Biden Letting Communist China Overtake US Navy To Focus On Climate Change

A key United States senator is warning Americans that Joe Biden is letting the United States Navy deteriorate and allowing Communist China to begin controlling the world’s seas, while liberals instead focus what’s left of America’s military on fighting so-called “climate change.”

U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) and ranking member of the Readiness and Management Support Subcommittee, “sounded the alarm this morning in an interview on Fox News’ America Newsroom over the dramatic reduction of the U.S. Navy fleet and the shipbuilding crisis that has exponentially worsened under President Biden’s watch,” Sullivan’s office announced in a statement.

Sullivan “warned that the United States is now being ‘overmatched’ by our adversaries, including China, whose 370 combatant ship fleet already exceeds the United States’ 293 combatant ship fleet. China’s Navy is also poised to dramatically grow in the coming years while the Biden administration has forecasted further cuts to the U.S. Navy fleet.”

Sullivan “also called for a return of the ‘peace through strength’ policies embraced by previous Republican presidents, including President Donald Trump, and noted the dangers posed by President Biden’s Navy Secretary, Carlos Del Toro, who ‘is not focused at all on shipbuilding,’ and ‘focuses more on climate change,’” the statement continued.

The following is a partial transcript of Sullivan’s interview with Fox News’ Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino:

BILL HEMMER: The U.S. military is said to be unveiling a so-called hellscape strategy if China were to invade Taiwan. It calls for the use of thousands of drones. Republican Senator Dan Sullivan just got back from a trip to Southeast Asia. He’s with us in person. Good morning to you. Taiwan’s president, a lot of others over there as well. Admiral Samuel Paparo—he’s the commander of U.S. INDOPACOM. He said, “I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities. I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything.” You want to flesh that out?

SENATOR SULLIVAN: Well, look, I’m a big fan of Admiral Paparo. He just started in the job, and he’s aggressive, and I like his aggressiveness. But I was over there meeting with the Taiwanese leadership, and then we moved over to Singapore to meet with allies that we have in the INDOPACOM region. But, Bill, here’s the challenge: Our shipbuilding capacity is in a crisis and the U.S. Navy is dramatically shrinking. So, Admiral Paparo—this is a great plan, but we don’t have the Navy to execute that at all. The Biden Navy—let me just give you some of the numbers—has gone from 293 ships to 280 ships by 2027. That’s when Xi Jinping says he wants to be ready for an invasion of Taiwan. Meanwhile, China’s shipbuilding is going to go to over 400 ships by 2027. We are being outmatched in a huge way. And I know Admiral Paparo is very concerned about that. I’ve spoken to him.

DANA PERINO: You just basically laid out these numbers here. So people can see just the vast amount of size. Why is it so important for us to have ships like this? That might sound like a simple question, but we’re in the department of asking dumb questions. I mean, the answer is obviously what it is, but I want to hear you explain to the American people—why does this matter?

SULLIVAN: This matters hugely, right? With regard to our interests in the South China Sea, in the INDOPACOM region. This is the entire U.S. Navy, Dana, that I’m talking about that is shrinking dramatically. Meanwhile, our main adversary, China, is going through the biggest peacetime build-up of the military in history. This is what happens when you have an aggressive dictator who sees an opportunity. Our weakness is going to be provocative, as it always has been. And here’s the deal—the Secretary of the Navy is not focused at all on shipbuilding. Neither is the Biden administration. They’re not focused on warfighting. This Secretary of the Navy focuses more on climate change, if you can believe that, than he does on warfighting and shipbuilding. When you show this kind of weakness with an adversary, it invites chaos and we’re seeing that all over the world.

HEMMER: If Trump were to win in November, how would it change?

SULLIVAN: I think, right now, I’m heading back to DC in the next hour. We’re going to be marking up the Defense Authorization Act. A bunch of us—by the way, a bipartisan group of senators—have major amendments to try to fix our shipbuilding. I think this would be a great initiative. A number of us have been talking about this already with members we think of the incoming Trump administration. Hopefully, President Trump certainly wins in November, but this would be a very important initiative that I think is tailor-made for President Trump. Think about this, in terms of Republicans—whether it’s Teddy Roosevelt, with his great white fleet; whether it’s Reagan; who built a 600-ship Navy—this is exactly what Republicans do: Peace through strength.

HEMMER: When we went to the Arctic a couple of months ago, one of the things they talked about was icebreakers. Putin had, they told us 39. [Senator Sullivan says] 54, some of them are nuclear powered…

SULLIVAN: …and almost all are weaponized.

HEMMER: We have two and one’s broken in drydock and they’re run by the U.S. Coast Guard.

SULLIVAN: I mean, we, again, are overmatched in so many parts of the world. The Arctic, of course, is my home, right? That’s Alaska. But the Russians and the Chinese, in terms of naval assets, are over-matching us all over the world. We have to fix it. We’ve done this before. We know how to build ships. We know how to build a military. But right now, with this administration—every year, President Biden has put forward a budget that shrinks the Army, shrinks the Navy, shrinks the Marine Corps. That is exactly the wrong message to be sending Xi Jinping and Putin and the Ayatollahs in Iran.

HEMMER: It seems like an issue that kind of goes under the radar.

PERINO: Well, and if Republicans do win more of these seats in the Senate, you could have at least two additional veterans who are then maybe more military minded and can help you get that across the finish.

SULLIVAN: We have some great candidates, and we’ll get back to peace through strength when President Trump takes the White House and Republicans take the Senate.

HEMMER: Thanks for coming in today.

SULLIVAN: Thanks again.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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