Looking to shipyards in Japan and Korea to repair Navy ships and possibly build ships for U.S. use as the recent icebreaker agreement calls for could meet the “scope and breadth of the Chinese threat,” a key congressional chairman and a Trump administration transition official proposed Saturday.
“We have to look at like-minded allies,” Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Select Committee on China, in deterring Beijing.
Robert Wilkie, a former Pentagon personnel chief who is working on the transition, said, “we probably have 10 shipyards working” in the United States now. “Absolutely, we should [have] in shipyards in Japan for repairs.” He added the United States needs to upgrade its presence in polar regions.
Last month, the United States, Canada and Finland signed an agreement on sharing technology on building icebreakers and maintenance.
Using Ottawa as an example of what can happen to the United States, Wilkie, who said several times he was not speaking for the transition team, said, “Canada is no longer a three-ocean power. …Their shipbuilding has cratered.”
Ottawa is looking abroad to build a modernized submarine fleet. Irving Shipbuilding in Halifax has the contract for its new frigates.
Earlier this year, USNI News reported Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro called for more allied foreign investment in U.S. shipyards and doubled down on criticizing the build rates of U.S. shipyards. Del Toro had just toured both the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipyard in Yokohama and South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean and HD Hyundai shipyards during a western Pacific trip. He encouraged Japanese and South Korean shipbuilding outfits to invest more in both U.S. commercial and naval shipbuilding.
“We have to embrace our allies, even more closer,” Wilkie said to maintain existing ships and possibly help build the future fleet.
With its modern shipyards, China has produced 370 vessels in naval or coast guard service. It also maintains the largest merchant fleet that is still expanding.
Speaking at the Reagan National Security Forum in Simi, Calif., Saturday, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti said the nation must be “looking for creative solutions not just in shipbuilding, [but also] in weapons production.”
The question that has to be answered is “how do you really get people interested” in working in the trades – electrician, plumbing, carpentry, etc. – to rebuild America’s defense industrial base, she said.
Horacio Rozanski, president of Booz Allen Hamilton, said the reality is “there’s never going to be enough money” to do everything. The Pentagon needs to set priorities, as the first Trump administration did in setting up Operation Warp Speed to develop and field vaccines to save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That produced extraordinary results and failures were expected” as the process got underway to its fielding. “The system we live in [is designed] to eliminate and reduce risks at all costs” that actually raise costs, stymie innovation and slow delivery.
Wilkie pointed out Operation Warp Speed worked because Trump invoked his emergency powers to focus the government on producing the vaccines.
Rozanski added, “we need to take a lot more risks [in industry, as well as the government].
In addition, “we need cheaper things to go after [an enemy’s] exquisite things by the thousands,” Army Gen Bryan Fenton, head of Special Operations Command, said. This is one goal in the Pentagon’s Replicator program.
“Ukraine has shown us the way on the conventional side and high-tech side” how to do that quickly and without cost overruns, Wilkie added. He pointed to Army Gen. George Marshall during World War II understanding the value of having large numbers of the shallow-draft boats being built by Andrew Jackson Higgins in New Orleans.
“We’ve been down this road before,” Wilkie said.
