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Hah! I told you months ago. The only surprise was they're giving repair contracts to India. US shipbuilding industry has been neglected for decades, and this was bound to happen.
Sauce: China's massive navy is only getting bigger, and the US is looking overseas for help keeping its warships in action | Business Insider IndiaThe rapid expansion of China's navy has heightened concerns about the availability of the US Navy's fleet, driving Washington to look abroad for help repairing warships that might otherwise face long delays at home.
- For years, the US Navy has struggled to complete repairs of its ships on time.
- Protracted delays heighten concerns about maintaining US naval presence in the Western Pacific.
China has the world's largest navy, with more than 370 ships and submarines in service in 2022, according to the Pentagon latest report on the Chinese military. Officials and experts say the US Navy's battleforce of roughly 300 ships has a qualitative advantage, but its edge has been dulled by protracted delays at domestic shipyards, problems that have the US looking to foreign shipyards to perform some maintenance and repairs its ships have had to leave the Pacific to receive.
The Government Accountability Office said in January that across 10 classes of US Navy ships, the average depot-maintenance delay per ship increased from 14 days in 2011 to 19 days in 2021. That number has improved, but delays persist amid other challenges at Navy shipyards.
The number of US shipyards has shrunk since the Cold War, and at the four public shipyards still in operation, "the condition of their dry docks and facilities is poor, and their equipment is generally past its useful life," the GAO said in June.