U.S. shipbuilding capacity lags vastly behind that of China, according to a leaked slide from the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) that the War Zone reported in July 2023.
The slide, posted by author Joseph Trevithick, showed that Chinese shipyards had a capacity to produce 23.2 million tons of military vessels, compared to less than 100,000 tons in the U.S., making Chinese shipbuilding capacity more than 232 times greater than that of the U.S. The disparity, as of the July 2023 article, appeared to keep growing. U.S. shipyards produced 95% of their vessels for military purposes, and only about 5% for merchant-commercial fleets, whereas the Chinese shipyards produced about 30% of their vessels for merchant-commercial use, giving them a much broader base.
The five leading U.S. shipyards are Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, Virginia; General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego, California; Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine; Philly Shipyard (acquired by South Korea’s Hanwha in 2024 and now Hanwha Philly Shipyard), in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the Austal USA shipyard in Mobile, Alabama. But their orderbooks and ships-under-construction were declining. This is a result of the deindustrialization policy and City of London-Wall Street speculation policy that the U.S. has followed since Aug. 15, 1971, then the U.S. went off the gold reserve/fixed-exchange rate system.
