America at Sea: Voices That Matter
Capt. John Konrad grew up in the Bronx in the early 1980s, when the city was close to bankrupt and whole blocks were burning. Then his dad took him to Fleet Week. He saw sailors in white uniforms walk off a Navy ship and decided right there that he was going to sea. He went to SUNY Maritime College at Fort Schuyler, worked his way up to captain on large ships, and then founded gCaptain, which has become one of the most widely read maritime and naval news sites in the world.
We asked him the same three questions we ask every voice in this series: what’s working, what’s in the way, and what he’d fix first. His answers covered a hollowed-out federal maritime agency, a fight at the UN over a shipping carbon tax, and a sailor in camouflage that his son mistook for a soldier.
What’s working?
John Konrad: We get into the doom and gloom because so much is broken in the American maritime space, but people don’t realize how much we really have going for us. I’m not just talking about being by far the largest economy in the world, the tech and knowledge leader, having reserve currency status and the most powerful military. I’m talking about real, fundamental maritime strengths. We have the best Navy, the best Coast Guard and the best merchant marine in the world.
Our maritime education system is really strong. About 10 years ago we put serious investment into new training ships for the maritime academies [1]. Go into any shipyard in the United States, any policy meeting on maritime issues, any maritime convention around the world, and you’re going to find graduates of one of the six state maritime academies, the federal academy at Kings Point, or the Naval Academy. You’ll find West Point grads who went into Army watercraft, Air Force Academy grads in logistics at TRANSCOM, and Coast Guard Academy graduates everywhere.
Go into any shipyard globally. I worked for a year and a half at the most impressive shipyard in the world, Samsung Heavy Industries in Geoje, and there are Americans from the American Bureau of Shipping everywhere. Go into any major Chinese shipyard and you’ll find ABS inspectors helping with the plans. Unfortunately, we probably helped them a little too much and transferred the technology.
“When we say the Koreans outbuild us, yes. But the technical expertise is here.”
The largest floating facility ever built, Shell’s Prelude, was built in Korea [2] and cost about as much as an aircraft carrier. The project manager for that project was in Houston. A lot of the naval architecture and design was done at Shell in Houston. We have a seat at the International Maritime Organization. The United States is underfunded and we have a lot of problems, but we have a lot to bring to the table, and people tend to forget that.
What’s the biggest barrier?
John Konrad: There’s a great book, The Abandoned Ocean, about how we abandoned our leading role [3]. After World War II we had the largest merchant marine by far, and it has steadily declined. We haven’t had a coordinated maritime policy since the Nixon administration [4].
We do so much helping our allies, helping Chinese shipyards and helping the International Maritime Organization in London that we forgot we have to stop and help ourselves. When we pushed back on the IMO’s carbon tax, there was huge pushback from the rest of the world. Do you not care about the environment? Yes, we do. But the U.S. merchant marine has only about 86 ships in international service, and those rules were going to hurt us. Our merchant marine is critical to the Navy’s logistics. People in the administration were willing to make a deal: let our fleet take a pass and you can carry on. The answer was absolutely not, and it turned into a confrontation [5].
“It doesn’t have to be like this. We can’t come in at the last minute.”
Almost every other nation has a dedicated ambassador to the IMO. We don’t. Up to World War II we had a Secretary of War and a Secretary of the Navy, who also looked after the Coast Guard and the merchant marine. Truman consolidated it all into the Department of Defense, and we lost that ocean representation.
I’m a merchant marine officer. We fall under the Maritime Administration at the Department of Transportation, a sister agency of the FAA. Once upon a time MARAD was larger and more influential than the FAA. Today the FAA has over 40,000 employees. MARAD has about 800 [6], and more than half of them work at Kings Point. So you have a few hundred people trying to manage an enormous policy agenda and coordinate with the Navy, the Coast Guard, NOAA, Interior, Energy and State. They ignore a lot of their duties because they don’t have the manpower. When someone like me pushes the Secretary of the Navy to call MARAD, because shipbuilding is in their charter, they very often drop the ball.
We don’t need 40,000 people. Maybe 5,000 would be good. Or we take liaison officers from the Navy, NOAA and the State Department and at least temporarily staff MARAD so we can start knocking out the agenda. We have the Maritime Action Plan [7], the Navy shipbuilding plan and new guidance at the UN. Carlos Del Toro did a great job as Secretary of the Navy in the previous administration.
“We’ve got this momentum, but no ability to execute.”
What would you fix first?
John Konrad: We have a Secretary of the Interior. We should have a Secretary of the Oceans, someone who also oversees the Army Corps of Engineers. We have the best waterways in the world and one person should manage all of it. More immediately, I would absolutely appoint an ambassador to the International Maritime Organization to coordinate our response, and maybe that ambassador answers to the Secretary of Maritime.
But I go back to Andrew Lambert’s book on seapower states [8]. Look at England at the height of its empire, or at the countries that do things well now. The Dutch are the best at salvage and dredging, and for decades they’ve printed baseball cards of their tugboat and salvage captains. Korea is extremely proud of its shipyards. It’s in the DNA of the society.
In America we venerate our generals. Everyone talks about Marshall and the Marshall Plan. But Marshall wasn’t the head of the military in World War II. Admiral William Leahy was, as chief of staff to the commander in chief [9]. I’ve asked very senior leaders at the Pentagon who was in charge of the military in World War II. They’ll say Marshall, some will say King, some will say FDR. We’ve written Leahy out of the history books.
“I want to see our sailors wearing sailor uniforms, not camo.”
Today our Navy sailors wear camouflage. I pointed one out to my son Jack, and he said, “That’s not a Navy sailor, Dad. That’s an Army guy.” I love the Army and I support the Army. But what are we doing to get kids excited? What are we doing to teach our maritime history and promote the merchant marine?
Many of our viewers have kids or grandkids in high school. Did you know you can go to Kings Point tuition-free [10]? Or go to a state maritime academy, like I did, join the New York Air National Guard, which will pay for college, and after graduation go merchant marine, Air Force, Navy or Army. You can join Military Sealift Command and make over $200,000 a year supporting our military around the world. It’s an incredible opportunity, and young people don’t even know it exists. When I told people I was going to Fort Schuyler, they said, “What’s that? Never heard of it.”
Now maritime stories are headlines every week: shadow tankers off Venezuela and Iran, the Black Sea with Russia. The system is under strain and we have to buttress it, and not just with money. In France, people follow ocean sailing the way we follow baseball. They made Bernard Moitessier, a Golden Globe sailor from the 1960s, a national hero [11]. I want our kids out sailing in Optimist dinghies. I want movies and TV shows about sailors. We’re an island nation with the best rivers, oceans, harbors and bays in the world.
“I want Americans to know this is your birthright.”
Closing
John Konrad: Thank you for having me, and thank you for honoring our forgotten service, the U.S. Merchant Marine.
About America at Sea: Voices That Matter
America at Sea: Voices That Matter is a conversation hosted by Americans for a Stronger Navy with U.S. Maritime Action and moderated by Capt. Brent Sadler, USN (Ret.). Shipbuilders, mariners, industry, the Navy community and policy experts answer the same three questions about rebuilding America at sea. Views expressed are the speaker’s own, and featuring a proposal is not an endorsement.
Join the conversation on X. What’s working? What’s in the way? What would you fix first?
References
[1] Maritime Executive, “First U.S. Training Ship Empire State Is Delivered to MARAD” (National Security Multi-Mission Vessel program). https://maritime-executive.com/article/first-u-s-training-ship-empire-state-is-delivered-to-marad
[2] Guinness World Records, “Largest floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) platform” (Shell Prelude). https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/113449-largest-floating-liquified-national-gas-flng-platform
[3] Andrew Gibson and Arthur Donovan, The Abandoned Ocean: A History of United States Maritime Policy (University of South Carolina Press, 2000). https://uscpress.com/The-Abandoned-Ocean
[4] Merchant Marine Act of 1970, Pub. L. 91-469, signed by President Nixon. Discussed in Gibson and Donovan, above.
[5] gCaptain, “IMO Delays Adoption of Global Shipping Carbon Tax by One Year After U.S. Pressure Campaign,” October 17, 2025. https://gcaptain.com/imo-delays-adoption-of-global-shipping-carbon-tax-by-one-year-after-u-s-pressure-campaign
[6] U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Maritime Administration: Actions Needed to Address Workforce Challenges,” GAO-25-107460, February 13, 2025. https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-25-107460
[7] Holland & Knight, “White House Releases America’s Maritime Action Plan,” February 2026. https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/02/white-house-releases-americas-maritime-action-plan
[8] Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World (Yale University Press, 2018).
[9] Phillips Payson O’Brien, The Second Most Powerful Man in the World: The Life of Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff (Dutton, 2019). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/548325/the-second-most-powerful-man-in-the-world-by-phillips-payson-obrien/
[10] U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. https://www.usmma.edu
[11] Bernard Moitessier, 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Moitessier