To Survive A China Fight, U.S. Navy Must Boost West Coast Shipbuilding

A U.S. Navy Littoral Combat Ship cruises with autonomous prototype vessels.

U.S. Navy

The Navy’s dream of using small, autonomous ships to deter China’s massive conventional naval force is inspiring. The only problem is these Navy strategies depend upon the operational status of the Panama Canal. Without the canal—a shortcut between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans—the Navy’s high-tech dreams quickly become a logistical nightmare. If Navy battle plans depend on fielding lots and lots of expendable craft throughout the Pacific, then the Navy had better get serious about building small craft on the west coast, at scale.

After years of drumming small craft from the fleet, it is good to see the Navy begin to change course. Dispatching lots of small, expendable ships into the Pacific is not a new concept. Take the tiny World War II-era Patrol Torpedo (PT) Boat. Between 77 and 80 feet long, fleets of these small, lightweight PT Boats fought all over the world. In the Pacific, by the end of World War II, at least 212 PT boats had gotten into the fight. To forward-deploy these vessels, the little ships had to wind their way from shipyards on the eastern side of America, transit the Panama Canal, and fan out into the Pacific.

For small craft, America’s game plan for the Pacific is the same today as it was 85 years ago. Virtually every surface combatant and Coast Guard Cutter counts on the Panama Canal to pivot between the Atlantic and the Pacific. As an always-reliable asset, few Navy operators alive today waste time mulling canal contingencies. As an unquestioned component of American battle plans since 1914, far too many of America’s high-tech warfighters take this global choke point for granted.

That is a mistake.

Logistics and infrastructure defense specialists know that Panama’s strategic short-cut between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean is under threat. The Navy must address the ugly fact that, despite all the security America can provide, a diverse array of enemies, rivals and criminals can shut the Panama Canal down at virtually any time. In modern “hybrid” conflict, no complex piece of infrastructure is totally secure.

The only way to fully mitigate the risk of a strategically significant Panama Canal closure is for the Navy to quickly mobilize America’s few remaining shipbuilding-ready sites on the West Coast. If America’s national security strategy is based upon a safe and secure Pacific, then America had better prepare to build lots of ships—particularly expendable ones—on the West Coast.

U.S. Navy Must Boost West Coast Shipbuilding

Real warfighters know that any fight in the Pacific is about managing distance.

Without the Panama Canal, the 4,500 nautical mile transit from the Gulf Coast to the Navy’s West Coast headquarters in San Diego gets a whole lot longer. Aside from adding 10,000 nautical miles to the trip, the detour south forces ships to travel around Cape Horn and through some of the roughest waters in the world.

America’s Navy is unready for this kind of grinding logistical endeavor. U.S. Southern Command logisticians know that supporting destroyers and Littoral Combat Ships in the southern hemisphere is hard enough. Managing fleets of America’s next-generation autonomous ships, and getting them fuel and maintenance support during a forced months-long detour around South America is a far harder task. Given America’s withered afloat support capabilities, shepherding fleets of small craft around Cape Horn is an almost insurmountable logistical challenge.

To limit logistical burdens and reduce wear and tear on transiting small craft, the Navy could take a page from World War II-era tactics, and put their small autonomous ships aboard larger shuttle vessels. In World War II, freighters and tankers often ferried PT boats into action, but still, even with a functional Panama Canal, the Navy needed to allocate a month and a half for larger ships to shuttle PT boats from Panama to the contested waters off Guadalcanal. And, even then, the transit wasn’t entirely risk free. Cranes would drop boats, or the sea would damage vessels sitting topside. The ferrying cargo ships became high-value targets themselves. In 1943, a submarine sank the SS Stanvac Manila as it was ferrying six PT boats to Noumea, at the South Pacific island of New Caledonia.

Modern Naval planners forget that, for small ships, the transit to the World War II battle line was usually an awkward and often grinding mix of travel. Aleutian-bound PT boats, sailing on their own bottoms, needed about twenty days to get from New Orleans to the Panama Canal. After that, they’d be loaded aboard ships for a month-long transit to Seattle, and then, traveling on their own again, they took another month to travel to Adak, Alaska, where they were needed for battle. The strain of the journey took a toll, and, of the first PT Boats in the region, only 75% arrived on time, ready for battle.

America’s Navy is not ready for this.

Put bluntly, the Navy has no plan to manage a long-term closure of the Panama Canal, nor does it have a plan to manage the logistics of getting small ships into the fight. All the tankers, maintainers and escorts needed to support a large-scale autonomous small-ship transit around Cape Horn, are absent. Few heavy lift ships are available to ferry autonomous craft into battle. And nobody in the Navy is anticipating the need to build upwards of 125% of the minimum small ship “requirement” just to mitigate transit-related losses.

The only real solution is to build the smaller craft we will need for a Pacific fight on the West Coast—and prepare to build them at scale.

The math works. In the months it would take to get small autonomous ships from East and Gulf Coast shipyards and into a Pacific fight, a modern West Coast shipyard could simply build several of them. Rather than wonder how to manage a three month transit, the Navy must follow Henry Kaiser’s example and focus on managing all the new ships a modern West Coast shipyard could build in three months. The Navy may forget, but, in the toughest days of World War II, west coast shipyards could produce a Liberty Ship in ten days.

The logistics of pushing autonomous vessels out into the deep Pacific is tough. Helping deter China from preying on Taiwan, the Philippines and beyond is even harder. If the Navy fails to move quickly and boost ship production capabilities along the West Coast, Pacific security will be tied to the operational status of the Panama Canal–and that is simply no longer an acceptable Navy strategy.