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Buying submarines from China would be faster than waiting for America

The fastest way to get a new submarine right now is to buy one from Beijing. Nobody in Canberra will say that out loud, so I will.

Here is why. Between 2020 and 2025 the US Navy commissioned about 27 ships and submarines into its battle force. Over the same five years China commissioned more than 100, including at least 14 submarines and a long run of major surface combatants. USNI’s Proceedings has been tracking that gap year on year, and every edition tells the same story: China’s navy keeps growing while America’s shipyards fall further behind.

That gap matters to Australia in a very specific way. We scrapped a $90 billion contract for French conventional submarines in 2021 to join AUKUS, betting that Washington could build us something better and sooner. Three years on, “sooner” is the part quietly disappearing from the sentence.

The build rate that keeps missing its own target

The US Navy has procured Virginia-class attack submarines at a planned rate of two a year since 2011. It has never actually hit that number. Since 2022 the real rate has slipped to about 1.1 to 1.2 boats a year, according to the Congressional Research Service’s latest report to Congress. To free up three to five of those boats for Australia in the early 2030s without shrinking the US fleet, the yards need to reach 2.33 a year. Nobody thinks that is close.

ABC News reported in April that a critical multi-year Virginia-class contract, authorised by Congress back in December 2023, still had not been signed 28 months later. The last comparable contract took 20 months. Submarines that took five to six years to build in the early 2000s now take nine to ten. Production in 2024 landed at 1.15 boats, below even the reduced target analysts had already downgraded to.

Where that leaves the “second hand” subs

Australia’s slice of AUKUS Pillar 1 was never glamorous: three to five used Virginia-class boats, sold off before the US Navy’s own replacements arrive, with the first transfer pencilled in for the early 2030s. That plan only works if the US can build fast enough to replace what it hands over. At the current rate, it cannot. The Navy’s own numbers put its battle force at around 296 ships today, dropping to a budgeted 287 next financial year, while China’s fleet has already passed 370. A leaked Office of Naval Intelligence slide, first reported by The War Zone, put China’s shipbuilding capacity at more than 200 times America’s.

None of that is a reason to trust Beijing with anything. The entire point of new submarines is to hedge against a more assertive China in the Pacific, not to shop with it. But there is something bleakly funny about a strategy built entirely on American industrial capacity, at the exact moment that capacity is the most obvious weak point in the plan. The country we are counting on to out-build China cannot currently out-build its own targets.

Call it what it is. A slow shipyard is not just a procurement headache, it is a scoreboard. And right now the scoreboard reads like one more data point on an empire past its shipbuilding prime.

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