Yes, that's right.
As I mentioned, western shipbuilding capacity is fairly limited. The Americans—the biggest of them all—are already stretched to their limits, in terms of both shipbuilding and maintenance capacity. Literally anything that any of us can do to help contribute to those numbers is absolutely vital to ensure that China's massive shipbuilding rate is kept in some degree of parity to our collective coalition and allied partners, whether that's in Europe, East Asia, Australia and the rest.
When I say that we need to do our part in contributing to the liberal world order's naval capacity, it's not about us doing it on our own, but in conjunction with everyone else with whom we have very strong foreign policy interests and ties. Everything we do here with naval shipbuilding has a diplomatic component and a foreign policy component. That is something we should leverage and point out more in our diplomatic discussions with our allies.
This goes back to the question of whether we can build these ships faster without risking boom and bust. One reason we're taking so long to build these ships and why they cost so much is that we want to prevent the shipyards from going bankrupt at the end. One way to solve that is to build more ships of different kinds, not necessarily CSCs. There are many other types of vessels that the western powers can use, even if they are cargo ships that can help carry troops and supplies back and forth. It could be more replenishment ships, supply vessels and repair vessels.
No one says that NSS has to begin and end with the ships that were begun back in 2010. We can expand the order, much as Elinor Sloan noted in the last meeting. The Brits have their new shipbuilding strategy, which takes a more comprehensive, nationwide look at what is needed across all sectors, from the federal level, provincial, municipal, private and commercial.