America vs China: Who stands where, as US Navy secretary says it can't keep up with Beijing (2024)

The US navy secretary caused a stir on Wednesday when he admitted that his country cannot keep up with China’s warship building.

CNN quoted Carlos Del Toro as saying that China “consistently attempts to violate the maritime sovereignty and economic well-being of other nations including our allies in the South China Sea and elsewhere.”

Del Toro added that Beijing was sending its fleet around the world and that Washington must modernise its own fleet.

“We do need a larger navy, we do need more ships in the future, more modern ships in the future, in particular, that can meet that threat,” he said.

This comes even as tensions have risen between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan, which China has vowed to reclaim if necessary ‘by force’.

Let’s take a closer look:

China has overtaken the United States when it comes to the sheer size of its navy.

While the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has around 340 ships, the US Navy has less than 300 ships at last count, as per Eurasian Times.

According to CNN, the Pentagon wants to have 350 manned ships by 2045.

As per China Power, Beijing added 18 ships in 2016 and another 14 in 2017.

That compared to five and eight for the US in the same period.

One underlying reason for China’s frenetic output is the number of shipyards.

“They have 13 shipyards, in some cases their shipyard has more capacity – one shipyard has more capacity than all of our shipyards combined. That presents a real threat,” Del Toro was quoted as saying by CNN.

The outlet quoted reports as saying that China has six major and two minor shipyards, while the US has seven shipyards making large and deep draft ships for the navy and coast guard.

China isn’t just leaving the United States in its dust.

Between 2014 and 2018, Beijing launched more submarines, warships, amphibious vessels, and auxiliaries than the combined navies of Germany, India, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

But some experts say that while size matters at sea, it’s not the only thing that counts.

“Let’s bear in mind that the Soviet navy was more numerous than we were, sometimes vastly so,” James Holmes, the JC Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, told Navy Times.

“No one would have said their submarine force was superior to ours. We were stronger on a platform-for-platform basis.”

Tonnage

When it comes to tonnage – the most important metric – the US remains ahead.

“The issue is not the number of ships — the US’ are generally much bigger and more capable, and the US Navy has twice the tonnage of the Chinese Navy,” Michael O’Hanlon, director of foreign policy research and a defence strategy analyst at the Brookings Institution, told DW.

DW quoted Center for International Maritime Security as saying that the Chinese Navy in its entirety was under two million tons while the US was over 4.5 million tons.

China, which is behind the US, has three aircraft carriers.

But this may advantage may be fading – and fast.

DW quoted the Pentagon as saying that China is now the ‘top ship-producing nation in the world by tonnage’.

“The PLAN remains engaged in a robust shipbuilding program for surface combatants, producing new guided-missile cruisers, guided-missile destroyers and corvettes. These assets will significantly upgrade the PLAN’s air defense, anti-ship, and antisubmarine capabilities,” the report stated.

Firepower

When it comes to firepower, the United States has China beat.

There’s more to the comparison than number of hulls,” Jerry Hendrix, author of To Provide and Maintain a Navy told Forbes.

“The real number in the competition is the number of missile tubes.”

As per the outlet, the US fleet has an estimated 10,500 ship- or submarine-launched offensive missiles.

The PLAN, meanwhile, has an estimated offensive missile count of just 4,168.

By 2030, the PLAN could have 5,000 or 6,000 sea-launched offensive missiles, and the US could be down to around 9,500.

“It will be much harder for the Chinese fleet to catch up to the U.S. fleet’s air-launched firepower, however,” the piece noted.

People power

Despite Beijing having the numbers, Del Toro says the US has one big advantage over China – their people.

“In many ways our shipbuilders are better shipbuilders, that’s why we have a more modern, more capable, more lethal Navy than they do,” Del Toro told CNN.

“They script their people to fight, we actually train our people to think. There’s a fundamental difference in how we train our Marines and our sailors and our soldiers and our airmen and our Space Force in this country that gives us an inherent advantage over anything the Chinese can put up.”

There might be something to that.

As per Navy Times, the PLAN uses a two-person command structure on its vessels – the skipper and a representative of the Chinese Communist Party.

“No sailor would be in favor of that,” retired navy vice admiral Bob Murrett told the outlet. Murret, a naval intelligence veteran, added, “There’s hundreds of years of history of the mariner being a captain who has complete accountability and responsibility for the ship.”

Also, in case of a conflagration between US and China, it’s unlikely things will remain one on one.

Which is to say that the US has allies it can call on.

As a piece in The Diplomat noted, Japan, a US ally, with 51 major surface combatants has the largest surface fleets in the world.

South Korea itself has 23 major warships and is eyeing more.

But others remain unconvinced.

“The argument that our technology offsets China, or that we retain an advantage, strikes me as unpersuasive,” Blake Herzinger a civilian Indo-Pacific defense policy specialist and Naval Reserve officer based in Singapore, told Navy Times.

With inputs from agencies

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