The U.S. Navy is in the midst of a shipbuilding crisis that will leave the United States outmatched in an increasingly dangerous world if it is not addressed soon, says Alaska’s U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan.
“This week, the Senate Armed Services Committee is negotiating the details of the National Defense Authorization Act, legislation that has passed every year since its inception. It is critical that the committee, of which I am a member, address the shipbuilding crisis in this legislation. My colleagues on both sides of the aisle and I have a number of amendments to the NDAA addressing this crisis. Congress must intervene because it has been abundantly clear that President Joe Biden and his secretary of the Navy will not,” Sullivan wrote in the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
Recently, Sullivan led a Senate delegation to the Indo-Pacific, a place where the U.S. Navy is key to America’s security as well as the security of her allies in Asia, including Taiwan. Freshly back from the trip, Sullivan articulated some key concerns in his column that focused on Navy preparedness.
“The concern over declining American shipbuilding power was front and center. As I spoke with the newly elected Taiwanese president, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s ships were encircling the island democracy,” Sullivan said.
China’s navy is expanding rapidly, Sullivan said, and is on pace to have more than 400 warships by 2027 — just three years from now. That’s the same year that China’s President Xi Jinping has directed his forces to be ready to invade Taiwan.
“Meanwhile, under Biden, the U.S. Navy has shrunk to just 293 ships and is on pace to shrink to 280 in 2027 — what could amount to a dangerous 120-ship deficit compared to the Chinese navy,” he said.
“After years of pressure from Congress, Biden’s Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro recently completed a review of the devastating state of the Navy’s shipbuilding programs. The results of that review were abysmal: five of the Navy’s major shipbuilding programs — the Columbia-class submarine, the Constellation-class frigate, the Ford-class aircraft carriers, and the Block IV and Block V Virginia-class submarines — are all delayed between one and three years,” Sullivan said.
Instead of doing his job, the Navy secretary has focused on climate change and the so-called “climate crisis,” and his report to Congress did not mention shipbuilding, lethality, or warfighting.
“Likewise, in his strategic guidance that he issued to the Navy and Marine Corps, an important document that lays out the secretary’s vision for our naval force, he mentioned climate change nine times but didn’t once address increasing the size of the U.S. fleet during these dangerous times,” Sullivan said.
“In my 30 years of public service, I’ve never seen U.S. Navy readiness at such a low point. And it’s not just me. This is a widespread, bipartisan concern. Numerous experts have also warned how ill-prepared our Navy is to meet global challenges and to keep us safe, particularly in the vital Indo-Pacific region, which includes my home state, Alaska. Recently, experts from the Congressional Research Service told me that ‘the U.S. Navy is in its worst state for designing, building, maintaining, and crewing ships in over 40 years,'” Sullivan wrote.
Sullivan has made amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act to address this crisis by requiring the Navy to be more predictable with procurement profiles so industry can respond with capital investments and workforce development, increasing the tenure of the admiral in charge of ship design and procurement, and working toward increasing our country’s shipbuilding capacity by identifying viable locations for two additional shipyards west of the Panama Canal. He also has called upon the Navy to turn its attention to fighting readiness, rather than climate change.
Because the Navy secretary is failing in his responsibilities, Congress must step in to fulfill its Article I constitutional responsibility “to provide and maintain a Navy,” wrote Sullivan, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Keep your eyes focused on China. They have hypersonic missiles, have landed on the dark side of the moon and have their own space station.
We owe just about all the money that we can beg borrow and steal in the next 10 years to them.
And they’re buying up the world’s supply of gold weakening the dollar. Our society is forced to purchase their wares because we’ve priced ourself out of our own market. China’s gonna govern the world without firing a shot.
You just confirmed building a bunch of ships is a waste of $$$$$
China does things looking at the future. Centuries in the future. We can’t see tomorrow.
They are really. They can sink them at will.
Keep brainwashed and stupid. Watch more corporate news, chump.
I don’t watch the news. Just the gold futures.
That’s champ.
There can be no disagreement on the need to maintain a superior position in military strength.
None. While often in disagreement with the Senator, on this point not so.
It is encouraging to view the apparent turn about on the European continent where the voting results favor the stopping of and returning of, the mass of population in fact, invading Europe as it is with our two borders, wide open to who know what. Perhaps, with a second Trump administration it WILL BE
addressed.
Cheers
(Beginning to use paragraphs (LOL)
Sullivan needs to remember the mission of today’s military.
1-surrender dominance to China
2-defeat the “white supremacy” agenda
3-promote societal deviance and incompetence at every level.
4-render the military into a non threatening fighting force.
Fighting China doesn’t enter the equation.
We have a floating battleship called Taiwan that can’t be sunk. After what Ukraine is doing to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, Senator Strangelove still does not understand drones launched from Taiwan will be more cost effective in the future than expensive ships built in the USA
Oh “Frank”…
I’m curious how many people you commanded in the military.
Regarding your notion Taiwan can’t be sunk. True, it would be hard to physically remove the land mass. But China can defeat it tomorrow with nukes if they want to. Or bio weapons.
One doesn’t have to sink a ship to render it combat ineffective. Or an island for that matter.
That reminds me of the time Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), talking about a Marine buildup on Guam said “My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize,”
Look everyone, Frank is a military strategist today. The most interesting man in his home.
Do us a favor, consider sitting this one out. Take a break.
& don’t forget the heavy emphasis on LGBTQ… it’s incredible! Pearl Harbor has dedicated an entire edition of the base magazine to it & all it does is increase the sense of entitlement & victimhood & worse- divide people. It’s terrible what our military has ENABLED China to do while we worked to tear down the majority of our service members!
What exactly are “You” and the other elected leaders (including Daddy’s Little Princess) going to do about this abrogation of fiduciary responsibilities to ‘Right the Ship” on this and many more issues??? A continual barrage of verbal threats isn’t producing meaningful – significant results. I recommend you start doling out and exercising “real” consequences.
Truth is, there isn’t much anyone can do. We’re not in a position to help ourselves, much less Taiwan.
This is a direct result of the Obama administration. They fired qualified senior officers and replaced them with ass kissing political officers. Obama and Biden are a clear and present danger to our republic.
We don’t produce anything anymore. We don’t make our own steel, our factories have diminished, our farming and ranching are being shrunk. We’re heading towards almost 100% dependency on China. With that large navy China will also control the shipping lanes. All by design and aided by the political elite.
China is also mentioned as the #1 cloud seeder of the world. Are they using microplastics? Is that harming the health of the planet? Is ” Cloud seeding” creating the hurricanes, flooding, tornados, and all other kinds of climate issues for the World? Does this also effect the health of a population? Let’s bring this project out into the public to see exactly what type of a program is being used. Let make public each and every experiment that is being done with this technology. Let’s make it such that all flights and other forms of disbursement into the atmosphere are published in local papers where and when conducted, to include all States within the U.S. This is a potential military weapon that is capable of being a silent killer of food sources and people. In my opinion, this is a back door military project that was brought up in the early ’40’s and is now being uses as a “Helpful tool” yet it is a deadly tool.
That is an interesting theory. If you can produce an earthquake, why not other “natural disasters?”
Cloud seeding is explained here: ‘https://www.dri.edu/cloud-seeding-program/what-is-cloud-seeding/.
Taiwan floats? I never knew that. Frank Rast has changed my whole view of the world as I knew it.
At any moment in the process of building this ship or the Littoral Combat Ship (another failure) Big Dan could have provided some oversight. But he didn’t until the outrage built up so that he couldn’t ignore it any longer.
This is the way.
It’s time. It’s time to remove political parasites from the uniparty.
Do it for Freedom. Do it for Liberty.
Do it for future generations of Americans.
Gotta start somewhere. The whole mess needs scrapped and start over. Not going to happen because too far gone.
I don’t understand how Sullivan can be criticizing them when he keeps voting to send all the money to other foreign countries.
Sullivan the Rebuker,,,,,,,, haranguer, criticaster, scolder, railer, admonisher, upbraider, hairsplitter, ranter, reproacher, reprover.