Given the increasingly competitive environment, the US needs to redouble efforts to stay ahead of its adversaries, he said.

“They steal a lot of stuff from us. It allows them to leapfrog us in ways we haven’t quite figured out how to deal with,” Modly said. “That technology gap is going to get closer and closer.”

US President Donald Trump has made increased military spending a priority and called for a fleet expansion to 355 ships, up from 295 today. Modly, a US Naval Academy graduate and pilot, said it would be several years at best before the navy reached that target.

And the absolute number is less important than the fleet’s capability, he said, adding that the average cost of US naval vessels has doubled to more than US$2 billion since the military build-up in the 1980s during Ronald Reagan’s administration.

US patrols in South China Sea hit record high in 2019

The US Navy currently has a budget of around US$200 billion. Before asking for more, it needs to make better use of what it has, Modly said. An audit recently turned up a warehouse in Florida filled with US$150 million in aircraft parts the agency didn’t know it had, allowing the navy to get several grounded aircraft airborne.

The fleet is now around 80 per cent “mission capable” – meaning that eight out of 10 ships could respond immediately in a crisis – up from 45 to 55 per cent two years ago, he said. And ship maintenance was 900 days behind schedule last year across the entire fleet, down from 1,700 days in 2018.

But there is still much room for improvement, he said. Toward that goal, the navy is bringing in more outside expertise, including officials from Southwest and Delta airlines to improve aircraft maintenance, said Modly, a Harvard Business School graduate and former PWC management consultant.

The navy also needs to improve its technological game, a process that will eventually save money even as spending on equipment increases in the short term. The navy’s chief information officer, a position the service didn’t have a few years ago, recently concluded that much of the basic equipment is 10 to 12 years old.

As if to make the point, Modly said, he was working on a report about information management strategy a couple of weeks ago. “My computer went down,” he said. “It crashed on me. In the Pentagon. We have a lot of work to do to improve our infrastructure.”

On Friday, the US Pacific Fleet said in a statement that a Chinese destroyer directed a laser at an American maritime patrol aircraft over the western Pacific Ocean last week, behaviour the US Navy described as “unsafe and unprofessional”.

Modly did not address the incident directly. But he said China’s focus on building bigger vessels able to sail farther from its shores is allowing it to expand its regional influence as seen by its island building in contested territory recently in the South China Sea.

“Of course we’re very alarmed by them becoming more aggressive there,” he said. “It’s alarming with respect to the growth of their navy, the growth of their missile programmes, etc.”

“They would not do well against us right now,” he said. “But I’m less concerned about right now than I am 10 years from now.”

Growing rivalry between China and US plays out in military war games

Zack Cooper, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the US naval lead over China may be a decade in a full-scale conflict over Taiwan, for instance. But in other scenarios, such as the domination of South China Sea territory, Beijing could catch up much faster given its rapid fleet expansion, he said.

Beijing certainly has stolen huge amounts of US advanced defence technology, although it’s struggling to integrate much of it and master complex command and control systems required to make full use of it, Cooper said.

“But they are catching up technologically, and are even ahead in cases where they’ve invested and we haven’t,” especially anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles, he added.

Modly said the US Navy was watching the growing military ties between Beijing and Moscow, particularly in the Arctic. But “they have their own challenges,” he added without elaborating.

He also declined to say how many aircraft carrier strike forces the US would like to have in the Pacific, adding that more information on the issue would be available soon.

Developing unmanned vessels and expanding the use of artificial intelligence is a priority, he said. But such vessels are not necessarily less expensive than their manned cousins given the number of people needed to support them elsewhere, he said, not to mention the challenge of trying to integrate them into the existing fleet.

“It’s unmanned but not really,” he said. “There are people involved.”

Another priority, he added, is building more smaller ships, including frigates. Allies in the Indo-Pacific region and elsewhere often lack the type of ships able to integrate with US aircraft carrier groups. Smaller US vessels, on the other hand, work better for joint training exercises with many of these countries, he said.