I am no expert on the U.S. Navy, but our navy has eleven aircraft carrier strike groups with state-of-the-art jets deployed throughout the world. Each strike group is accompanied by numerous destroyers, cruisers, frigates, submarines and supply ships with the latest laser technology and hypersonic missiles.
In stark contrast, Communist China presently has only three aircraft carriers and is currently working on a fourth one.
In addition to our eleven aircraft carriers, the U.S. has sixty-four (2023) of the most advanced nuclear submarines in the world, comprised of ballistic missile submarines, guided missile submarines, and attack submarines. Whereas Communist China only has twelve (2025) nuclear-powered submarines, which are technologically inferior to U.S. submarines.
The sun has never set on the American Navy or Pax Americana since 1945.
Our satellite technology is also second to none in spotting troop and naval buildups and other military threats, especially in the shallow Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.
After reading Senator Todd Young’s semi-alarmist column in the New York Post on May 7, I was immediately reminded of when presidential candidate John F. Kennedy falsely accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower of a so-called “missile gap” during the 1960 presidential election, when in fact, there was none.
It was all a big lie, and Kennedy knew it.
Senator Todd Young’s (R-IN) article was entitled, the “U.S. has surrendered the seas to China — here’s how to win them back.” The article’s title was extremely misleading.
Young’s assertion is only true in regard to the Communist Chinese merchant marine, which the U.S. can significantly catch up by 2035.
Young was correct in stating that “China now possesses the world’s largest commercial fleet — 5,500 vessels strong, with a thousand more built annually.” That has been true because of the huge unfair trade imbalance in the trillions of dollars that has existed between our two countries for the past twenty-five years, not to mention the “debt-trap diplomacy” of the Belt and Road Initiative and lack of U.S. investment in the Third World since 1991.
Young stated, “America’s rusted maritime sector is a pending national disaster.” That is again true because we lost much of the manufacturing sector of our economy in the last forty years with much of it transferred to Communist China. We do not have nearly as much to export to other countries like we once did from 1945 to 1970.
We have to start putting something in our merchant marine ships besides soybeans, corn, wheat, wood, or soldiers. Until the U.S. revitalizes its manufacturing base and decides to become less dependent on foreign merchant ships, we will never have much of a need for a bigger merchant marine fleet.
Plus, there is the consideration that a 250-vessel merchant fleet will only put the U.S. deeper and deeper into national debt, which is now approaching $37 trillion.
Establishing “an expansion of the U.S.-flagged international fleet to 250 ships by 2035″ is an admirable goal, but the U.S. must FIRST increase its manufacturing sector of the economy in order to put American exports on these ships.
In 2024, the trade deficit between Communist China and the U.S. was approximately $295 billion, and it has been almost identically that bad or much worse since 2000. This occurred because of corporate and political pursuit of globalism, stupidity, and Wall Street’s focus on short-term profits beginning in the late 1990s.
Bill Clinton’s and George H.W. Bush’s objective, along with their successors, was to make the U.S. a service economy in the naive hope of liberalizing and pluralizing China’s political system, which in retrospect has been a huge failure if not a disaster. Their policies both began the eroding of the American middle class and created another powerful Cold War adversary.
Fortunately, that is about to change in the near future when fewer imports will be needed from Communist China as the U.S. obtains a fair-trade deal from Beijing, and we slowly revitalize both our manufacturing base and shipbuilding industry. Once domestic U.S. manufacturing revives in the next ten years, more merchant ships will definitely be needed for American exports.
Unfortunately, what Young’s article did not mention is that Communist China has built a massive number of merchant ships because it might be preparing for a future invasion of Taiwan. Many of these commercial vessels could easily be converted to military transport ships before the invasion of Taiwan and its subsequent occupation.
In the meantime, it is time to decouple our economy from Communist China as much as possible, and greatly lessen our dependence on such vital industries as pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, semiconductors, electrical machinery, consumer goods, apparel, rare earth minerals, smartphones, electronics and many other industries, and bring them back to the U.S. as soon as possible. After all, the U.S. was never dependent economically on the Soviet Union or had so much intellectual property stolen from our country during the Cold War from 1945 to 1991.
Our naive belief that increasing China’s economic standard of living would also increase political democracy or freedom in Beijing has utterly failed. The U.S. needs to economically isolate Communist China as much as possible in the future.
Increasing our merchant marine fleet to 250 ships by 2035 is an ambitious goal, and it should be initiated as soon as possible. In the meantime, despite our lack of a sizable merchant marine fleet, I do not think there is one U.S. admiral who would ever exchange our navy for Communist China’s navy.
Robert L. Maronic