the American Navy projects. And with the Navy’s current inefficient and micromanaged shipbuilding bureaucracy, this almost certainly understates the real cost.A devastating Wall Street Journal article recently outlined the disastrous decay of American shipbuilding. For instance, Japan and South Korea can each build a frigate in three years. America takes roughly a decade.Our shipbuilding efforts are plagued with bureaucratic micromanagement and design changes. These drive up cost and slow down construction.The new frigate, United States Ship Constellation, is being built on a successful Italian design. It was initially to be 85 percent like the original Italian ship design. After the Navy bureaucracy was done, it is only 15 percent based on the Italian design. The American frigate was supposed to cost $1.3 billion. Now, projected costs have increased by $600 million to $1.9 billion.The current, overly bureaucratic, regulation-ridden culture of naval shipbuilding must be replaced rather than reformed.There are breakthroughs in manufacturing and design that could radically accelerate production and minimize costs. The use of new technology and AI-powered simulations could design a new warship within a month — and finalize a stable design which could be rapidly built. The emerging system of AI, robotics, 3d printing, and specialized chemistry could revolutionize shipbuilding in speed, cost, and warfighting capabilities.Companies such as Divergent Technologies are already manufacturing weapons and vehicles at a pace and quality three or four generations ahead of our legacy systems. We could clearly innovate, manufacture, and grow the fleet faster — and at much lower cost — if we embrace the future.Otherwise, we will gradually lose more ground to Communist China. It won’t matter how much money we pour into the bureaucracy. The current Navy shipbuilding system just can’t compete.We know how to build weapons in mass numbers effectively. Find a workable model, and mass produce it. This was the key to our overwhelming force in World War II.American industrialist Henry Kaiser went from focusing on construction — including the Hoover Dam — to shipbuilding during the war. In 1939, he established a shipbuilding company to meet wartime shipping requirements. He used modern assembly line systems and a deeply production-oriented approach. As a result, Kaiser built 1,490 ships. This was 27 percent of the total Maritime Commission construction. Kaiser’s ships were finished in two-thirds of the time and a quarter of the cost of other shipyards. Each of these so-called Liberty ships was built in about two weeks, and one in less than five days. America built ships faster than German submarines could sink them.A similar mass production approach led to the overwhelming number — more than 49,000 — of M-4 Sherman tanks built during World War II. It was a simple design that was easy to manufacture and maintain in the field. The Germans built better tanks, but in smaller numbers. They were drowned by the combination of Sherman tanks, air power, and artillery.With rapid speed of design, America used more than 100 types of aircraft in World War II. We built 300,000 aircraft to guarantee total dominance of the air.A modern parallel of speed in development is the SpaceX system of test-fail-learn-retest. By emphasizing testing and learning rather than long periods of bureaucratic planning, SpaceX has become the world’s dominant space launch system. Its massive Starship rocket is going through this process now. The current government bureaucracies think, plan, re-plan, and re-replan. They are as expensive as they are ineffective.President Trump and the Congress should learn from emerging systems of AI, 3d printing, robotics, and specialized chemistry. A stunningly powerful and fast system could only be developed with a new Navy shipbuilding system. We need a new culture of speed, cost-cutting, and constant adaptation.The fate of the American Navy — and our ability to continue dominating the world’s oceans — require this scale of change. Anything less will fail.________Correction: $600 million is the amount by which the cost of a new American frigate is projected to increase. An earlier edition misstated the amount.

To Meet Communist China’s Naval Threat, Replace America’s System of Building New Ships

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