Shipbuilding and Shipyards, the USSR
source material from the 3rd and 4th Editions, Guide to the Soviet Navy.
To put it simply, the shipbuilding capacity of the Soviet Union is impressive. The USSR has 20 major shipyards (one with more than 2,000 full-time employees) compared to 16 for the US, as well as 700+ smaller shipyards. Four of these shipyards build only warships: Severodvinsk (submarines); Kaliningrad (destroyers and amphibious warships); Petrovskiy (small combatants) and the Sudomeky portion of the Leningrad Admiralty Association (submarines). These yards employee some 215,000 workers (this is considered to be the low estimate by Western intelligence agencies of the 1985-1990 period).
The Soviets build some 6 million deadweight tons (a supertanker is roughly 100,000 DWT by the way) of merchant shipping in the period 1986-1990 with another 4.2 million deadweight tons produced by shipyards in Finalnd, Germany and Poland (all purchased by the USSR).
Now, deadweight tonnage is not the same as full load displacement tonnage, but any way you cut it, 10.2 million tons is a lot of hulls!
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The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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