Congress Can’t Allow Biden to Shrink Our Navy at Such a Critical Moment

T he world has watched in horror as Vladimir Putin’s bloodshed in Ukraine is televised for all to see. China has remained supportive of Russia’s carnage even as Putin has indiscriminately targeted civilians, cruelly taking the lives of innocent children and elderly Ukrainians. The reason China has so gladly supported Putin’s crimes is because it is plotting its own takeover of an independent democracy: Taiwan.

Xi Jinping has watched as the Biden administration has stumbled in its attempts to protect democratic allies — from letting Afghanistan fall to failing to prevent Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. China is assessing the lessons learned from Russia’s war in Ukraine as Xi weighs his options and expands his regional hegemony in Southeast Asia.

It is in America’s interest to prevent China from taking Taiwan by force or coercion. If Taiwan fell, U.S. allies and territories in the region would face a greatly increased threat from Beijing. China would also gain control of about half of the global semiconductor industry, including the world’s largest chip-maker, TSMC, which would be a massive blow to the global economy and cybersecurity efforts.

How, then, can the U.S. prevent Taiwan from falling? We must invest in hard-power capabilities to deter the CCP. Our military must expand forward deployments to the region and continue its freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea. To that end, it is critical that the U.S. Navy gets the funding and tools it needs to deter China — and the latest Biden budget fails on both of those priorities.

It’s been nearly 50 years since the U.S. has fought a war in the Pacific, and over that time we have allowed our naval force to decrease substantially. When the United States withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, the U.S. Navy had 641 active ships. Today, the U.S. Navy has 298 active ships, while China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has 355.

It is expected that the PLAN will grow to nearly 460 ships by 2030. By comparison, Biden’s 2023 budget would accelerate the retirement of 24 ships, shrinking the U.S. Navy to 291 ships. The Biden administration’s 30-year ship-building plan also reduces the Navy’s ability to protect its aircraft-carrier strike groups and eliminate enemy minefields, reduces the Marine Corps’ ability to conduct forcible-entry missions, and reduces by almost 10 percent our Navy’s capacity to launch missiles. Public estimates indicate that China will eventually develop a global force of submarines capable of launching ballistic missiles, posing an obvious risk to the U.S. And China’s surface-combatant forces already greatly exceed ours. It is unsettling, to say the least, that the Biden administration is shrinking our naval force under these circumstances.

The Chinese military has been watching the U.S. Navy for decades. It knows that a key aspect of our strength is our forward-deployed naval forces and their associated forward bases. It has even developed advanced long-range missiles specifically to target these assets, placing them at such great risk that the U.S. may be unable to depend on their capabilities in any potential conflict.

Additionally, our logistics forces are particularly vulnerable to Chinese interdiction. Yet, our Navy lives in a peacetime fantasy. Our decrepit, steam-powered surge sealift fleet’s average age is over 45 years old, and the readiness of its ships reflects their age. We rely on these forces to project Army and Marine Corps forces in times of conflict.

What’s worse is that China knows we are set in our ways. Former and current American Pacific commanders have indicated that maritime conflict with China could occur within the next five years — yet our Navy appears inclined to pursue a strategy that wouldn’t make it capable of meeting the Chinese threat for another 20 years.

China’s regional ambitions pose one of the toughest national-security challenges America has faced in decades. I remain committed to ensuring that we have the right force structure to deter Chinese aggression by 2025, and I am particularly skeptical of plans that diminish our already-inadequate current readiness. We will not prevail without overwhelming strength — and the Biden administration’s budget request won’t give us that strength.