[maxglute]

I think USNI recently released report that PRC now has 630x more ship building capacity (up from 300x estimate last year), Jiangnan Shipyard itself has more capacity than _entire_ US ship building, PRC shipbuilding last year was something like ~40M dead weight tons which is around US 5 year ship building during WW2. All of which is to say US ship building is indeed in the toilets, but also PRC ship building / industrial output is _significantly_ greater than US at her most productive.

IMO which really begs the question... why is the PRC navy so small? Yeah PLAN has the most hulls, but still ~2/3 the displacement. One would expect projected gap would trend to _multiple_ times larger than USN, not just current prediction of PLAN ~400 vs USN ~300 by 2030. Why is PLAN building carriers so slowly? Why are they building lots of smaller surface combatants and about to spam a lot of subs. Why are they not urgently rushing the carrier + large surface combatant displacement game despite being able to build entire USN displacement in a few months. IMO maybe they don't think surface combatants are going to survive in a shooting war either. Maybe US planners knows this to, but can't admit it publically, but directing aquisitions behind the scenes accordingly. Meanwhile you're going to get lots of navy folks who likes their big ships advocate for building big ships, which granted, having at least semi competent shipyards is real need to sustain current USN global posture even if it's not appropriate for a future peer war.