When does shipbuilding capacity become naval combat capability?
A shipyard can build a ship. But at what point does the ability to build ships become actual naval capability?
I have been thinking about the gap between the two.
A warship has to be designed and built, of course. But then it has to be armed, crewed, maintained, supplied, trained and integrated with other ships before a navy can actually fight with it.
In other words:
Shipbuilding capacity is not yet fleet readiness.
This question unexpectedly brought me back to Admiral Yi Sun-sin in Korea in 1591.
What interests me increasingly about Yi is not only what happened after the Japanese invasion began in 1592, but what had to exist before his first naval battle.
Ships had to be available and maintained. Weapons had to work. Crews had to be trained. Supplies had to be secured. Signals and command had to function.
And then those ships had to do something much harder than simply exist.
They had to move and fight together.
These were sail-and-oar vessels operating in the confined and often strong tidal waters around Korea’s southern coast. There was no radio, GPS or digital command network. Yet Yi’s fleet eventually demonstrated that ships, crews, weapons, signals, command and practiced maneuver could function together as a system under combat conditions.
That makes me wonder whether we sometimes measure naval industrial capacity too close to the shipyard gate.
Perhaps there are really two different questions:
How quickly can an industry build a warship?
and
How quickly can a navy turn that warship into part of a combat-ready fleet?
For people here who actually work in naval architecture, shipbuilding, repair or shipyards: where do you think the shipbuilder’s contribution to readiness ends—and where does the navy’s begin?