Are We at the End of American Maritime Hegemony? – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

In an important article in Foreign Affairs, Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Eric Labs, a naval expert at the Congressional Budget Office, warn U.S. policymakers that America is suffering from a “ship gap” with the Chinese Navy in raw numbers of warships and merchant vessels, and a potentially catastrophic shipbuilding gap that could determine victory or defeat in a future war.

And while the U.S. maintains superiority in weapons, capabilities, size of ships, experienced officers, and better-trained crews, in a long war China’s massive shipbuilding advantage would enable it to more rapidly “expand or replace losses to its fleet that the United States simply could not match.” (RELATED: Generals Should Win Wars Before Declaring Victory)

Biddle and Labs compare the current gaps with the World War II struggle between the U.S. and Japan. “At the outset of that conflict,” the authors write, “it was the U.S. Navy that was less skilled and experienced than its counterpart,” but as the war progressed America’s superior shipbuilding capacity enabled it to “outbuild and overwhelm its enemy in a long war.” “The United States,” Biddle and Labs advise, “should look at China’s navy and see the terrifying potential of its former self.” And there is no time to lose.

China’s shipbuilding capacity is more than 200 times greater than ours. Wars, including wars at sea, never go as planned. In a long war with China in the western Pacific, the U.S. Navy would lose ships — perhaps a lot of ships.

China would lose ships, too, perhaps more than the United States at the outset of the conflict, but under current circumstances, China would be much more capable than we would of replacing those ships and expanding its navy. In a long war, those numbers would matter, especially since, as Biddle and Labs note, China is closing the gap in the U.S. qualitative edge. Therefore, we risk losing the maritime hegemony that we have maintained since 1942. (RELATED: China’s Threat to Taiwan: Intentions and Capabilities)

Nothing lasts forever. Great Britain enjoyed an unchallenged maritime hegemony from 1805, when its navy under Admiral Horatio Nelson crippled the French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar, until the early 20th century when the German empire invested in what Robert K. Massie called “castles of steel” which enabled Germany’s High Seas Fleet to challenge British maritime supremacy. “[W]ith more and more German dreadnoughts accumulating every year and a formidable German fleet now concentrated only a few hours’ steaming time from England’s North Sea coast,” Massie writes, Britain’s century-long sea power hegemony began to fade.

As Winston Churchill, who served as the first lord of the admiralty at the beginning of the war, later wrote in The World Crisis, “After a long period of serene and unchallenged complacency, the mutter of distant thunder could be heard.” Churchill explained the danger in a speech at Glasgow: “[T]he whole fortunes of our race and Empire, the whole treasure accumulated during so many centuries of sacrifice and achievement, would perish and be swept utterly away if our naval supremacy were to be impaired.” It had been impaired. The major naval battle of that war — Jutland — ended in a draw.

Like Great Britain, the United States is in geopolitical terms an island nation. From the middle of the Second World War — which was our Trafalgar moment — until now, we were the unchallenged hegemon of what Halford Mackinder called the “world ocean.”

At the end of the Cold War, we had an unmatched 600-ship navy — thanks to President Ronald Reagan, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and Navy Secretary John Lehman — that ruled the waves. Like Britain in the 1890s and early 1900s, we have grown complacent in the post-Cold War world. We need to close the shipbuilding gap, Biddle and Labs warn, “while [we] still can.”

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