U.S. Navy facing ‘breakneck pace’ of China’s naval expansion
The U.S.–ROK alliance has long rested on the credibility of American extended deterrence and South Korea’s own growing military capabilities. However, the alliance now faces a strategic challenge: the erosion of the U.S. naval industrial base. The U.S. Navy, once unrivaled, struggles to meet force structure goals due to shipbuilding delays, cost overruns, and limited capacity across its yards. This industrial shortfall risks undermining not only U.S. global maritime power but also the effectiveness of deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, where China’s naval expansion continues at a breakneck pace. It is in this context that the MASGA— “Make America Shipbuilding Great Again”—initiative, which envisions leveraging South Korea’s advanced shipbuilding sector to revitalize U.S. naval capacity, becomes a vital agenda for both Washington and Seoul.
The United States cannot ignore the gap between strategic demand and industrial supply. The U.S. Navy’s own force structure assessments call for over 350 ships, yet it has hovered around 290, with aging vessels facing delayed replacement. China, by contrast, has surpassed the United States in total battle force ships, with estimates suggesting a fleet of over 400 by the early 2030s. Even if U.S. technological superiority remains an advantage, quantity exerts its own quality in naval strategy, especially in potential flashpoints such as the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea. The bottleneck is not strategic imagination but industrial production. American yards lack the capacity to scale up rapidly. This makes external partnerships not a luxury but a necessity.