Why the US Can Never Match Chinese Shipbuilding

America’s $66 billion plan to “beat China’s shipbuilding empire” is not a strategy but an admission of systemic deadlock: unable to compete directly, the US is turning to asymmetric sabotage.

In the video, an American shipyard worker is seen wearing a helmet with a sticker saying, “Go Navy, Beat China,” China — a nation that has never attacked the United States — and instead has been subject to US encroachment, occupation, and war both before and after the World Wars — exemplifying the delusional belligerence US interests encourage among the American public and specifically those among the US military and across its military industrial base.

Detached even further from reality is the notion of the US “beating China” in the realm of shipbuilding where China is reported to build between 1,000 to 1,700 ships a year while the US builds ships in single digit numbers.

While the video discusses plans by the US to invest in shipbuilding through expanding the workforce with training programs, improve worker retention, and through the use of new technology to produce more with less, and even plans to have US proxies build ships for the US — no plans were announced to address the systemic problems creating this disparity in shipbuilding capacity in the first place.

The problems stymying US shipbuilding (and all other productive industries in the US) are problems no amount of investment or technology can solve until the root causes themselves are addressed.

US-China Shipbuilding Gap is a Symptom of Bigger Problems

The atrophy of US shipbuilding has not taken place in a vacuum or overnight.

It has been in decline alongside all other major productive American industries and for generally the same reasons. The US has spent decades prioritizing shareholder primacy (the pursuit of perpetually expanding profits) at the expense of all other considerations — including industrial capacity, national infrastructure, American education, and the workforce the US educational system is tasked with creating.

The US — in pursuit of perpetual profits — has reorganized its economy from a global industrial leader, to a financialized Ponzi-economy building wealth across ledgers rather than upon factory floors.

The US educational system reflects this reprioritization — not only in redirecting students from productive vocations to better serve the Ponzi-economy — but also in the form of maximizing profits to access the education system itself. This has been done through expanding privatization across primary and secondary education, and across all forms of higher education. Young adults find themselves faced with tens of thousands of US dollars in debt before starting their first step in any chosen career.

This has created not only a critical shortage of workers for the US industrial base, it has created a systemic obstacle that must be removed before that critical shortage of workers can even be addressed. Reforming US education alone, is a process that could take a generation to solve.

An atrophied workforce is only one of several systemic problems the US faces. The other takes the shape of national infrastructure, including transportation, energy production and distribution, and the very facilities at which shipbuilding and other forms of industrial activity take place.

Because the US functions as a for-profit system where the “private sector” is responsible for all of the above — and because........

© New Eastern Outlook