It means China has amassed the capacity to outbuild the United States not just in warships but in merchantmen, and by a gaping margin. The slide purports to show that China can manufacture over two hundred times the shipping the United States can, measured by tonnage. Joe Trevithick pores over a slide from an Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) presentation about the future of transpacific strategic competition. This old, sore subject comes to mind now because of a story over at The War Zone last week spotlighting the disparity between U.S. Admitting you have a problem represents the first step toward finding a solution.Īnd we do have a problem. Sobriety may have taken hold regarding the naval balance. Numbers and tonnage could ultimately be on China’s side. Navy by ship count, a margin that will only widen in the coming years, while at the same time narrowing the gap in tonnage. You don’t hear this undead talking point much anymore, thankfully, now that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy has surpassed the U.S. Navy outweighs likely antagonists, it’s therefore predestined to triumph-even though Congress and presidential administrations have shortchanged shipbuilding accounts for decades. It’s a kind of rhetorical fudge factor, letting skeptics argue that because the U.S. This walking-dead talking point-that the navy that weighs the most wins-finds special favor among those averse to devoting more funding and resources to shipbuilding. The number of ships in the inventory somehow doesn’t matter much. This particular ghoul is the fallacy that a navy’s combined tonnage-the amount of water its hulls displace-is somehow the decisive factor in naval warfare. You shoot it down coming from one commentator or institution and ten or a hundred others repeat it anyway. Zombie in this context meaning an idea that’s hard to kill. At last: I think a zombie has been slain.
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