Why the SHIPS Act’s new White House coordination role matters, and why the choice of who fills it should be made in public
WHAT IS THE SHIPS FOR AMERICA ACT?
For readers new to this: the SHIPS for America Act (S. 1541 / H.R. 3151) is a bipartisan, bicameral bill — introduced by Sen. Mark Kelly, Sen. Todd Young, Rep. Trent Kelly, and Rep. John Garamendi — aimed at reversing decades of decline in the U.S. shipbuilding industrial base and the American-flagged merchant fleet. Its core provisions include rebuilding domestic shipyard capacity, growing and training a maritime workforce, expanding cargo preference requirements that favor U.S.-flagged vessels, and establishing a Maritime Security Trust Fund to reinvest industry fees back into maritime infrastructure. Its core provisions are currently riding inside the FY27 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 8800), which is headed to House-Senate conference this September — the point at which what survives into final law gets decided. One of its most structurally important provisions is the subject of this piece: the creation of a Maritime Security Advisor and Maritime Security Board inside the White House.
BACKGROUNDER — FIRST IN A SERIES
This is the first in a series examining the Maritime Security Advisor role created by the SHIPS for America Act — a new White House post that could end up mattering more than almost anything else in the coming maritime revival. This piece lays the groundwork: what the role actually controls, why it was created, and why the decision about who leads it deserves public attention now, before the FY27 NDAA conference resolves it one way or another. Later pieces in this series will look more closely at the landscape of who could fill it, how it fits into the broader package of maritime legislation moving through Congress this fall, and what coordination work is already happening inside the administration to prepare the ground for it.
Most of the public debate over the SHIPS for America Act has focused on ships — fleet targets, funding mechanisms, shipyard capacity. Buried in Title I of the bill, though, is a provision that may end up mattering as much as any of that: the creation of a new Maritime Security Advisor, housed in the Executive Office of the President. If the bill becomes law, this single office could do more to fix America’s maritime coordination problem than any funding mechanism in the bill.
THE PROBLEM THIS POSITION IS DESIGNED TO SOLVE
Right now, no single person in the federal government is responsible for American maritime strategy as a whole. The Navy, the Coast Guard, the Maritime Administration, and Military Sealift Command all operate in their own lanes, reporting up through different departments, with different budgets and different priorities [1]. The National Security Council has directors for regions and for functional issues like counterterrorism — but nobody with a standing brief to ask “what is America’s maritime strategy?” and get everyone else in the building to answer to it [1].
The Heritage Foundation’s own analysis of the maritime legislative landscape makes a related structural point: with four separate bills moving through different committees — SHIPS for America, the Shipbuilding Investment and Workforce Act, the FLEETS Now Act, and the Ready Reserve Force Modernization Accountability Act — the risk isn’t a shortage of good ideas. It’s that good ideas arrive at conference as competing claims on the same floor time rather than as a coordinated package [2]. A standing coordinating office would help avoid that same fragmentation once bills become law and start needing joint implementation.
WHAT THE JOB ACTUALLY CONTROLS
The bill text gives the Maritime Security Advisor real authority, not just a podium. As a Special Advisor to the President, the position chairs a Maritime Security Board that spans every federal agency with a stake in the maritime domain [3]. Its responsibilities include:
Developing, updating, and implementing the National Maritime Strategy [3]
Setting fleet-size targets for the U.S.-flagged commercial fleet [3]
Independent oversight of federal cargo preference programs [3]
Coordinating the national maritime workforce buildout [3]
Setting R&D priorities for next-generation shipbuilding technology [3]
Aligning federal policy to favor U.S.-flagged vessels in international commerce [3]
Protecting U.S. vessels from physical and cyber threats [3]
Put simply, this office doesn’t just advise on maritime policy from the sidelines — it runs point on it, across every department that touches a ship, from the Pentagon to the Department of Commerce to the Federal Maritime Commission.
“A position with real cross-agency authority is only useful if the person in it can actually use that authority — which means the credentials and judgment of whoever fills this chair will matter as much as the statute that creates it.”
WHY THIS IS BIGGER THAN IT LOOKS
It’s worth being precise about scale here. The Maritime Administrator at MARAD is a real and important job — but it’s a single-agency post inside the Department of Transportation, with authority bounded by MARAD’s own statutory mission. The Maritime Security Advisor sits above that, in the West Wing, with a mandate that spans defense, commerce, transportation, and diplomacy simultaneously. It’s the closest thing the American maritime enterprise has ever had to a single point of accountability.
WHY THE TIMING MATTERS NOW
Of the four bills currently carrying the broader maritime revival effort forward, the SHIPS Act’s core provisions have the most institutional momentum — riding inside the FY27 NDAA (H.R. 8800) rather than standing alone as separate legislation [4]. That package is headed to House-Senate conference in September, which means the decisions about what survives into final law — including whether this office is created and what authority it retains — will be made in the next few weeks, not next year [4].
Congress doesn’t create offices like this often. When it does, the choice of who fills the chair first tends to define how much authority the office actually exercises for years afterward. That’s a conversation worth having in public, and worth having now — before conference, not after.
REFERENCES [1] Heritage Foundation research on maritime coordination gaps across Navy, Coast Guard, MSC, and MARAD. [2] The Heritage Foundation, “Maritime Legislation: Explainer and Next Steps,” Factsheet No. 285, August 12, 2026. [3] SHIPS for America Act of 2025 (S. 1541 / H.R. 3151), Sec. 101, Title I—Oversight and Accountability; Senate Commerce Committee, “SHIPS for America Act Section-by-Section,” Apr. 30, 2025. [4] H.R. 8800 (FY27 NDAA), House passage with maritime amendments, 2026; expected House-Senate conference, September 2026.
The Heritage Foundation published a factsheet this month that does something rare in this space: it lays out, in plain language, exactly where the nation’s maritime revival stands and exactly what Congress needs to decide next [1]. We want to highlight one recommendation in particular, because we think it’s the single most important structural fix available to Congress right now and because it’s the kind of nonpartisan, process-focused idea a nonpartisan organization like ours can endorse without reservation.
Heritage recommends that, whether or not the Senate consolidates the current maritime bills into one, congressional leadership should create a Select Committee for Maritime Industrial Revival to coordinate across the committees that currently have jurisdiction [1]. We think that recommendation deserves support from anyone who has watched this effort unfold over the past three years.
The Problem the Committee Would Solve
The maritime revival effort is not lacking for good bills. The April 2025 version of the SHIPS for America Act carries genuine bipartisan support — 29 Senate cosponsors (15 Republican, 14 Democrat) and 140 House cosponsors (75 Democrat, 65 Republican) as of its last recorded action [1]. Alongside it sit the Shipbuilding Investment and Workforce Act, the FLEETS Now Act, and the Ready Reserve Force Modernization Accountability Act — each addressing a different piece of the same problem, each sponsored by different members, and each currently routed through different committees [1].
That’s not a failure of ideas. It’s a failure of coordination. A House amendment to the FY27 NDAA passed with two of these maritime provisions attached, and the whole package is now headed to House-Senate conference in September [2]. Conference is exactly the moment when overlapping, uncoordinated bills either get reconciled into something workable or get quietly dropped in the scramble to close out a defense authorization. A Select Committee — standing up now, ahead of that conference — is the difference between these bills arriving as a coordinated package and arriving as competing claims on the same limited floor time.
Why This Matters Beyond the Bills Themselves
We’ve spent three years arguing that naval readiness is fundamentally a “who pays” problem — allied burden-sharing through the Gulf Act, and a debt-neutral corporate demand signal through the SEAS Act’s Strategic Technology Responsibility Contribution [3]. Neither of those mechanisms competes with what’s already in SHIPS for America. Heritage’s own factsheet shows SHIPS for America’s funding model leans on shipping-side fees — non-U.S.-flagged vessel fees and Section 301 penalties tied to Chinese-built ships feeding a self-sustaining Maritime Trust Fund [1]. That’s a shipping-side answer to “who pays.” The SEAS Act is a corporate-side answer. The Gulf Act is an allied-side answer. None of these ideas need to compete for the same dollars or the same bill number — but they do need a body capable of seeing all of them at once, which is precisely what a Select Committee would provide.
What We’re Asking
We’re not asking Congress to adopt any specific funding mechanism in this post — ours or anyone else’s. We’re asking Congress to create the structure that would let good mechanisms be evaluated on the merits rather than lost to committee turf. A Select Committee for Maritime Industrial Revival, stood up before September conference, would let Congress treat this as the “generational task” Heritage rightly calls it [1], instead of a jurisdictional scramble.
The nation’s maritime revival has been, in Heritage’s words, a bipartisan, bicameral effort since its inception [1]. It should stay that way through conference. A Select Committee is how it does.
References
[1] The Heritage Foundation, “Maritime Legislation: Explainer and Next Steps,” Factsheet No. 285, August 12, 2026. [2] H.R. 8800 (FY27 NDAA), House passage with maritime amendments, 2026; expected House-Senate conference, September 2026. [3] Americans for a Stronger Navy / Center for Maritime Strategy, “Defense Reinvestment as Naval Strategy,” March 2026.
A recent C-SPAN clip of President Trump discussing South Korea has been circulating, and it’s worth pausing on — not for the politics, but for the arithmetic. Trump described renegotiating South Korea’s cost-sharing agreement for U.S. troop protection, contrasting the roughly $3 billion Seoul agreed to pay against an initial ask of $10 billion, and questioning why the U.S. maintains 39,000 troops defending a wealthy ally that declined to assist with a related Middle East operation [1]. He extended the same complaint to NATO, noting the hundreds of billions the U.S. spends defending Europe from Russia [1].
Set aside whether you think that negotiation was handled well. The underlying question — who pays for the protection America provides? — is one we’ve been asking about naval power for three years, and it’s one the country can no longer afford to leave unanswered.
The Number That Changes the Conversation
As of this month, the U.S. gross national debt stands at roughly $40 trillion — up more than $2.8 trillion in the past year alone, or about $7.9 billion in new borrowing every single day [2]. Net interest now consumes nearly 14 percent of federal outlays, a share the Congressional Budget Office expects to keep climbing [2]. Debt held by the public is already above 100 percent of GDP, and CBO’s own long-term outlook shows that ratio climbing toward 120 percent by the mid-2030s absent reform [3].
That’s the fiscal backdrop against which every naval modernization request, every shipbuilding appropriation, and every forward-deployed carrier strike group now has to be justified. Taxpayers are not wrong to push back on open-ended commitments funded by more borrowing. As Washington debates spending, the Navy’s own leadership has been blunt that this is fundamentally a resource issue, with the Chief of Naval Operations citing a Congressional Budget Office estimate that an adequate fleet requires something on the order of $38 billion a year in shipbuilding funding alone [4] — funding that has to come from somewhere.
The Gulf Act: Burden-Sharing Where It Belongs
This is exactly the gap the Gulf Maritime Protection and Burden-Sharing Act is built to close. The Strait of Hormuz example is almost too on-the-nose: the U.S. Navy underwrites the security of a chokepoint that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil, much of it bound for nations that are not proportionally sharing the cost of keeping that lane open. China alone receives well over a third of the crude that transits the Strait, with India, Japan, and South Korea rounding out the bulk of the remainder — while the United States itself, thanks to domestic shale production and a supply chain built on Canada and Mexico, takes in only a small fraction of that flow [5].
The Iran war earlier this year gave us a live test of what happens when that lane actually closes, and the results make the case for burden-sharing sharper, not weaker. China and Japan largely rode out the closure on strategic reserves and pipeline diversification; India surprisingly weathered it too, on the strength of a decade of stockpile-building [6]. But none of that resilience came free. It meant months of elevated prices, emergency reserve drawdowns, and — for economies like Vietnam with thin buffers — real shortages and rationing [6]. Self-insuring against a closed strait is expensive and imperfect. A functioning U.S. Navy presence that keeps the strait open in the first place is the far cheaper alternative — which is precisely why it’s in these nations’ own economic interest to help fund it, not simply a matter of fairness to the American taxpayer. Trump’s complaint about allies who “don’t want to get involved” in guarding their own energy lifeline is, functionally, the same diagnosis the Gulf Act was written to fix. The Act doesn’t ask American taxpayers to absorb more debt to police a chokepoint for other nations’ benefit — it asks the beneficiaries to pay a proportional share for a service that is, by their own recent experience, worth far more to them than its cost.
The SEAS Act: A Demand Signal That Doesn’t Touch the Debt
The Strategic SEAS Act applies the identical logic domestically. Rather than asking Congress to appropriate still more borrowed dollars into shipbuilding, the Act’s Strategic Technology Responsibility Contribution draws a modest, offset-eligible assessment from U.S. companies with the deepest revenue dependence on China’s economy — the same offshoring era that hollowed out American shipyard capacity in the first place. It creates a dedicated, predictable demand signal for shipbuilders, which is the single thing industry has said it needs most to justify capital investment, without adding a dollar to the $40 trillion balance sheet [7].
That “no new debt” framing matters more today than it did when we first proposed it. Fiscal conservatives, China hawks, and taxpayers who are simply tired of watching the debt clock spin are, for once, aligned on the same conclusion: national defense funding mechanisms that don’t require more borrowing are worth building.
Builders, Not Critics
We’re not in the business of scoring political points off a South Korea negotiation. We’re in the business of pointing out that the underlying math — protection without proportional payment — shows up everywhere, from allied burden-sharing to Wall Street’s China exposure to a shipbuilding budget the Navy itself says is underfunded by billions a year. The Gulf Act and the SEAS Act are the constructive answer: mechanisms that ask the actual beneficiaries of American sea power, foreign and domestic, to help sustain it — instead of asking an already over-leveraged taxpayer to do it alone.
References
[1] C-SPAN, “Trump says Kim Jong Un has responded to overtures,” transcript, 2026. [2] Joint Economic Committee (Republicans), Monthly Debt Update, August 2026. [3] Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036, February 2026. [4] Remarks by Adm. Daryl Caudle, CNO, West 2026 conference, San Diego, February 12, 2026, as reported by Janes. [5] International Energy Agency, “Strait of Hormuz Factsheet,” February 2026; U.S. Energy Information Administration, Q1 2025 destination data. [6] Gulf International Forum, “Hormuz Disruptions and Asia’s Energy Resilience,” March 2026; The National Interest, “How China Turned the Strait of Hormuz Crisis into an Advantage,” June 2026; India Narrative, “The Strait That Didn’t Break India,” July 2026. [7] Americans for a Stronger Navy / Center for Maritime Strategy, “Defense Reinvestment as Naval Strategy,” March 2026.
Maritime analyst Dr. Sal Mercogliano recently highlighted a critical dynamic shaping modern trade: “The world is diversifying around China, not away from it.”
While economic headlines often celebrate Western supply chains “decoupling” from Beijing, maritime shipping data tells a very different story. Between 2023 and 2025, Chinese containerized exports surged to regional manufacturing hubs—up 40% to India, 36% to Vietnam, and 37% to Thailand.
Rather than pulling manufacturing out of China’s sphere of influence, companies are increasingly relying on a “China + 1” strategy. Raw materials, components, and machinery are still produced in Chinese factories, shipped to South and Southeast Asia for final assembly, and then sent onward to Western markets.
For the U.S. Navy and the defense industrial base, this isn’t true decoupling—it’s re-routing. And it presents serious risks to American sea power.
The Hidden Risks to the Fleet
Naval power relies on secure, resilient supply chains. The expansion of China’s sub-tier manufacturing network impacts U.S. naval readiness across three primary fronts:
Deep Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Vulnerabilities: Federal regulations strictly forbid purchasing major military hardware directly from strategic competitors. However, Tier-3 and Tier-4 sub-suppliers—who provide basic electronics, circuit boards, and specialized alloys—remain heavily dependent on Chinese inputs. In a crisis, Beijing could restrict exports of critical sub-components, stalling U.S. ship construction and maintenance.
The Critical Mineral Bottleneck: Modern warships depend on Rare Earth Elements (REEs) for permanent magnets, radar systems, sonar arrays, and electric motors. An Arleigh Burke-class destroyer requires roughly 5,200 lbs of rare earth elements, while a Virginia-class submarine requires 9,200 lbs. Because China controls over 80% of global REE refining capacity, shifting final assembly to third-party nations does not resolve this primary vulnerability.
Strained Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs): Multi-leg supply chains (China \rightarrow Southeast Asia \rightarrow U.S.) make maritime trade routes longer and more fragmented. This places greater operational demand on the U.S. Navy to monitor, protect, and maintain freedom of navigation across critical maritime chokepoints like the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca.
Policy Action: The Return of Domestic Industrial Mobilization
Recognizing these deep supply chain risks, federal leaders recently announced the revival of a World War II-era model: the Smaller War Plants Commission (SWPC), spearheaded by the Department of Defense and the Small Business Administration (SBA).
Because roughly 70% of the defense industrial base consists of small businesses, this initiative targets the exact lower-tier chokepoints that threaten naval readiness. By expanding capital access and streamlining support for small domestic manufacturers, the SWPC focuses on critical areas:
Domestic production of microelectronics and legacy chips.
Critical mineral refining on American soil.
Specialized castings, forgings, and shipbuilding components.
Rebuilding the U.S. Fleet requires ensuring American warships aren’t grounded by missing foreign-sourced parts during a crisis. Programs like the SWPC are essential steps toward restoring true maritime sovereignty.
Rebuilding True Maritime Strength
Securing U.S. naval readiness requires moving past the illusion of trade diversification:
Map Deep-Tier Supply Chains: Track sub-tier components to eliminate single-point dependencies on foreign raw materials.
Onshore Critical Refining: Leverage domestic programs to build processing facilities for critical minerals and defense components.
Expand Shipyard Infrastructure: Invest directly in U.S. commercial and naval shipyard capacity so the fleet can build, maintain, and repair vessels independently.
As Dr. Mercogliano’s analysis reminds us, trade routes may shift on paper, but strategic dependencies remain. Rebuilding American sea power means securing the industrial foundation behind every ship, sensor, and sailor.
Take Action for American Sea Power
Join Americans for a Stronger Navy in advocating for policies that rebuild domestic shipbuilding, secure defense supply lines, and maintain a fleet capable of protecting global freedom of navigation.
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If you’ve been following defense news this month, you’ve probably seen the headlines: President Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum on August 13 aimed at overhaul-level changes to U.S. naval power. The directive covers everything from replacing catapult systems on the carrier USS Doris Miller (CVN-81) to planning a fifth public naval shipyard—the first in over 80 years.
But one specific provision immediately ignited a fierce debate across Washington, the defense industry, and naval policy circles: the proposal to temporarily build certain U.S. Navy ships in foreign yards.
To understand why this is happening—and why experienced naval experts hold drastically different views on it—it helps to look past the political noise and unpack the underlying problem.
The Reality: America’s Shipyards Are Bottlenecked
The United States faces an industrial capacity crisis. Domestic Tier-1 shipyards are heavily backlogged. Maintenance delays mean warships spend too much time tied up at piers waiting for repairs, while new construction schedules continue to stretch. Recent fleet incidents—such as the engineering power failure on the destroyer USS Benfold and extended deployment strain on the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln—show how depot maintenance backlogs directly impact daily fleet operations.
Everyone agrees on the core objective: America needs more ships, delivered faster, backed by a resilient domestic industrial base. The debate is strictly over how to get there.
What the “Finland Model” Actually Does
The controversy centers on expanding what policy experts call the “Finland Model”.
First used for U.S. Coast Guard icebreakers, this framework allows a qualified foreign shipbuilder to construct the first two ships of a specific class at its home shipyard. However, this foreign construction comes with mandatory conditions:
Domestic Investment: The foreign company must simultaneously build a new shipyard in the United States or acquire majority ownership of an existing American yard.
Local Workforce: It must hire and train an American workforce.
Tech Transfer: It must license its proprietary shipbuilding technology to the U.S. facility.
Domestic Transition: Every follow-on ship in that class after the first two must be built inside the U.S.
Proponents frame this as a trade: leveraging near-term allied industrial capacity to rapidly add hulls right now, while using access to U.S. defense contracts as leverage to force foreign capital into domestic yards.
The Core Debate: Leverage vs. Risk
This strategy has divided experienced naval analysts into two distinct camps:
The Case For (Speed & Competition): Proponents, including Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, argue that domestic shipyards lack the capacity to rapidly scale on their own. By offering market access to proven international shipbuilders—like South Korea’s Hanwha Group, which bought Philly Shipyard and bid $1.2B for Austal USA—the U.S. can inject foreign capital, modernized techniques, and competitive pressure directly into American shipbuilding.
The Case Against (Enforcement & Sovereignty): Opponents, including naval analyst Hunter Stires and the Shipbuilders Council of America, point out a major structural risk: leverage. Access to the U.S. market is Washington’s strongest bargaining chip. Once the first two hulls drop anchor, that direct leverage drops. If a foreign partner fails to follow through on building out American yard capacity, the U.S. risks losing domestic shipbuilding jobs without securing long-term industrial independence.
“…diverted from American shipyards this Administration pledged to rebuild.” — Matt Paxton, President of the Shipbuilders Council of America
The Path Ahead: Accountability First
This isn’t a simple fight between “buying American” and “outsourcing.” It is a fundamental question of policy design and enforcement.
How do we take advantage of international partnerships without exposing the U.S. industrial base to long-term risk?
That is where legislative solutions come in. Legislative frameworks like the Defense Reinvestment Credit (DRC) under the proposed Strategic SEAS Act aim to close this exact gap. Rather than taking a foreign firm’s future promises at face value, mechanisms like the DRC mandate audited, verified capital milestones on American soil before contracts are finalized or paid out.
As Congress navigates the upcoming National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) conference and the Department of War prepares its implementation plans, the key metric won’t be political promises. It will be who pays, who is held accountable, and whether capital actually lands in American shipyards.
I am not a maritime economist. I am not a Jones Act scholar. I am a former blue-water destroyer sailor who stood watches aboard USS Henry B. Wilson (DDG-7) in the 1970s, and a former telecommunications and web engineering executive who spent three decades watching American industry move offshore — including firsthand business travel to China during the early 2000s tech transfer era. I come to this the way I come to most naval policy questions: as a student, not an expert.
I have a bias, and I want to name it up front. I watched American manufacturing hollow out in real time. So when someone argues the fix for a hollowed-out merchant marine is removing one of the last laws requiring any of it to be American-built, -owned, -flagged, or -crewed, my instinct is skepticism.
That instinct is what sent me digging. Over the past several weeks I’ve read the primary MARAD compliance filings behind the 2026 Jones Act waiver, followed the public arguments of four people who know this issue far better than I do, and engaged two of them directly. What I found didn’t confirm my bias. It refined it.
What the Waiver Actually Is
On March 17, 2026, during the Strait of Hormuz crisis, the federal government waived the Jones Act’s cabotage rules, allowing foreign-flagged vessels to move fuel, fertilizer, and related cargo between U.S. ports. That waiver has been extended twice, is now the longest suspension of Jones Act rules in the program’s history, and by August was being driven substantially by gasoline prices ahead of the midterms rather than the original national-security rationale.
I went to the primary source: MARAD’s own compliance filings, which every operator is legally required to submit within 10 days of each waiver voyage, including a specific field — an “Explanation of National Defense Interest.” What I found in those filings surprised me. A meaningful share of operators listed that required field simply as “Not Applicable.” Most of the rest reused identical boilerplate language, word for word, across unrelated shippers and vessels. That’s not proof the waiver is bad policy. It is proof that its stated legal basis — a case-by-case national defense necessity — isn’t being documented as case-by-case in practice, for a real share of its use.
Four Voices, One Diagnosis
Public debate over the Jones Act has been framed as a binary choice: repeal the century-old law, or defend it as written. I went looking for the strongest version of every position I could find, and heard from four people who do not agree with each other, or always with me:
Colin Grabow of the Cato Institute has built the most detailed public data tracking waiver voyages, and reads it as proof the law suppresses legitimate demand.
Dr. Steven Wills of the Center for Maritime Strategy argues reform, not repeal — that the law is connective tissue between America’s commercial shipyards and naval surge capacity, and removing it without building a replacement trades a flawed foundation for no foundation at all.
Dr. Sal Mercogliano, historian and host of “What’s Going On With Shipping,” rejects both camps. As he put it directly:
“It’s not the Jones Act that’s the issue. It’s our maritime policy. We’ve been asleep at the wheel while China woke up and has seized the reins.”
William P. Doyle, a former U.S. Federal Maritime Commissioner, adds a sharper security dimension — documenting a Chinese state-owned vessel operating in U.S. coastwise trade under the waiver while qualified American tonnage sat idle.
Four different prescriptions. But underneath the disagreement, a shared diagnosis: a shipyard base too thin to survive between crises, a mariner workforce that shrinks every drought cycle, and a country that let China take over 70 percent of global shipbuilding orders while looking the other way.
The Question Nobody’s Asking
None of these four voices, in their public positions, centers a funding mechanism as the answer. That’s the gap I wrote this report to address. Not repeal or defend — who actually pays to rebuild the capacity everyone agrees we’ve lost.
Read the Full Report
I’ve written up the complete research — the MARAD filings analysis, all four positions in full, and where I’ve landed — as a diagnostic report rather than a single post, because the material deserved more room than a blog format allows.
Vice Admiral Thomas J. Moore, U.S. Navy (Retired), ran the command that builds and sustains the fleet. As the 44th Commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, he spent more than 20 years in the design, acquisition, and sustainment of the Navy’s CVN fleet — and served as the CNO’s Director of Fleet Readiness for more than three years.
In February 2025, he published one of the most important — and most honest — assessments of American naval power to appear in recent years. The title says it plainly: “A Path to the Navy Force Structure the Nation Needs.”
U.S. Navy ships moored at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, July 3, 2024, during RIMPAC 2024. Vice Admiral Thomas J. Moore’s February 2025 Proceedings analysis concludes the Navy needs 381 ships to meet current security requirements — nearly 90 more than today’s fleet. (U.S. Navy/DVIDS)
His thesis is equally plain: “The Navy’s force structure is inadequate because the service has been unable to effectively manage new construction and ship retirements.”
Not China’s fault. Not Congress’s fault. The Navy’s own management failures — documented in detail, with receipts.
What follows is a summary of Moore’s argument, why it matters now more than when he wrote it, and what the Shipbuilding Economic Acceleration and Security (SEAS) Act offers as the funding answer his analysis demands.
Three Self-Inflicted Wounds
Moore identifies three compounding problems — each within the Navy’s control, each making the others worse.
1. An insatiable requirements appetite. The Navy has a persistent pattern of designing ships that are too complex, too expensive, and take too long to build. The Zumwalt-class destroyer is Moore’s primary exhibit — a ship whose cost ballooned so dramatically that the Navy decided to decommission several hulls early, before they had delivered their intended service life. The Gerald R. Ford-class carrier required hundreds of millions in unplanned investment after delivery. The Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ship was decommissioned early. In each case, the Navy’s desire for next-generation capabilities produced platforms that couldn’t be sustained at the numbers the force structure required.
His conclusion: “The fits and starts cannot get to 313, let alone 381 ships.”
2. A workforce the industrial base cannot sustain. This is where Moore’s analysis becomes most specific — and most sobering. From 1993 to 2027, the Navy built an average of just 5.5 ships per year. The industrial base shaped itself around that signal. Growing to the 12 ships per year required to reach 381 ships means growing the skilled shipbuilding workforce by a commensurate amount — and that takes years, not months.
Moore is direct about where the constraint actually lies: the problem is not physical shipyard capacity. It is skilled workers. His highlighted conclusion: the current industrial base does not lack the physical capacity to build the required number of ships annually. What it lacks is a skilled workforce in the numbers needed to meet that increase in demand.
That is a critical distinction. More shipyards don’t solve it. More cranes don’t solve it. Only a stable, predictable, multi-year demand signal — giving industry the confidence to hire, train, and retain the workforce — solves it.
3. Procurement whipsaw. Moore’s Table 1 — Battle Force Ships Procured or Requested, FY1982–FY2028 — is the most damning exhibit in the article. The numbers bounce from 28 ships in a single year down to single digits, back up, down again. Wildly. Decade after decade. His point: a rapid downsizing of shipbuilding creates structural consequences that take 5 to 7 years to reverse. When demand drops, senior workers retire, younger workers leave for other industries, suppliers consolidate or close. The experience and productivity levels needed to support a surge take years to rebuild — far longer than the short-term political signal that caused the drawdown in the first place.
This is the procurement whipsaw. And it has been the dominant feature of American shipbuilding policy for forty years.
The Math Behind 381
Moore’s proposed solution is elegant in its simplicity. Rather than chasing arbitrary ship counts, he proposes building force structure from the bottom up using a “build center” mechanism: divide the required number of ships by service life to determine the steady annual production rate each platform requires. Apply that rate consistently. Give industry a stable and predictable demand 10 to 15 years out.
The resulting force structure requirement — Table 2 in the article — totals 381 ships:
66 fast-attack submarines requiring 2 per year. 87 large surface combatants requiring 2.5 per year. 73 small surface combatants requiring 3 per year. 12 ballistic-missile submarines and 12 aircraft carriers anchoring the deterrent and power projection triad. Amphibious, logistics, and support vessels completing the force.
Today’s fleet sits at roughly 291 — below the 325-ship floor identified in the 2016 Force Structure Assessment as the minimum acceptable risk threshold. We are not approaching a gap. We are in one.
The annual shipbuilding budget required: $40 billion. Moore addresses the affordability objection directly and dismisses it:
Some will argue the nation cannot afford $40 billion or more per year for shipbuilding and the attendant costs to operate, maintain, and man the ships. But of course the nation can afford it. It has a multitrillion dollar annual budget and spends far more than $40 billion per year on many things it deems important. The real question is, should the United States do this?
And then the warning that should be on every policymaker’s desk:
The Navy the nation has today is the Navy it will fight with — and it is not big enough. There are parallels to World War II, but unlike in that war, this time the United States will not have the luxury of waiting for industry to catch up in a conflict with China or other adversaries as it did then when labor and large-scale manufacturing facilities were plentiful. The time to start is now.
That is not analysis from a think tank. That is a judgment from the man who ran NAVSEA.
A Lot Has Changed Since He Wrote This. The Gap Hasn’t.
Moore published in February 2025. The policy environment has shifted significantly since then — almost entirely in the direction of validating his urgency while making execution harder.
The FY2027 shipbuilding budget request came in at $68.5 billion — a 57% increase over the prior year. Moore’s $40 billion floor wasn’t an overreach. It was a minimum. The administration confirmed his math and raised it.
The 381-ship goal has since been superseded by the “Golden Fleet” concept — though the full force-level details remain unpublished. Moore’s analysis remains the most precise public accounting of what naval adequacy actually requires.
The Constellation-class frigate — one of the surface combatant programs Moore’s build-rate math depended on — was cancelled in November 2025 after cost overruns made it unsustainable. One more self-inflicted wound, confirming Moore’s requirements appetite diagnosis.
The SHIPS for America Act — the workforce and industrial base legislation Moore’s analysis implicitly requires — has held only one congressional hearing since reintroduction in April 2025. The legislative environment has not caught up to the threat.
And the fleet is still at roughly 291 ships.
Moore Defines the Problem. The SEAS Act Answers It.
Moore’s article diagnoses three problems: requirements creep, workforce collapse, and procurement whipsaw. All three share a common root cause — the absence of a stable, mandatory, multi-year funding signal that industry can plan around.
Annual appropriations cannot solve this. A single large budget request cannot solve this. What Moore’s analysis demands — whether he frames it this way or not — is a funding mechanism that operates outside the political cycle, delivers a consistent signal to the industrial base, and cannot be raided for other priorities when the next fiscal crisis arrives.
That is precisely what the Shipbuilding Economic Acceleration and Security (SEAS) Act proposes.
The SEAS Act establishes a 2% Strategic Technology Responsibility Contribution (STRC) from U.S. companies earning $5 billion or more annually from China operations revenue, directed into a dedicated Naval Modernization account outside the standard appropriations cycle. Estimated annual yield: $4 to $4.4 billion.
The anchor logic: the companies that built billion-dollar China revenue models — enabled by U.S. Navy forward presence, freedom of navigation operations, and Indo-Pacific security architecture — bear a proportional responsibility for sustaining the force that makes that access possible.
The Defense Reinvestment Credit (DRC) allows qualifying companies to offset up to 80% of their STRC obligation through verified domestic defense investment — in shipyard capacity, workforce development, supply chain, or related industrial base priorities. This transforms the mechanism from a contribution into a reinvestment strategy. And critically, it directs capital toward exactly the workforce problem Moore identifies as the binding constraint.
The SHIPS Act asks who builds the ships. The SEAS Act answers who pays for them.
The Reagan Precedent — In Moore’s Own Footnotes
Moore’s Table 1 shows what sustained investment actually produced: the Reagan naval buildup from 1982 to 1992 — the last period of consistent, multi-year shipbuilding commitment — delivered the fleet that won the Cold War. His article cites Jerry Hendrix and Brent Sadler’s October 2024 National Review piece, “Restoring Our Maritime Strength,” as foundational context. Sadler — Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation — has since published the TRUMP Act proposal calling for presidential sponsorship of the SHIPS for America Act to break the current legislative logjam.
The through-line is clear: Moore establishes the force structure requirement. Sadler maps the legislative path. The SEAS Act provides the funding mechanism that makes either sustainable across administrations.
The Time to Start Is Now
Moore’s closing line is not rhetorical. It is a planning constraint.
The industrial base does not have the skilled workforce to execute a surge today. Building that workforce requires years of stable demand signal. The procurement whipsaw of the last four decades has to stop — and stopping it requires a funding mechanism that outlasts any single budget cycle or administration.
381 ships. $40 billion per year. A force structure derived from service lives and build rates — not politics. Three self-inflicted wounds that a dedicated, mandatory funding stream begins to address structurally.
Admiral Moore has charted the path. The SEAS Act is one serious answer to the funding question that path demands. Washington needs to move from debating whether to rebuild the fleet to deciding how to pay for it — and who has been benefiting most from the security that fleet provides.
The time to start is now.
Americans for a Stronger Navy advocates for a modern, capable fleet capable of deterring conflict and protecting American interests worldwide. Learn more at StrongerNavy.org.
REFERENCES
[1] Vice Admiral Thomas J. Moore, U.S. Navy (Ret.), “A Path to the Navy Force Structure the Nation Needs,” Proceedings, U.S. Naval Institute, February 2025, pp. 22–25.
[2] 2016 Force Structure Assessment — 325-ship minimum acceptable risk threshold; confirmed in multiple subsequent CNO assessments.
[3] SEAS Act STRC mechanism and Naval Modernization account structure — Americans for a Stronger Navy framework documentation, 2025–2026. Published: “Defense Reinvestment as Naval Strategy,” Center for Maritime Strategy, March 16, 2026.
[4] Reagan naval buildup (1982–1992) — Congressional Budget Office historical shipbuilding analysis; Moore Table 1, Battle Force Ships Procured or Requested, FY1982–FY2028.
[5] Jerry Hendrix and Brent Sadler, “Restoring Our Maritime Strength,” The National Review, 24 October 2024. Cited by Admiral Moore as footnote 1 of the Proceedings article.
[6] FY2027 Navy shipbuilding budget request — $68.5 billion, released May 11, 2026.
[7] Constellation-class frigate cancellation — Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, November 2025.
[8] SHIPS for America Act legislative status — one Senate Commerce Committee hearing, October 28, 2025; bill reintroduced April 2025 following EO 14269.
In a conversation with CDR Salamander, I explore allied readiness, the Strait of Hormuz, burden-sharing and the Navy’s structural crisis.
America’s allies often say the right things about maritime security. The harder question is whether they can still do them.
That “say versus do” gap sits at the center of my conversation with CDR Salamander — a retired U.S. Navy officer, former NATO staff officer, and one of the most respected independent voices in naval commentary for nearly two decades.
We discussed Europe’s shrinking naval capacity, the Strait of Hormuz, burden-sharing, the industrial base, and the structural failures that have brought the U.S. Navy to a readiness crisis that many veterans recognize all too well.
I came to the conversation as a student. I left it convinced that Americans need a wider, more honest debate about sea power, allied obligations, and the real cost of keeping global trade moving. His explanation of the global economy is one of the most important parts of the interview.
Why I Asked These Questions
I started Americans for a Stronger Navy about two and a half years ago. Before that, I spent over three decades in telecommunications and web technologies — building and leading organizations at the intersection of global internet infrastructure, international business, and nonprofit professional management. I traveled to China and Russia during the early 2000s tech transfer era — and to other emerging markets in between — and watched, firsthand, how economic integration and strategic naivety can compound into serious long-term risk. That ground-level view of how these economies operate, and how they think about America, shapes everything I do at StrongerNavy.org.
I am not a think tank fellow. I am not a defense contractor. I am not a retired flag officer. I am a former blue water destroyer sailor who stood watches aboard USS Henry B. Wilson in the 1970s during the original hollow Navy era.
That outsider status used to feel like a liability. I’ve come to think it’s an asset. Fresh eyes — from someone who has managed global organizations, tracked technology transfer across borders, and spent thirty years watching how interconnected systems succeed and fail — can sometimes see patterns that are harder to spot from inside a specialized community. That’s not a criticism. It’s an argument for a bigger tent.
My goal has never been to be the loudest voice in the room. It has been to listen carefully, learn honestly, connect what we learn to concrete legislative action — and help build the coalition this moment requires.
Which is why I reached out to CDR Salamander. If you want to understand where the naval community’s thinking actually is, you start there.
What follows is that conversation. I hope you’ll read it the same way I tried to have it.
Europe’s Readiness Gap
Q: The Royal Navy was significantly larger in 1982 than it is today, and they barely scraped together a task force to retake the Falkland Islands. The RAF was making the case that carriers were obsolete and land-based air could handle everything — they were months away from not having that carrier in the South Atlantic at all. France, the Netherlands, Denmark — Europe had a real, robust military then. Fast forward to 2026. Is that capability still there?
We find ourselves in a situation where there’s a certain inertia to assumptions — we just assume our allies can do something. You see announcements like the French carrier getting underway with a European strike group to help defend Cyprus because the British can’t get a single destroyer underway. And that’s great. But the French have one carrier. Some of their allied units are genuinely impressive — the Spanish F-100 Aegis destroyer is a fine piece of kit — but there just aren’t that many of them. They can do this one deployment. They have no follow-on. They have no endurance.
Even they themselves still carry this inertia of a memory of a military that could do things. And it’s simply not there anymore.
CDR Salamander: You have to be very careful what you take from Europe at face value, because a lot of what they’re proposing isn’t what’s best — it’s what they’re capable of. We make fun of the “strongly worded letter,” but if that’s all you have, that’s what you lean on. If you need things to delay, to push to the right, to wait for a UN or EU meeting — that’s what you’re going to do, because you don’t have the military capability to do anything else.
And even as NATO allies approach that 2% GDP threshold — which is laudable — you have to ask: what can they actually do with that? A lot of our assumptions, everything from mine sweeping to escort ships to underway replenishment, don’t hold up when you look at the actual order of battle. Mike Mullen’s “Thousand-Ship Navy” concept still echoes, but do we really have allies who can fill those billets?
Even in the Red Sea the operational experience has been revealing. CDR Salamander noted that one allied navy’s top-line unit deployed and discovered its hardware couldn’t communicate with a partner nation’s radar systems. And on the British Type 45 destroyers — everybody loves those ships — CDR Salamander observed that at least one was unable to use its main gun against air targets in the Red Sea because of a software capability that had not been purchased, a cost-saving decision that reflected years of accumulated underinvestment.
That’s the “say versus do” problem. A lot of what Europeans are saying cannot be backed up because they have so under-resourced their militaries. They can posture, protest, and stand at sight. That’s it.
Politics and NATO
Q: Is this primarily a capability problem, or is politics a bigger factor in why allies haven’t stepped up?
CDR Salamander: It depends on the nation. I say this as a former NATO staff officer who genuinely loves the alliance. I loved who I served with. In Afghanistan, I spent more time with NATO partner nations than with Americans. But out of respect — because they speak clearly to us — we should speak clearly back.
There are a couple of powerful undercurrents in Europe. One is a latent anti-Americanism that’s part of the political landscape. The other — especially in France and to a lesser degree Germany — is a desire for EU primacy over NATO. They resent American influence in the alliance. Any opportunity to position the EU as an alternative to NATO is taken, because if they can detach European security from the American relationship, the EU becomes more powerful.
You also have national habits. Some allies are simply accustomed to the US carrying the load — and then commenting from the sidelines in ways that play well domestically. And the Israel dimension cannot be discounted. The fact that the US is operating alongside Israel has triggered large portions of the European electorate in ways that make allied political leaders unwilling to be seen as part of this operation — even when it’s clearly in their own economic interest.
This was true under Carter, Clinton, and Obama as much as under Reagan, Bush, and Trump. The Europeans just don’t map their political spectrum onto ours, and right now that disconnect is making things worse.
Why Hormuz Still Matters
A note before this next section: whether you follow naval policy closely or you’re coming to this conversation for the first time, what follows is the most important part of this interview. CDR Salamander explains, in plain language, why the Strait of Hormuz matters to Americans who don’t buy a drop of Gulf oil — and why the global economy is far more fragile than most people understand. It deserves close attention.
Q: What’s the one thing Americans aren’t getting from traditional news coverage about the Strait of Hormuz?
CDR Salamander: The hardest thing to explain — but the most important — is that the US hasn’t relied on Hormuz hydrocarbons for a long time. We’re energy self-sufficient. So when people ask why this matters to Americans, the answer isn’t about our gas prices. It’s about the entire architecture of the global economy.
After the Cold War, decisions were made across North America and Europe to de-industrialize. That doesn’t mean you stop needing manufactured goods — it means you offshore the manufacturing to Asia, and you don’t have to see any of it. That works until it doesn’t. And it doesn’t work when the energy supply chain feeding Asian manufacturing gets disrupted.
The vast majority of hydrocarbons moving through the Strait of Hormuz are going to China, Japan, India, Thailand, Australia. If that energy supply is disrupted, the cost of hard industrial manufacturing in Asia rises to the point where supply chains feeding Western industries start to collapse. The whole system wavers.
And it’s not just oil. It’s fertilizer derived from natural gas — the feedstock that made the Green Revolution possible and held back mass starvation. It’s helium, a byproduct of natural gas production, essential for semiconductor manufacturing and fuel cell development. People don’t see those connections.
What they really don’t understand is that if you want to stop economic migration, you need strong economies in Southeast Asia. If you want a buffer against an expansionist China — and a Russia probing NATO’s eastern flank and an Iran that has spent forty years treating the Gulf as its own private lake — you need viable economies in Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Australia. That can’t happen if those nations can’t access hydrocarbons at market prices.
Burden-Sharing Without Mercenaries
Q: Asian economies receive the overwhelming share of crude moving through the Strait of Hormuz — China, India, Japan and South Korea among the largest exposed markets. We’re backstopping maritime insurance, deploying carrier strike groups, burning through hardware and personnel. What’s the value proposition for the American taxpayer?
CDR Salamander: Too many people in positions of political power don’t know how money works. They don’t understand interconnected economic systems. And they’re operating in a political environment where maintaining their coalition comes before strategic clarity.
Some of them genuinely believe that contributing to an escort operation in the Strait of Hormuz means being part of the conflict. We saw that when Italy and Spain withdrew base access for operations involving Israel. They’re making decisions out of spite and domestic political calculation — even though the disruption will hurt their own economies far more than it hurts ours.
The argument that the beneficiaries of American naval protection should contribute more is legitimate. But how you structure that contribution matters enormously.
Q: We’ve had financial models before where countries paid for protection. Kuwait in 1987. Japan in 1991. Is there a precedent for a more formal burden-sharing arrangement?
CDR Salamander: I guess in theory it could work, but I’m not a fan of the concept as it’s usually framed. America has a voluntary military. These are the sons and daughters of American citizens who chose to serve their country. If we do anything that even smacks of being somebody else’s mercenary force, I don’t want to be the one explaining to a mother why her kid came home in a box because someone was cutting us a check to do their job for them.
Now — contributing nations don’t have to contribute forces. If Iceland doesn’t have a military but will buy diesel fuel for the operation, that counts. Resources and services in lieu of forces — that’s legitimate burden sharing. That’s the Daughters of the American Revolution model: you don’t need an ancestor who fought at Yorktown. Someone who drove a supply wagon qualifies too.
But pure payment for services rendered? That leaves a bad taste. Why is Bangladesh so active in UN peacekeeping? Because they like the money. I don’t want the United States Navy in that equation.
What the Navy Commission Must Confront
Q: The National Commission on the Future of the Navy has begun its work. If you were advising the commission — not on ship counts, but on structural questions — what are the two or three things they absolutely cannot afford to skip?
CDR Salamander: First, back up and ask why this commission exists at all. It exists because the institutions given stewardship over American sea power have done a poor enough job over the last three decades that Congress felt compelled to create external oversight. So the question isn’t “what ships do we need” — it’s “what structural dysfunctions produced this situation?”
My answers are unsexy. But the foundations of a house are unsexy. Plumbing is unsexy. You can’t have a functioning structure without them.
The first thing is industrial base. The only reason we won World War II is our industrial capacity — including our maritime industrial capacity. Right now we have submarines waiting over a year for repairs. We have dry dock capacity so constrained that ships are receiving depot-level maintenance in 2026 at a rate that would have gotten people fired in 1986. We need incentives and disincentives that grow, support, and sustain a geographically and institutionally diverse shipbuilding and maintenance industry. That will take a decade to fix. Start now.
Second: officer corps incentives. How we promote people and why. The current system is not fit for purpose. If it were, we wouldn’t be where we are.
Third: geographic presence. The Navy has disappeared from the view of too many Americans. San Francisco Bay is geographically ideal for naval facilities and sits at the center of American technology and influence — and we BRAC’d our way out of it. The “Master Base” concept — concentrating everything in San Diego, Jacksonville, and Norfolk — only makes sense to an accountant. It certainly doesn’t make sense in an era of drone swarms that can take out entire airfields. We need a distributed presence.
And underneath all of this: we need a national understanding of maritime power, not just a maritime strategy document. By geography and economy, we are a maritime and aerospace nation. Our budgetary priorities don’t reflect that. Changing them will require taking resources from what is not our comparative advantage as a non-continental land power. We have to be willing to make that fight. We need more Vice Admiral Tom Connollys and fewer officers who can’t get through a sentence without the word “joint.”
The Case for Sea and Air Power
Q: Final question. What’s the key takeaway — for Navy professionals and for civilians who might be listening?
CDR Salamander: There’s an opportunity here, and it’s being missed.
Every carrier deployed for nine, ten, eleven months is proof we don’t have a large enough navy. Every static airfield attacked ashore is an argument for sea-based power projection. Every Houthi missile fired at a merchant ship is a demonstration that the only answer is at sea. Every Chinese fishing fleet strip-mining the territorial waters of a South American coastal nation is a mission for the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. Every Russian submarine probing undersea infrastructure in the North Atlantic is a reminder of who owns the depths. Every Iranian fast boat swarming a merchant vessel in the Gulf is a test of resolve we cannot afford to fail.
The Western Pacific threat is maritime and aerospace. What Australia, Japan, the Philippines, New Zealand need most is help securing their maritime connections and their airspace. That is our lane.
All the argument points have been delivered to us on a plate. We have the receipts. And I’ve been frustrated for a while that the stars are aligned, the case is right there, but too much of our senior leadership would rather talk about “joint” — or worse, say nothing at all.
This isn’t parochial. It’s about the security of the Republic. We have secure land borders. Europe has the population and economy to handle most of its own land and air requirements. We don’t need to find ourselves in another land war in Asia. But we do have a unique, irreplaceable role at sea and in the air.
If conflict comes — something like what we’re watching off Iran right now — the best outcome for America is one where we limit our involvement to sea power and air power. That’s not isolationism. That’s strategy. It’s the argument we should be making every day, because it’s an easy argument to make — and right now, the world is making it for us.
Bill’s Takeaway
A few honest reflections after sitting with this conversation.
CDR Salamander is an exceptional teacher. His ability to move from a 1982 carrier nearly decommissioned by RAF budget politics to a 2026 British destroyer unable to use its main gun in the Red Sea — and have both illuminate the same structural failure — is a gift. I’d encourage every reader to go back through his answers on the global economy section slowly.
What he makes clear — and what most people never connect — is that we do not live in silos. The fertilizer derived from natural gas that feeds billions also underpins the modern technology supply chain. The strong economies in Southeast Asia that buffer against Chinese expansionism are the same economies that prevent mass migration crises from landing on our doorstep. Freedom of navigation isn’t an abstraction. It is the load-bearing wall of the modern world. Remove it and everything above it comes down.
That lesson applies closer to home too. The naval advocacy community has its own silo problem. Veterans organizations, individual advocates, civic groups, and policy voices are all making versions of the same argument — but separately, in parallel, without a unified message. A trade association of defense contractors speaks for an industry. A coalition of veterans, citizens, and civic advocates speaks for the Republic. Those are not the same thing, and the difference matters.
I don’t agree with everything he said. I want to be straightforward about that, because intellectual honesty is the only foundation worth building on.
His objection to burden-sharing — the mercenary framing — is one I take seriously. He made it with conviction and genuine feeling for the men and women who serve. I respect that completely.
But here’s my honest position: The United States is not operating from a position of unlimited fiscal strength. Debt-service costs are rising, readiness needs are growing, and the nations benefiting most from open sea lanes — China, India, Japan and South Korea among the largest — have an obligation to contribute to the cost of keeping them open. That isn’t mercenary. That’s arithmetic.
And here’s where I think CDR Salamander and I are actually closer than it might appear. His own instinct — Iceland buying diesel fuel, basing access, logistics support, the wagon driver — is a barter framework. Contributions in kind rather than cash. I’ll take it. That’s a step in the right direction. The principle that beneficiaries contribute is the thing that matters. The mechanism is a conversation worth having.
We will have more to say about the legislative path forward at StrongerNavy.org in the weeks ahead. Watch this space.
CDR Salamander and I share the core conviction: the United States is a maritime and aerospace power, the Navy is underfunded and structurally undermined, and the window to fix it is narrow. That is enough to work with.
Stronger together. Break the silos.
— Bill Cullifer Americans for a Stronger Navy | StrongerNavy.org
About CDR Salamander
CDR Salamander is a retired U.S. Navy officer and former NATO staff officer. He has written at CDRSalamander.com for nearly two decades and publishes regularly on Substack. His post “Europe’s Say v. Do Problem” served as the starting point for this conversation.
About Americans for a Stronger Navy
I founded Americans for a Stronger Navy (StrongerNavy.org) after serving as a Quartermaster/helmsman aboard USS Henry B. Wilson (DDG-7) in the 1970s. Our mission is simple: advocate for a properly funded, capable U.S. Navy as a cornerstone of American security and economic prosperity. Full audio of this interview is available at StrongerNavy.org.
Brent Sadler at The Heritage Foundation just published one of the most comprehensive naval shipbuilding blueprints in recent memory. The 40-page Special Report, To Build the Golden Fleet, released March 25, 2026, is required reading for anyone serious about what it will actually take to rebuild American sea power. We’ve read every page. Sadler gets it right.
But the report has a gap. And we’ve spent two and a half years building the mechanism to fill it.
First, the numbers that should stop every American cold.
As of March 2026, China’s fleet stands at 474 warships. Ours stands at 291. Since September 2016 — when Congress set a goal of 355 ships — China’s fleet has grown by more than 100 warships. We added 17. [1]
The 2016 Force Structure Assessment identified the real requirement as 459 warships. Budget pressure compressed that to 355. And 325 ships was assessed as “maximum acceptable risk” — a floor, not a goal. We are operating below that floor today.
Submarine production currently runs at 1.1 boats per year. The requirement is 2.33 per year — and above 3.0 per year once AUKUS demand kicks in. [1]
Secretary Phelan has said 250,000 new shipyard workers will be needed over the next decade. And according to the Navy’s own acquisition executive, 50 to 60 percent of new industrial base hires quit within their first year. [1]
There are eight U.S. shipyards capable of building vessels over 400 feet in length. Eight. For a nation that needs to build a generational fleet larger than the Reagan-era 600-ship buildup.
These are not advocacy numbers. These are Sadler’s numbers, sourced from the Pentagon, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Navy’s own planning documents.
What the Golden Fleet Report Gets Right
Sadler’s blueprint is built around two simultaneous imperatives that most naval commentary treats as separate problems. He holds them together correctly.
The first is getting firepower to sea now. The bridge fleet — largely unmanned platforms deploying existing weapons like Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-6 missiles, built faster at smaller shipyards — addresses the 2027 Davidson Window without waiting for the industrial base to catch up. The USV Ranger’s successful SM-6 launch in September 2021 is the proof of concept. This is executable today.
The second is the generational industrial revival. New public shipyards in the Pacific. Design sprint teams collocated with shipbuilders. Vessel Construction Manager models that consolidate accountability. Modular construction techniques. Robotic welding systems that South Korean and Japanese shipyards have shown increase productivity by 20 percent. Block buys that give industry the funding predictability to invest in workforce and infrastructure rather than managing quarter-to-quarter. [1]
Sadler is particularly sharp on a point that rarely gets named directly: budgets must not predetermine the size or delivery schedule of the Golden Fleet. The threat informs the requirement. The requirement informs the budget. Not the other way around. Budget-led planning is how we got from a real requirement of 459 ships to a compromise of 355 to an actual fleet of 291 — while China added 100 warships.
The Gap the Report Doesn’t Fill
Sadler calls for novel contracting mechanisms — specifically SAWS, the Shipyard Accountability and Workforce Support contracting approach — matched with reformed tax structures that incentivize capital investment in shipbuilding capacity over pleasing Wall Street. He calls for a Naval Act with block buy authority. He calls for a fifth public shipyard in the Pacific at an estimated cost of $20 billion, with Congress appropriating initial funding now. [1]
These are the right prescriptions. But they share a structural dependency that the report doesn’t fully resolve: they all require sustained, predictable, mandatory funding that the annual appropriations process has consistently failed to deliver.
The White House Maritime Action Plan, released February 13, 2026, directed OMB to propose a legislative mechanism for a Maritime Security Trust Fund — a dedicated, mandatory funding stream. The directive was clear. The mechanism was left unspecified.
That mechanism is the Strategic SEAS Act.
The Funding Engine
The Strategic SEAS Act — the Shipbuilding Economic Acceleration and Security Act — proposes a sector-based defense reinvestment framework. Companies whose global operations depend on the maritime security the U.S. Navy provides contribute to a Maritime Security Trust Fund dedicated to shipbuilding capacity, fleet expansion, and maritime workforce development.
The logic is direct. American technology, developed with public investment and deployed at global scale, enabled the commercial operations that now depend on open sea lanes. China’s own shipbuilding capacity — the one producing more tonnage annually than the entire U.S. fleet — relies on logistics networks and advanced manufacturing that trace lineage to American innovation. The companies that benefit most from maritime security should have a structural stake in sustaining it.
This is not a new tax. It is a reinvestment framework — the same principle Sadler invokes when he calls for incentive structures that reward capital investment in shipbuilding over short-term financial returns.
The SEAS Act provides what SAWS and block buys cannot provide on their own: a funding stream that does not depend on annual appropriations decisions, does not compete with other defense priorities in the FYDP, and does not evaporate when political priorities shift between administrations.
Sadler’s Golden Fleet blueprint is the architecture. The SEAS Act is the funding engine that makes it executable across budget cycles.
In the comments section of Sadler’s September 2025 Washington Times piece, a reader identifying himself as the leader of the 2016 Force Structure Assessment study team wrote the following:
“I led the study team that developed the 2016 force structure assessment and just wanted to point out that the different numbers were based on assessed risk. CNO chose the 355-ship force that we assessed as ‘moderate risk’ while the 459 was minimal risk. We even had a 325-ship ‘maximum acceptable risk’ — which should say something about our current force level.”
Read that carefully. Three hundred twenty-five ships was the floor — the maximum acceptable risk threshold established by the people who ran the assessment. We have 291. We are not below the goal. We are below the floor.
That is not a readiness problem. That is a national security emergency dressed in budget language.
What Comes Next
Secretary of the Navy John Phelan confirmed this week that the Golden Fleet is no longer a blueprint — it is an active program. In a public statement, Phelan outlined decisive action already underway: canceled programs not delivering results, new Portfolio Acquisition Executives with accountability for integrated capabilities, a Rapid Capabilities Office to accelerate technology delivery, and Ship OS now scaled to two major shipbuilders, four public shipyards, and 100 suppliers. Most significantly for the funding argument, Phelan stated plainly that “the era of free money is over — industry now has skin in the game and investing in their own expansion.” That is the SEAS Act’s core logic stated from the highest level of Navy civilian leadership. The reinvestment principle is no longer outside advocacy. It is official policy direction waiting for a legislative mechanism.
The Golden Fleet details will emerge in the coming days as the Navy’s budget and 30-year shipbuilding plan follow the report. Sadler’s three metrics for judging whether it’s worthy remain the right standard: firepower to sea, new operational concepts to deter China, and maritime industrial revival.
The third metric — industrial revival — cannot be sustained by legislative authorization alone. It requires a funding architecture that outlasts administrations and survives budget cycles. The SEAS Act is that architecture.
Americans for a Stronger Navy has been building toward this moment for two and a half years. Eight hundred published posts. A nonpartisan record. A framework developed in consultation with naval policy experts, constitutional scholars, and defense industry stakeholders.
The blueprint exists. The funding mechanism exists. What remains is the political will to connect them.
That is what we are working on. And we are not going anywhere.
[3] White House Maritime Action Plan, February 13, 2026.
Bill Cullifer is the founder of Americans for a Stronger Navy and a former blue-water destroyer sailor who served aboard USS Henry B. Wilson (DDG-7). StrongerNavy.org.
Why This Matters: The High Stakes for American Seapower
As we watch the events unfold in the Persian Gulf, many Americans are asking: Why should we care? For the team here at StrongerNavy.org, the answer is clear. This isn’t just a regional skirmish; it is a stress test for the very foundation of global commerce and the U.S. Navy’s role as its guardian.
The Chokepoint of the World: The Strait of Hormuz is the world’s most critical energy artery. Roughly 20% of global oil and LNG pass through here. A threat to this “chokepoint” is a direct threat to your gas prices and home heating bills.
A New Era of Naval Warfare: Our Navy is facing a “swarm” threat of low-cost drones. The challenge is “missile math”—defending against a $20,000 drone without exhausting million-dollar interceptors.
The Cost of Deterrence: With munitions costs hitting $6 billion in the first week, we see exactly why a properly funded, technologically superior Navy is the only way to prevent wider aggression.
The Interview: Objective Analysis in a Complex War
In what I consider to be one of the most objective and hard-hitting interviews on the current conflict, Katie Couric sat down with General David Petraeus to dissect the joint U.S.-Israeli operations. Couric asked the tough questions about shifting goals, while Petraeus provided a masterclass in strategic analysis.
The Rationale: Why Now?
General Petraeus identified two primary triggers for the timing of this operation:
Missile Reconstitution: Israel observed Iran rapidly rebuilding its missile program. The “missile math”—the ratio of launchers to interceptors—was becoming “uncomfortable.”
Fleeting Intelligence: The U.S. gained “exquisite intelligence” on the patterns of the Supreme Leader. The administration struck in broad daylight to capitalize on this window.
Naval Neutralization: “Giving Them the Bottom Half”
The U.S. Navy has effectively erased Iran’s ability to project power at sea. The numbers are historic:
120+ Vessels Sunk or Damaged: Including the IRIS Soleimani and the Makran forward-base ship.
Submarine Force Eradicated: All 11 Iranian submarines, including midget Ghadir-class mine-layers, are reported neutralized.
Carrier Power: The USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Abraham Lincoln are leading the charge, proving American steel remains the ultimate deterrent.
📊 QUICK STATS SIDEBAR: The Naval Front
Iranian Vessels Sunk/Damaged: 120+
Submarine Capability: 0 (Total Neutralization)
Missile Launch Reduction: 90% Decrease since Week 1
U.S. Carrier Presence: 2 Strike Groups (Ford & Lincoln)
Munitions Cost (Week 1): $6 Billion
The “Pottery Barn” Rule
Couric asked the poignant question regarding the “Pottery Barn Rule”—if you break it, you own it. Petraeus offered a sobering distinction: without boots on the ground, the U.S. doesn’t “own” the aftermath. “The Iranians own it,” he noted, while acknowledging that we may be “revisiting this periodically” if a new agreement isn’t reached.
Watch the full interview below to see General Petraeus navigate these complex waters.
