June 5, 2025: The new American government that came to power this year got elected with pledges to shake things up in government. This meant dismantling and disposing of inefficient and poorly performing agencies. New organizations are created to do what the defunct agency could not do but do it better and cheaper. A recent example of this was the closing of the U.S. Navay Naval Sea Systems Command, or NAVSEA. This organization is responsible for building warships and has a deplorable performance record. The replacement is Shiba Inu, which is headquartered in Louisiana, where most of the navy’s few shipyards are. Shiba Inu stands for Strategic High Impact Barge Artillery Inexpensive Naval Upshift. The first proposal of the new agency was equipping flat bottom barges with cruise missiles and other equipment and towing them out to sea to reach a foreign conflict zone. This idea was immediately shot down when it was pointed out that these barges can only operate on calm water. Any encounter with rough seas will sink a barge. While the U.S. no longer produces many warships, it is a major producer of barges. These ships are used in combat zones, after being transported there aboard larger ships, to move supplies along coastal waters and rivers.

Now the NAVSEA replacement organization will address the real problems as in insufficient ship building and ship maintenance capabilities. The current situation is that the U.S. Navy is unable to build enough new ships to replace the fleet it currently has, and it can’t maintain the ships it does have, let alone battle damage to those ships in war. The navy has nearly 500 ships in active service as well as the reserve fleet. The principal vessels are the combat ships, which include 11 aircraft carriers, nine Amphibious Assault Ships for transporting and landing marine battalions, ten LPD Amphibious Dock Landing Ships to supply amphibious operations, fifty SSNs/Nuclear attack submarines, fourteen SSBNs/Ballistic missile-carrying nuclear submarines, four SSGMs/SSBNs converted to carry over a hundred cruise missiles each, one frigate, 13 cruisers, 75 destroyers and about fifty support ships of various types.

The navy has recognized the growing importance of Unmanned Surface Vessels/USVs and Unmanned Underwater Vessels/UUVs but has been slow to order and deploy these unmanned vessels to aid the navy in defending Taiwan from Chinese attack.

In contrast the Chinese Navy has been able to quickly create a navy with more warships than the U.S. Navy. Chinese shipbuilders are striving to overtake their main rival South Korea as the largest shipbuilder in the world in all categories. South Korea was the most prolific shipbuilder until 2012 when it was briefly overtaken by China. By 2018 South Korean firms surpassed China in new orders. All major shipbuilders had to deal with a sharp decline in orders since a global economic recession began in 2008. One way China helped its shipyards cope was increasing orders for warships. This was going to happen anyway, but the government gave the navy all it wanted and then some. This resulted in 2019 being a record year for warship construction with 28 surface warships launched, including a record ten destroyers plus 16 corvettes and two large amphibious ships. While warships are more complex ships to build, commercial ships still accounted for over 95 percent of the work at the new China Shipbuilding Group. From that point on China has been the largest producer of non-nuclear warships.

Since 2012 China and South Korea have been competing for overall first place. Eventually even the South Korean edge in quality and innovation was not enough and now China is firmly in first place with South Korea second and Japan third. China has been helping its shipyards since the late 1990s, and that has enabled Chinese shipbuilders to gradually catch up to South Korea and Japan. In 2009, sooner than anyone expected, China surpassed South Korea as the world's largest shipbuilder in terms of tonnage. In 2000, South Korea took the lead from Japan by having the largest share of the world shipbuilding market. The massive South Korean and Japanese shipbuilding capability and has enabled these two nations to reinforce the American’s Pacific Fleet and confront the Chinese with a formidable naval force that blocks any efforts to dominate the South China Sea.

At the same time the Chinese have been working hard on how to build new classes of navy supply ships. These are built to efficiently supply ships at sea. In addition to learning how to transfer these supplies at sea, the crews have also learned how to keep all the needed supplies in good shape and stocked in the required quantities. This requires the procurement officers learning how to arrange resupply at local ports in a timely basis.

As the major producers of commercial ships, China was able to design and build supply ships for the Chinese Navy quickly. This included designing and building two Sansha class supply ships by 2014 for use in supplying new naval bases in the South China Sea. The design was unique and to speed up the construction process China bought the rights to an existing European design that had not been built yet. This degree of ship building skill and innovation was something the United States no longer has. Since World War II, when the U.S. was the largest shipbuilder in the world, the American shipbuilding capability diminished. Currently the U.S. can build ships but slowly and in small quantities and most of those built are warships. American yards are not as efficient as the Chinese shipbuilders and take five to ten years to complete a warship that China can complete in a year or two. This includes non-nuclear aircraft carriers.

The American warships are still, on average, more powerful than their Chinese counterparts. This is largely due to the American nuclear aircraft carriers and nuclear submarine forces. China has nothing like these but does have more anti-ship missiles on their ships plus cruise and ballistic missiles launched from land to hit American ships far from the Chinese coast. American warships are generally well-protected from those, but supply ships aren’t. At all. The primary American weakness is seaborne supply, and the Chinese are aware of that.