China – Page 2 – Gavinsblog.com

The Malacca Strait

Perhaps the most interesting essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs is about China’s energy strategy. David Zweig, Director of the Center on China’s Transnational Relations at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the author of Internationalizing China: Domestic Interests and Global Linkages and Bi Jianhai, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the center.

What I noticed about the essay was often the Malacca Straits were mentioned:

Negotiations for a pipeline that would transport Caspian Sea oil to China through Kazakhstan are slowly moving forward, but China remains heavily dependent on international sea-lanes, especially through the Strait of Malacca and other navigational chokepoints, to bring oil from Africa and the Middle East.

But its growing dependence on oil, especially from the Middle East, will make it more actively concerned with sea-lanes, in particular the Strait of Malacca and the Taiwan Strait, both of which its oil tankers use. Zhang Yuncheng, an expert at the Chinese Institute of Contemporary International Relations, in Beijing, believes that China would face an energy crisis if its oil supply lines were disrupted and that whoever controls the Strait of Malacca and the Indian Ocean could block China’s oil transport route.

Concerns about safety in the Strait of Malacca are not new, but the potential for terrorism to target oil tankers in the region has understandably been taken more seriously since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Although the coastal states of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore have long patrolled the strait to ensure free passage, now that four-fifths of China’s imported oil comes through it, Beijing increasingly shares that interest. The Taiwan Strait has also long been a source of concern, since it is seen as a possible battleground between China and Taiwan were Taipei ever to declare full sovereignty. With China increasingly reliant on foreign resources, Beijing is now also worried that Taiwan could threaten China’s supplies.

But China’s oceangoing navy is small, and with a U.S. naval base at Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, and India’s navy dominating the mouth of the Strait of Malacca, Beijing seems to feel vulnerable about its limited capacity to patrol on its own. President Hu has reportedly commented on the problem, which he calls “the Malacca dilemma,” and considers it key to China’s energy security. He is concerned that “certain powers [read ‘the United States’] have all along encroached on and tried to control the navigation through the strait.”

Speaking at a conference at Hong Kong University last February, he argued that countries along the Strait of Malacca have the main responsibility to protect the strait and that China is willing to cooperate with them. He also expressed the hope that China, Japan, and South Korea could work together to ensure the flow of energy to Northeast Asia. And although he said that he believes U.S. influence is expanding in the Strait of Malacca, he expressed no concern about it. Thus, although Beijing is trying to build its own capacity to secure sea-lanes, it clearly wishes to continue to cooperate with — and sometimes free-ride on — the United States, as well as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, to keep the straits open.

That both governments want stability in the Malacca and Taiwan straits does not pit them against each other — just the opposite. Moreover, developing an oceangoing navy to defend far-off sea-lanes is an arduous and expensive project, which will take Beijing decades to complete. In the meantime, China must cooperate with the United States to maintain its sea-passage security, in particular the security of its energy shipping lanes. This should not be a problem, so long as China and the United States avoid war over Taiwan.

So what you might say. Here is a Wiki reference on the Malacca Straits.

The essay is also full of various jibes and apparent sneering (at least in my estimation) at US foreign policy. For example in relation to the oil trade with Sudan, despite massive human rights violations there:

Beijing has brushed off accusations that it is helping to prop up Khartoum. “Business is business. We try to separate politics from business,” said then Deputy Foreign Minister Zhou Wenzhong in the summer of 2004. “I think the internal situation in the Sudan is an internal affair, and we are not in a position to impose upon them.” Meanwhile, Beijing has deftly protected its oil interests there. In September 2004, it successfully watered down a UN resolution condemning Khartoum, undermining U.S. efforts to threaten sanctions against Sudan’s oil industry. As if oblivious to the tensions created by Beijing’s maneuvering, two highly respected Chinese professors argued this past April that China’s assistance in turning Sudan into an oil-exporting state shows how China is raising standards of living in the developing world.

To their assertion that by buying oil from Sudan, China is helping raise the standards of living in Sudan I say, well, bullshit. Buying oil from a country does not necessarily equate to this, nor it seems, does it ever happen. It is argued that:

According to Homi Kharas, a chief economist at the World Bank, 45 percent of China’s total annual imports come from developing countries, and these sales help developing states offset the increased cost of crude oil and gas.

But surely suggesting that China is doing developing countries a favour is a little much?

I digress. In relation to the issue of the Malacca Stait, the writers note:

In February, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that although the Pentagon was watching China’s growing naval power, he could not confirm reports that in a decade the size of the Chinese fleet would surpass that of the U.S. Navy. But in May, Rumsfeld challenged Beijing to explain why it is increasing its military investments when China faces no major threat. Assistant Secretary of State Hill, for his part, does not perceive China as a serious threat to the United States; he has said that China’s rise is not a zero-sum game for Washington. Others claim that China will need to expand more than its military capacity to remain secure. Bernard Cole of the National War College, for example, has argued that “Beijing will not be able to rely on its navy alone to protect its vital [sea-lanes], but will have to engage [in] a range of diplomatic and economic measures to ensure a steady supply of energy resources.”

Cui Tiankai, the director general of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Asian Affairs Department, has confirmed the view that whatever Beijing’s efforts to boost its navy, China will continue to rely heavily on diplomacy and cooperation. Speaking at a conference at Hong Kong University last February, he argued that countries along the Strait of Malacca have the main responsibility to protect the strait and that China is willing to cooperate with them. He also expressed the hope that China, Japan, and South Korea could work together to ensure the flow of energy to Northeast Asia. And although he said that he believes U.S. influence is expanding in the Strait of Malacca, he expressed no concern about it. Thus, although Beijing is trying to build its own capacity to secure sea-lanes, it clearly wishes to continue to cooperate with — and sometimes free-ride on — the United States, as well as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, to keep the straits open.

Reading between the lines it is safe to assume that once China has a blue-water navy, and that is their aim, the need for diplomacy and cooperation will be lessened. Considering the rumours that China recently started construction on a 78,000 tonne aircraft carrier I think it is safe to assume that in tandem with the growth in GDP of the Chinese economy, the Chinese military will continue to grow until such time that it can safely defend its commercial fleet and secure the Malacca Strait should it need to.

China's "Peaceful Rise" to Great-Power Status

I spent the morning reading essays in the latest issues of Foreign Affairs, as ever there lots, and all make very interesting reading. One that caught my attention in my particular was by Zheng Bijian, Chair of the China Reform Forum, a nongovernmental and nonprofit academic organization. He has also drafted key reports for five Chinese national party congresses and held senior posts in academic and party organizations in China.

His essay concerns China’s future, where he believes China will act entirely peacefully, but will not make exceptions when it comes to doing business with rogue regimes, as the US would wish.

He begins with some facts:

Since starting to open up and reform its economy in 1978, China has averaged 9.4 percent annual GDP growth, one of the highest growth rates in the world. In 1978, it accounted for less than one percent of the world economy, and its total foreign trade was worth $20.6 billion. Today, it accounts for four percent of the world economy and has foreign trade worth $851 billion — the third-largest national total in the world. China has also attracted hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investment and more than a trillion dollars of domestic nonpublic investment. A dozen years ago, China barely had mobile telecommunications services. Now it claims more than 300 million mobile-phone subscribers, more than any other nation. As of June 2004, nearly 100 million people there had access to the Internet.

That is 100 million accessing the Chinese version of the Internet don’t forget.

He goes on to outline 3 primary ‘grand’ strategies:

The first strategy is to transcend the old model of industrialization and to advance a new one. The old industrialization was characterized by rivalry for resources in bloody wars and by high investment, high consumption of energy, and high pollution. Were China to follow this path, it would harm both others and itself. China is instead determined to forge a new path of industrialization based on technology, economic efficiency, low consumption of natural resources relative to the size of its population, low environmental pollution, and the optimal allocation of human resources. The Chinese government is trying to find new ways to reduce the percentage of the country’s imported energy sources and to rely more on China’s own. The objective is to build a “society of thrift.”

The second strategy is to transcend the traditional ways for great powers to emerge, as well as the Cold War mentality that defined international relations along ideological lines. China will not follow the path of Germany leading up to World War I or those of Germany and Japan leading up to World War II, when these countries violently plundered resources and pursued hegemony. Neither will China follow the path of the great powers vying for global domination during the Cold War. Instead, China will transcend ideological differences to strive for peace, development, and cooperation with all countries of the world.

The third strategy is to transcend outdated modes of social control and to construct a harmonious socialist society. The functions of the Chinese government have been gradually transformed, with self-governance supplementing state administration. China is strengthening its democratic institutions and the rule of law and trying to build a stable society based on a spiritual civilization. A great number of ideological and moral-education programs have been launched.

He concludes:

China does not seek hegemony or predominance in world affairs. It advocates a new international political and economic order, one that can be achieved through incremental reforms and the democratization of international relations. China’s development depends on world peace — a peace that its development will in turn reinforce.

Is it just me or does that sound really really nice, but just not very believable?

The end of the affair: Rupert Murdoch in China

So Rupert Murdoch is criticising Yahoo for its policies in China. Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York during the UN summit, the Economist reports that Murdoch castigated Yahoo:

FIERCELY independent media mogul and defender of democracy everywhereâthat was the Rupert Murdoch on display at a Bill Clinton-organised conference in New York on September 16th. The News Corporation chairman castigated Yahoo! for leading Chinese authorities to the identity of a local dissident journalist, subsequently jailed for ten years. He excoriated Beijing’s policymakers as âparanoidâ? for reversing an opening of the mainland media market. And he admitted that his own business in China had âhit a brick wallâ?. In August, News Corporation’s Star TV had its innovative joint-venture with Qinghai Satellite, a regional broadcaster, cancelled; and since July, it has been investigated for illegally selling decoders to forbidden News Corp channels.

What is curious is that despite trying to cosy up to a succession of Chinese Presidents, Murdoch still remains on the periphery of the media landscape, perhaps is because he is not towing the line as Yahoo and Microsoft have been.

Some questions for the Irish government

Richard Waghorne recently noted the staggering statistics about China in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs:

Consider this sobering information: the most recent influenza pandemic, of 1968-69, emerged in China, when its population was 790 million; today it is 1.3 billion. In 1968, the number of pigs in China was 5.2 million; today it is 508 million. The number of poultry in China in 1968 was 12.3 million; today it is 13 billion. Changes in other Asian countries are similar. Given these developments, as well as the exponential growth in foreign travel over the past 50 years, an influenza pandemic could be more devastating than ever before.

I am very concerned about the inevitable flu pandemic that will hit the world, and based on the 1918-19 pandemic we could be in for quite a few deaths. While one can’t directly relate population figures to death rates from the 1918-19 pandemic to now, one could hazard a guess.

The population of the world in 1919 was circa 2 billion, it now stands at over 6.5 billion. Estimated deaths in 1919 were 100 million globally, but that figure could be much higher. Given the ease of travel, increases in medical technology (at least in the West where they can be implemented), and the ratio of poor to rich people in the world, what would be a fair figure to guess at for projected deaths from the next pandemic? I would hazard 500 million, but feel free to point to any studies into this.

So for those of us in the small island at the edge of Europe, what precautions have been taken? I have no idea, so I fired off an email to the NDSC:

Q. Are you aware of any specific precautionary measures the Irish government have taken with regard to a possible or indeed inevitable influenza pandemic?

Q. Are there any plans or trials to license the sale of antiviral drugs such as oseltamivir phosphate, amantadine or rimantadine?

Q. Given that zanamivir is the only licensed antiviral, have the government stockpiled this drug in any way, shape, or form?

Q. How many mechanical ventilators are there available in the Republic, and are there any stockpiled?

Q. How quickly could Ireland gain adequate numbers of vaccines in the event of an outbreak of Type A influenza?

Q. Does the Irish government have any specific emergency planning in relation to an influenza pandemic?

I will let you know how it goes.

Poll: In wake of Iraq war, allies prefer China to U.S.

A little disturbing:

In Britain, almost two-thirds of Britons, 65 percent, saw China favorably, compared with 55 percent who held a positive view of the United States.

In France, 58 percent had an upbeat view of China, compared with 43 percent who felt that way about the U.S. The results were nearly the same in Spain and the Netherlands.

The United States’ favorability rating was lowest among three Muslim nations which are also U.S. allies — Turkey, Pakistan and Jordan — where only about one-fifth of those polled viewed the U.S. in a positive light.

Only India and Poland were more upbeat about the United States, while Canadians were just as likely to see China favorably as they were the U.S.

Why is China seen in such a good light?

Kaplan responds

I meant to post this a while ago, but Atlantic journalist Robert Kaplan has responded to criticism of his recent cover story. He deals with some of the issues raised, that I mentioned here. It seems Kaplan was mostly responding to Thomas Barnett, as he deals specifically with issues Barnett raised. Kaplan notes:

The article has elicited some rants on the Web that express the following concerns. First, that in return for highlighting the military viewpoint, I am granted unusual access to the military. In fact, I am granted access because I am willing to spend six months yearly away from my family, out of e-mail contact for weeks on end, living in tight quarters with enlisted men, on deployments that the public would find fascinating but rarely gets to hear about because they often lack hard-news value. Any reporter, including a left-wing one, willing to do this would find many doors open for him in the military. Second, and related, is the criticism that I have bought into the Pacific Command-Navy view of the world. The PACOM view of the world is one that I judge to be worth knowing, especially as it constitutes one of the big blocks of the China story that has gotten relatively little attention from the media. The PACOM viewpoint offends those on the right who see nothing good about China because it is not yet a democracy, and thus believe that the whole concept of managing and constraining China’s military is doomed to fail without more hard-line policies. It also offends those on the other side of the political aisle, who define any reference to China’s growing military capability as war-mongering. Pacific Command, whatever its shortcomings and internal divisions, falls in the reasonable middle between these extremes. My conclusion is expressed in the article’s last “callout”: that China’s reemergence is natural and legitimate. But PACOM, as a military organization, is forced to think in worst-case scenarios, even as it chooses moderate Bismarckian methods to prevent their occurrence. I have internalized that outlook in my narrative.

Remember, we worst-cased the scenario in our original invasion of Iraq and got the best possible result. But we best-cased the occupation and got the worst possible result. Worst-casing China may be the way to peaceful outcomes.

This article introduces PACOM to the reader. That is probably the most important thing that it does, because I’m making a bet in this article: that PACOM is going to be in the news a lot over the next years and decades. Even if China emerges peacefully, there is going to be relatively more military activity in the Pacific. Yet PACOM is not monolithic, and will change. The new combatant commander, Admiral William Fallon, a carrier aviator, comes from a different tradition than the previous PACOM commander, Admiral Thomas Fargo, a submariner. Admiral Fallon may turn out to be more of a traditionalist in regards to China and other matters. Submariners—who have been very active in the post-Cold War off the coasts of the Balkans, Iraq, and elsewhere—can tend to be a bit more aggressive.

On the subject of aircraft carriers specifically:

We will have aircraft carriers or the equivalent of them through most of this new century. The question is, Should we invest in building even more of them? Or rather, should we just keep upgrading the ones we have in a slow gradual phase-out over many decades? This is something about which there are terrible fights that get very, very technical. The bad thing about putting all your marbles in carriers is that at some point adversaries will be able to penetrate their defense shield. The good thing about them, as you saw during the tsunami, is they’re offshore bases for all intents and purposes.

Apologies to those who have not been following this debate.

Death by a Thousand Blogs

Nick Kristoff’s piece about China and blogging has been making the rounds on the blogosphere – it is a good piece, and well worth a read. To save you clicking the link, here’s the whole thing:

The Chinese Communist Party survived a brutal civil war with the Nationalists, battles with American forces in Korea and massive pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. But now it may finally have met its match – the Internet.

The collision between the Internet and Chinese authorities is one of the grand wrestling matches of history, visible in part at www.yuluncn.com.

That’s the Web site of a self-appointed journalist named Li Xinde. He made a modest fortune selling Chinese medicine around the country, and now he’s started the Chinese Public Opinion Surveillance Net – one of four million blogs in China.

Mr. Li travels around China with an I.B.M. laptop and a digital camera, investigating cases of official wrongdoing. Then he writes about them on his Web site and skips town before the local authorities can arrest him.

His biggest case so far involved a deputy mayor of Jining who is accused of stealing more than $400,000 and operating like a warlord. One of the deputy mayor’s victims was a businesswoman whom he allegedly harassed and tried to kidnap.

Mr. Li’s Web site published an investigative report, including a series of photos showing the deputy mayor kneeling and crying, apparently begging not to be reported to the police. The photos caused a sensation, and the deputy mayor was soon arrested.

Another of Mr. Li’s campaigns involved a young peasant woman who was kidnapped by family planning officials, imprisoned and forcibly fitted with an IUD. Embarrassed by the reports, the authorities sent the officials responsible to jail for a year.

When I caught up with Mr. Li, he was investigating the mysterious death of a businessman who got in a financial dispute with a policeman and ended up arrested and then dead.

All this underscores how the Internet is beginning to play the watchdog role in China that the press plays in the West. The Internet is also eroding the leadership’s monopoly on information and is complicating the traditional policy of “nei jin wai song” – cracking down at home while pretending to foreigners to be wide open.

My old friends in the Chinese news media and the Communist Party are mostly aghast at President Hu Jintao’s revival of ideological slogans, praise for North Korea’s political system and crackdown on the media. The former leaders Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji are also said to be appalled.

Yet China, fortunately, is bigger than its emperor. Some 100 million Chinese now surf the Web, and e-mail and Web chat rooms are ubiquitous.

The authorities have arrested a growing number of Web dissidents. But there just aren’t enough police to control the Internet, and when sites are banned, Chinese get around them with proxy servers.

One of the leaders of the Tiananmen democracy movement, Chen Ziming, is now out of prison and regularly posts essays on an Internet site. Jiao Guobiao, a scholar, is officially blacklisted but writes scathing essays that circulate by e-mail all around China. One senior government official told me that he doesn’t bother to read Communist Party documents any more, but he never misses a Jiao Guobiao essay.

I tried my own experiment, posting comments on Internet chat rooms. In a Chinese-language chat room on Sohu.com, I called for multiparty elections and said, “If Chinese on the other side of the Taiwan Strait can choose their leaders, why can’t we choose our leaders?” That went on the site automatically, like all other messages. But after 10 minutes, the censor spotted it and removed it.

Then I toned it down: “Under the Communist Party’s great leadership, China has changed tremendously. I wonder if in 20 years the party will introduce competing parties, because that could benefit us greatly.” That stayed up for all to see, even though any Chinese would read it as an implicit call for a multiparty system.

So where is China going? I think the Internet is hastening China along the same path that South Korea, Chile and especially Taiwan pioneered. In each place, a booming economy nurtured a middle class, rising education, increased international contact and a growing squeamishness about torturing dissidents.

President Hu has fulminated in private speeches that foreign “hostile forces” are trying to change China. Yup, count me in – anybody who loves China as I do would be hostile to an empty Mao suit like Mr. Hu. But it’s the Chinese leadership itself that is digging the Communist Party’s grave, by giving the Chinese people broadband.

Aircraft Carriers and Robert Kaplan

Kaplan’s Atlantic cover story has stirred quite a hornet’s nest of discussion. It stems from a rather heated response by Thomas Barnett. This led to it being reproduced by praktike over at Liberals Against Terrorism. Matthew Yglesias then got involved in the ‘aircraft carrier’ debate, if you can call it that. He also points to a piece in TAP by Ted Carpenter and Justin Logan. Instapundit later picked up the Yglesias remarks.

While I do take some of the points made in criticism of Kaplan, I would not agree with some of the rather ill-considered arguments of Barnett. One of the main bones of contention is this passage from Kaplan’s piece, which is debated at length over on Yglesias’ blog.

To adapt, the Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile range—all the while developing an offensive strategy based on missiles designed to be capable of striking that supreme icon of American wealth and power, the aircraft carrier. The effect of a single Chinese cruise missile’s hitting a U.S. carrier, even if it did not sink the ship, would be politically and psychologically catastrophic, akin to al-Qaeda’s attacks on the Twin Towers. China is focusing on missiles and submarines as a way to humiliate us in specific encounters. Their long-range-missile program should deeply concern U.S. policymakers.

May

Another post, another month. I see Kaplan’s piece has appeared in the Atlantic. More soon.

China and future wars

Robert Kaplan said some things that got my interest in an interview he did recently on BookTV. He recently spent an amount of time on a US missile cruiser in the Pacific, and believes that the next major military buildup may be in the field of naval power. His remarks are well worth reading:

China is re-emerging as a great power, the way we [United States] emerged as a power in the late 1870s and the 1880s. What happened? We had all this economic dynamism as a result of the industrial north’s victory in the Civil War, and as a result we had Marine landings in the Samoas, in the Hawaiian islands, on the western coast of South America. Because our dyanamic economy, let us go, forced us to go outward to protect new interests, trading interests, and once we were out there in the Samoas and Hawaii suddenly we were interested in Japan and even futher. So we didn’t expand consciously with any nefarious imperialistic motive, it was just a dynamic society and economy forced us outward, and gave us greater ambitions.

You can see that happening in China today. China is not just developing light quiet diesel submarines, but nuclear submarines. Which means it has oceanic, bluewater, i.e. imperial, ambitions throughout the Pacific. They may not be democrats but they want to provide a first world liberating life style for a good chunk of their 1.3 billion citizens, which means protecting energy and sea lanes from the Middle East. And they are not going to depend on the US Navy and the burgeoning Indian Navy to do that….What we are entering upon is a new naval-oriented cold war with China. It need not be violent, it might contain and deter China hopefully without needlessly provoking it. But we will be challenged in the Pacific by the Chinese Navy.

I had Kaplan’s words in mind reading two recent articles.

The first was one in the IHT concerning European and Chinese cooperation over Galileo, the new GPS system. The US is just a little concerned. The piece noted:

Analysts who study the People’s Liberation Army say that the skill China would gain from participating in the system’s development would allow it to close an information gap that now gives the United States the advantage in the precise targeting of missiles and “smart weapons.” The system would also allow Chinese military leaders to greatly improve their command and control of forces in the field.

China’s acquisition of the Galileo system is seen by these analysts as a major setback to U.S. efforts to limit China’s access to advanced military technology. Critics of China’s participation in the Galileo project say that the EU is, in effect, assisting China’s military modernization despite the embargo.

In their latest defense white paper, published in 2004, Chinese military planners make it clear that the use of advanced information technology is a top priority in efforts to make the army a modern force.

“Access to secure navigation satellite signals is absolutely essential to the PLA realizing its vision,” said Rick Fisher, vice president of the Washington-based International Assessment and Strategy Center.

It continued:

Missiles are at the forefront of the Chinese military’s strategy for gaining the upper hand over Taiwan, a democratically governed island that Beijing regards as a renegade province.

Taiwan’s defense minister, Lee Jye, said in Parliament on March 9 that mainland China had 700 missiles aimed at the island.

Modern antiship and antiaircraft missiles are also weapons the Chinese military planners hope would deter any U.S. intervention in a conflict over Taiwan, according to military analysts.

One can see why American strategic interests would be under threat. The second article concerns the state of the US Navy. There has been recent controversy surrounding the stealth DD(X) Destroyer, with Defence Department officials now saying that the total number of ships will be far smaller than originally planned:

The Navy’s new destroyer, the DD(X), is becoming so expensive that it may end up destroying itself. The Navy once wanted 24 of them. Now it thinks it can afford 5 – if that.

The price of the Navy’s new ships, driven upward by old-school politics and the rusty machinery of American shipbuilding, may scuttle the Pentagon’s plans for a 21st-century armada of high-technology aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines.

Shipbuilding costs “have spiraled out of control,” the Navy’s top admiral, Vern Clark, told Congress last week, rising so high that “we can’t build the Navy that we believe that we need in the 21st century.”

The first two DD(X)’s are now supposed to total $6.3 billion, according to confidential budget documents, up $1.5 billion. A new aircraft carrier, the CVN-21, is estimated at $13.7 billion, up $2 billion. The new Virginia-class submarine now costs $2.5 billion each, up $400 million. All these increases have materialized in the last six months.

The number of ships is also set to drop:

Mr. Dur of Northrop Grumman said that new ships’ costs are going up because the number of ships the Navy wants is going down. Five years ago, the Navy foresaw a fleet as large as 375 warships. Now it says it may go as low as 260.

Mr. Dur said his company invested in equipment and people, expecting the Navy to buy ships at a steady rate. When the Navy’s plans “change dramatically from year to year, the assumptions we make are radically altered,” he said. “That generates extraordinary costs.”

If Congress and the Navy would steadily spend more money buying more ships, he said, the costs for each ship would shrink.