In today's national defense news, China is building a fourth aircraft carrier while the U.S. Navy's procurement remains stalled and the U.S. Air Force will shrink this year to its smallest size ever.
Let's take these items one at a time.
The South China Morning Post reported last week that PLA Navy political commissar Yuan Huazhi said that China's fourth carrier “will soon be announced" and that he added that "he had not heard of any 'technical bottleneck' regarding the aircraft carrier, suggesting its progress was on track."
Some believe that the as-yet-unnamed carrier will be China's first to use nuclear propulsion, according to a report today in Popular Mechanics. That would grant Communist China Navy entry into an exclusive club consisting today of just the U.S. Navy, "a major milestone in ship development and the key toward projecting Chinese military power abroad."
On our side of the Pacific, carrier production is behind schedule, over budget, and has less than zero room for error. Bryan McGrath warned in a new Defense One report that the Navy's plan to delay production of our next Ford-class carrier by two years would result in layoffs and further erode our shipbuilding base.
"These developments would represent steep challenges to the continued production of aircraft carriers. And because many suppliers of aircraft carrier parts also furnish components for submarines (both are nuclear-powered), the delay would also undermine the already insufficient submarine industrial base," he wrote.
Also, the Navy will sacrifice production of a vital Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine in this year's budget to free up funds to keep suppliers in business. “We did reduce the funding to one Virginia-class submarine in FY25. But we maintain the funding for nine out of the planned 10 Virginia class” during the five-year procurement plan, Under Secretary Erik Raven was quoted in a Defense News report this week. We're also supposed to be producing Virginia subs for Australia but, at this point, we can't even meet our own needs.
Donald Trump's promise to bring the Navy up to 355 ships — we had nearly 600 under Ronald Reagan, and the oceans haven't gotten any smaller — is dead in the water under Joe Biden.
Next year, the Air Force will retire 250 aircraft, "dropping its total aircraft inventory below 5,000, an unprecedentedly small number," according to Air and Space Forces. "The Air Force wants to purchase 42 F-35As and 18 F-15EXs—a total of 60 new fighters. That will not meet the service’s stated long-term goal of at least 72 new fighters annually."
One bright spot is the new B-21 Raider stealth bomber, which is on time and largely on budget. But Congress has yet to authorize enough funding, personnel, or airframes necessary to maintain nuclear deterrence — much less enough to meet China's "strategic breakout" in its nuclear forces.
"The larger picture presented by this budget is that the U.S. military is in a state of managed decline," the Wall Street Journal concluded in a Tuesday editorial. "U.S. defense spending falls to a projected 2.4% of the economy in 2034, down from an estimated 3.1% this year, which is half the nearly 6% spent during the 1980s when the U.S. was rearming to win the Cold War.
And, financially speaking, the USSR was a far less formidable rival than Xi Jinping's China.
I still believe that when it comes to a Great Power competition with China, we still hold most of the trump cards. But our lack of seriousness invites China to take risks that it wouldn't dare against the serious competitor we once were.
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