Nine Carriers vs. None: Why China Builds Ships 230 Times Faster Than We Do — And Who's Actually Fixing It
About this episode
The episode discusses China's superior shipbuilding capacity compared to America's and explores the implications for U.S. naval strategy and industrial capacity.
China's naval intelligence assessment puts Beijing's shipbuilding capacity at 230 times America's. They already have 370 warships to America's 287, climbing to 475 by 2035. America is projected to hit roughly 317. The Navy's own cost review confirms the newest Ford-class carrier is running 18 to 26 months late. And a company that didn't exist three years ago just got valued at ten billion dollars building warships in a cornfield in Louisiana. Mike and Neal open on how America got here: decades of treating industrial capacity as something to outsource while China spent twenty years making maritime industry a national priority. From there, they get into the real fight—whether the Navy's fixation on eleven supercarriers is even the right math. Mike makes the case for fewer supercarriers and hundreds more smaller, distributed ships, pointing to the roughly one hundred carriers, mostly light and escort carriers, that the US fielded by the end of World War II. Neal pushes on what a blue-water Navy actually requires, and whether America's industrial base can support either vision. The founder-and-operator angle comes through Saronic, the Austin-based shipbuilder that just raised a…
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