National Interest

by James Holmes

    During World War II, Japan’s fleet was large and qualitatively peerless, but unsupported by a broader defense-industrial base. The United States finds itself in the same position today.

    Talk about an acute case of role reversal: the US Navy in 2026 has taken the place of the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1941.

    During the lead-up to Pearl Harbor, Japan fielded the best marine fighting force in the world on a ship-for-ship, plane-for-plane, munition-for-munition basis. After demolishing the US Pacific Fleet battle line at Pearl Harbor, it rampaged across the Indo-Pacific for six months, conquering a vast swath of the earth’s surface. But Japan had meager industrial capacity to manufacture new or repair damaged ships and planes. The differential equation was ruthless: Japan lost shipping—much of it to American submarine warfare—at a far faster rate than its domestic industry could produce replacements.

    In other words, the Imperial Japanese Navy was excellent, yet brittle. And when confronted with an antagonist whose factories had started turning out mountains of good-enough armaments, it could not keep up. Quantity had a quality all its own in the Pacific War.

The industrial mismatch produced catastrophic results for Japan. In our era, will the US Navy fare better against China’s navy—an antagonist backed by a maritime-industrial complex boasting over 200 times America’s shipbuilding capacity

• Replenishment Matters More than Raw Strength

    I hope so—but hope is not a strategy. Something fundamental is at work in the US-China strategic competition. A friend, former colleague and naval aviator liked to propose an intriguing thesis in the classroom. He maintained that the combatant better able to regenerate combat power after suffering battle damage was the likeliest victor in war.

    There’s profound truth to this. The Imperial Japanese Navy had little capacity to regenerate lost strength, chiefly because of industrial and logistical shortfalls. Conversely, the World War II-era US Navy could take immense punishment and come back bigger and stronger. It was antifragile. Fast forward to today and China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy, the world’s most numerous armada, is the contestant that looks antifragile.

    The Japanese precedent is discomfiting. Maintenance, repair and overhaul is in a parlous state within the US maritime industry. That’s true even today, in relatively placid times. Think about how shipyards struggling to keep up with the demand in peacetime would cope with the vastly more stressful environment of war. In wartime, the sea services—the US Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard, not to mention the Merchant Marine—will need to keep the current fleet steaming, while at the same time replacing ships sunk and repairing ships incapacitated in battle. The differential equation between industrial production and battle losses—a stalwart ally during World War II—has transfigured into a grim foe.

• Understanding America’s Shipbuilding Shortfall

    A report issued by the watchdog Government Accountability Office (GAO) early last year details the sea services’ plight. Seldom do GAO reports make comforting reading and this one is doubly disquieting. The report notes in GAO’s usual clinical style that the US Navy fleet has remained stagnant in numbers for over two decades, in spite of a near-doubling of the shipbuilding budget and a congressional mandate to bulk up the fleet. It observes that, at the time, new-construction combatants were being delivered to the Navy between eight and 38 months late. This included submarines, arguably the Navy’s foremost competitive advantage against China and other peer adversaries.

    No area of the force was exempt from these delays. The Columbia-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine, the Navy’s top acquisition priority, faced a 12- to 18-month delay. Virginia-class attack submarines, the centerpiece of the AUKUS arrangement as well as US naval strategy, were behind schedule by 24 to 36 months. The surface fleet, including Ford-class carriers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, was in similar straits. Last fall, the Trump administration despaired of the Constellation-class frigate and canceled the program in favor of a substitute that—officialdom hopes—will be delivered on time, on budget and in bulk.

    For perspective’s sake: measured from Pearl Harbor to the dropping of the atomic bombs, World War II in the Pacific raged for a total of about 44 months.

    If 2027 is indeed the pivotal year in US-China strategic enmity, as many within the Beltway believe, such figures augur ill.

    The good news is that the sea services, their political masters in the Trump administration and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle concede that American sea power has a problem. And admitting you have a problem constitutes the first step toward a solution. Revivifying the domestic industrial base is one obvious step. Another long-delayed step is reaching out to allies, partners and friends—in particular skilled shipbuilders like South Korea and Japan—for help.

    America needs hulls displacing water. Let’s deposit hulls in the water by whatever means necessary—and avoid Imperial Japan’s fate.