Gauging the credibility of Trump and Modi's plan to build merchant fleets from scratch
 Both India and the United States share an ambition to build an ocean going merchant marine from scratch - or very nearly. Neither has much in the way of ocean shipping that flies their national flags.
India has been content to leave shipping to others. First, the British controlled it, but then the ocean shipping business went to any and all flags to take cargoes away.
Except for the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), which only started serving Indian ports from the 1990s, Maersk Line, Hapag-Lloyd and Evergreen have been there since the 1970s.
The state-owned Shipping Corporation of India (SCI), the nation's biggest shipping asset, only has six containerships with an average size of 4,500 TEU. There are only 84 US-flagged ocean-going containerships with an average size of 3,500 TEU.
As scale matters, let us contrast and compare. The average ship size on the transpacific route is 12,000 TEU while Asia-Europe ships average 15,000 TEU.
Major lines serving India include the Italian-Swiss (MSC) with 801 containerships, averaging 12,500 TEU; Denmark's Maersk with 682 ships, averaging 12,500 TEU; Germany's Hapag-Lloyd has 292 ships, averaging 639 TEU and Taiwan's Evergreen has 208 box ships, averaging 12,500 TEU.
The rush to build a serious merchant fleet by two largely fleet-less major powers arises because of China's growing power projection in the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and beyond through its Belt and Road Initiative as well as its growth of its blue water navy and its ocean going merchant fleet of 5,600 box ships averaging 15,000 TEU.
Aggressively, China has been crowding the Solomon Islands with a flotilla of fishing boats in the South Seas. It has signed a treaty allowing Chinese troops to provide security if Chinese interests are threatened, which has alarmed Australia, which had played that role in the past.
China also claims almost the entire South China Sea based on its "Nine-Dash Line," a claim that encroaches on the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei. The Hague arbitration court ruled that China had no right to made such a claim as it violates the UN's Law of the Sea, of which Beijing is a signatory.
While well short of a declaration of war, flouting the court's ruling by simply ignoring it, the world has departed from the rules-based system for one that employed more forceful means.
"Leaders are usually slow to grasp changes in the relative power of states. Even when leaders recognize these shifts, they must still build consensus in political, military, and industrial circles to pursue new policies," says Zack Cooper in New York's Foreign Affairs magazine.
Despite the typically slow pace of change, leaders do accelerate defence reforms when they recognize a serious external threat, he says. "At moments of heightened concern, it is easier for leaders to cut through bureaucratic and political obstacles in pursuit of needed reforms."
The Trump administration prioritized the threat posed by China and helped shift the debate in Washington. But peacetime reforms are often too few and too late. Many great powers act only after a conflict has begun.
While this appears to have changed, it often takes new leaders with fresh ideas to execute fundamental changes to national militaries. Accordingly, the beliefs, personalities, and perceptions of individual leaders are hugely important when assessing a country’s potential for real defense reform.
The West needs leaders who are willing to acknowledge that reform is necessary and assume the accompanying political risk. China has shifted to power projection in a way that appears to seek overlordship of the eastern hemisphere, the way the Monroe Doctrine has conferred it upon the US in the western hemisphere.
What is strikingly dissimilar in the two cases, is the absence of potential rivals to the reigning top dog in the west and the presence of two potential challengers - India and Japan - in the east. There are also substantial Muslim powers - Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh - ideologically opposed to the Chinese Communist Party, which has persecuted their co-religionists in China.
The western hemisphere is nominally Christian and the biggest non-American power is Canada whose economic force in equivalent to California's, and is, with the exception of the French-speaking province of Quebec, is culturally much the same as the United States.
Restoring a competitive American merchant marine would require building new shipyards as existing yards do not have the capacity or the skilled workers needed to build a commercial fleet to rival others. The best that be expected from current capacity is five ships a year.
To be fit for purpose, a US national maritime strategy would have to treat the merchant marine as vital to national security, equal to its naval power, and embrace the principle that commercial maritime strength underpins naval capability.
Incentivizing private investment is crucial but difficult without state intervention. Only five American yards can build large commercial vessels, while a single Chinese yard surpasses all US output combined.
China’s embrace of power projection has rattled US policymakers. Frank Kendall, former secretary of the US Air Force, warned that the United States was in a race it could lose. “Our cushion is gone,” he said. “We are out of time.”
But China’s People’s Liberation Army requires expensive and vulnerable power-projection platforms, such as aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships, if it is to cross the open ocean and conquer Taiwan by force, says Mr Cooper in Foreign Affairs magazine.
"By contrast, the US military’s main objectives are to deter adversaries from attacking US territory or that of its allies and partners. Maintaining the status quo is much easier than changing it. To do so, it must field smaller, cheaper and more expendable systems in larger numbers, say experts.
It's hard to imagine the US, short of the threat of existential war, building a merchant marine worthy of the US without massive state spending, which it earnestly does not want to do. It is equally hard to imagine, China, beset with its current economic difficulties, do anything - like invade Taiwan - that would jeopardize its export-led economy, the loss of which would pose an existential threat to the government.
But stranger things have happened. |
