Author: billcullifer

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America at Sea: Mark Tempest on Sea Blindness, Sustainment and Thinking Strategically

Welcome back to America at Sea: Voices That Matter. Today we hear from Captain Mark Tempest, U.S. Naval Reserve (Ret.), who co-hosts the Midrats podcast with CDR Salamander. In more than 30 years of Navy and Navy Reserve service, he served on an ammunition ship off Vietnam, in convoy planning to get merchant ships safely across the oceans, and protecting Saudi ports during Desert Storm. Same three questions as everyone: what’s working, what’s in the way, and what he’d fix first.

What we heard

What’s working: People. “Get good people, keep good people, and treat people well.” Sailors know good leadership and will find better ways to do the job if leaders listen.

The biggest barrier: Sea blindness. America gave up most of its merchant fleet because foreign shipping was cheaper, and China built the shipyards and much of the world’s shipping, and now a navy that may rival ours in size. Meanwhile we have a huge stretch of ocean to defend, from Guam to Alaska to the Gulf.

“We are a big country with a lot of water around us. That’s both a blessing and a curse.”

Keeping a fleet supplied: His biggest concern is sustainment, everything a fleet needs to keep fighting far from home. Fuel, food, ammunition reloads, repairs, tender ships, hospital ships and floating dry docks that can be towed toward a fight. In the 1920s the Navy planned for exactly that. Today, he says, we’ve lost that capacity and need an urgent program to rebuild it. He also suggests using drones and long-range aircraft to escort supply ships across the ocean.

Fix first: End “just in time” thinking. “Let’s think strategically and let’s act strategically.”

Full transcript

Lightly edited for clarity.

Bill Cullifer: Bill Cullifer here with Americans for a Stronger Navy. Welcome back to America at Sea: Voices That Matter. This week we’ve heard from the people who sail our ships and the people who build and crew them. Today we meet Captain Mark Tempest, U.S. Naval Reserve, retired, a convoy and logistics veteran who co-hosts the Midrats podcast with CDR Salamander, on what it takes to keep a fleet supplied in a fight. These are his views. Not everyone will agree, and that’s how we find common ground. Mark, over to you.

Introduction

Mark Tempest: Hello, I’m Mark Tempest, retired captain, United States Naval Reserve. I’ve spent 30 years or more in the United States Navy and Navy Reserve, including time on service force ships, an ammunition ship off the coast of Vietnam, and a destroyer. I served in the Naval Control of Shipping organization, dealing with convoy operations to get merchant shipping across the oceans to sustain our forces if there was an event overseas, and in the inshore undersea warfare organization, particularly during Desert Storm, when we were tasked with helping protect the ports of Saudi Arabia for sustainment of land forces already ashore.

So I have experience in areas many naval officers have not touched, and I’ve been studying matters of naval import for some time. I did extensive coverage of piracy, especially the Somali pirates in their heyday, and have written some thoughts on how our Navy could be better maintained.

Question 1: What’s working right now that we should do more of?

Mark Tempest: The answer is: get good people, keep good people, and treat people well. We do a pretty good job with our sailors. We get good sailors. We have great people who, when they’re given the opportunity, are extremely professional and innovative, and they like to experiment if you give them the chance.

One of the things I used to tell my units was, there’s always a better way. The challenge is to find it. So I encouraged people to think about how to do their job better, how to do my job better, and we shared that information.

Sailors know good leadership. Sailors know how to be good leaders. Sailors know how to do their jobs, and they can think of ways that whatever they’re doing could be done a little better if we would tweak things. You have to give them that power, let them know you’ve heard them, and take their suggestions and ideas seriously. I think we do a pretty good job of that, but it can always be done better.

“There’s always a better way. The challenge is to find it.”

Question 2: What’s the biggest barrier to rebuilding America at sea?

Mark Tempest: I think the biggest barrier is that we are suffering from short-sightedness. Some people call it sea blindness, when it comes to what the Navy and what America need to be doing at sea.

We gave up our merchant shipping because it was cost-effective to let cheaper carriers bring the goods we needed to our country. The people who took advantage of that were low-cost providers like the Chinese, who developed shipyards of amazing capacity and produced a huge percentage of the ships now afloat, carrying everything from container ships to tankers. You name it, they’ve done it. And now they’ve developed a heck of a good navy, a large navy, one that may be even larger than the United States Navy.

They show a great deal of innovation. If you read what they’re up to, you’ll see they’re developing drone carriers and all kinds of things, and they do it quickly. They have an advantage in that they’re not a democracy. The boss at the top can say “I want this done,” and they all run around and do it. We’re a little different, and as a result we don’t always get things done the same way. But we really need to encourage industry to seize the moment. This is a time for experimentation, a time for industry to come forward and not just do the same old thing, but do new things, do them well, and let us experiment with them.

For years we’ve been arguing about drones. The U.S. Navy developed both aircraft and surface drones for some time, abandoned those projects for a variety of reasons, and now we’re getting back into it. That’s great. We need to think more like that.

One of the problems is we haven’t had a united message. We need to unite in saying the seas around our country matter. Our country is huge, and we cover a lot of the surface of the Earth. In the Western Pacific we have a territory, Guam, full of American citizens, with a large Navy base, a large Air Force base and a growing Marine presence. We have a lot of other islands out there that are part of a defense structure we’ve put in place, and the people there look to us for protection. We need to contemplate what that means.

Look at the size of Alaska and how far it extends across the globe and up toward the North Pole. We need to think about how to protect that. Look south, where Florida dips toward the Caribbean and Texas sits on the Gulf. We need to pay attention to that, too.

We are a big country with a lot of water around us. That’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing that has provided protection up to now. It’s a curse in that you have to have a fleet and forces large enough to defend it from anybody who wants to get aggressive.

It’s important to understand how vital it is for us to have a large merchant marine and sustainment shipping. When I talk about sustainment shipping, I mean this: if there’s a war in the Western Pacific, we’ll have to send our ships across, and they have to be supported. They need fuel for aircraft and for the ships, food for the crews, personnel changes, weapons reloading and repair.

In the 1920s, the General Board of the United States Navy looked at how to sustain a force that had to go to the Western Pacific, against Japan in that case. They developed the concept of large floating dry docks. We don’t have any of those anymore that we can hook to a tug and tow across the ocean to a relatively safe location where a damaged ship could be repaired. We’ve lost a lot of time that needs to be recaptured by an urgent program to rebuild that capacity.

Do we need hospital ships? Yes. Do we need tenders that take care of the smaller jobs required to keep ships going? Yes. We need them for destroyers, for smaller ships and for submarines, and we need them where we can move them around and put them where they do the most good. Do we need floating dry docks? Yes, we do. Do we have enough other sustainment shipping? We have some. It’s all in the Military Sealift Command. When I was on active duty, it was part of the Navy fleet. I think we need a bigger mix.

We also need to think about how to protect a logistics sea train of ships carrying all the sustainment goods we need to keep a force in the Philippines, on the islands of the South Pacific, and to help our Australian, Japanese, Singaporean and Philippine allies and the islands that belong to the United States or our allies in the Western Pacific.

The threat we know is China. That’s the one we’re worried about now, although Russia continues to be active, with a fleet in Vladivostok. And we have to counter new weapons: unmanned vessels, surface, subsurface and in the air. They all require special attention and innovation, with weapon systems designed to take them down, from lasers and other energy weapons to kinetic weapons, everything from the CIWS concept to small, very cheap anti-drone rockets or missiles.

Finally, we need to worry about how we escort ships across the ocean. In the past, the Navy has told the shipping industry and Military Sealift Command that we don’t have enough ships to provide escorts. Well, we don’t have enough ships. We spend a lot of money on ships that are fundamentally not useful for the kinds of warfare we are currently facing. So we need to think outside the box. We could provide escorts using the drone technology we’re already developing. Let’s develop it more. Let’s escort ships with unmanned vessels coordinated through a small communications box that can be put on any merchant or MSC hull. Let’s use long-range aircraft that can accompany these ships on a voyage, including helicopters, which already exist on some MSC ships.

These problems are not insurmountable, but we need to act now. This is a strategic problem, and this is not the place for the management techniques we’ve fallen prey to, like “just in time,” where the parts arrive just in time to be put on the next vehicle. Strategic and tactical operations don’t work that way. You have to have a force in being that can be called on. Bean counters hate forces in being, because they don’t want to pay for an asset that may never be used. But when you need that asset, you need it right away. You can’t wait for it just in time.

“When you need that asset, you need it right away. You can’t wait for it just in time.”

People are taking steps. Some allies are building or improving shipbuilding facilities in the U.S., and some companies are opening operations in Texas, Louisiana and other places. We have a lot of water in this country where we can build ships, and if we adopt the right technologies, we can build wonderful ships and get them out where we need them. And we need them right now.

Question 3: If you could fix one thing first, what would it be?

Mark Tempest: The one thing I would fix is getting rid of this just-in-time concept. Let’s think strategically, let’s act strategically, and let’s get the ball rolling. That’s what I’m proud to say this Stronger Navy effort is all about. Thank you.

“Let’s think strategically, let’s act strategically, and let’s get the ball rolling.”

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 view is not an endorsement.

Join the conversation on X. What’s working? What’s in the way? What would you fix first?

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Who Leads America at Sea? With Sal Mercogliano

America at Sea: Voices That Matter continues with Dr. Sal Mercogliano, maritime historian, former merchant mariner and host of What’s Going On With Shipping? Sal is a professor at Campbell University, where he chairs the Department of History, Criminal Justice and Political Science, and he teaches maritime industry policy at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy [1]. He answers the same three questions we ask everyone.

New to the SHIPS for America Act? Start with our plain-English primer.

Join the conversation. Reply to the post above on X and tell us what’s working, what’s in the way, and what you’d fix first.

What we heard

What’s working: the small and mid-size yards. Sal doesn’t want to be “the Debbie Downer.” The U.S. fleet of deep-draft oceangoing ships has fallen from about 450 when he graduated in 1989 to 180-some today, but he sees real strength in inland and coastal shipping, tugs and ferries, and the yards that build them. Build more at that level, he says, and you rebuild the steel, pipefitters, electricians and suppliers that bigger ships need. Add automation and new propulsion like small modular nuclear reactors, and technology can offset higher U.S. costs.

What’s in the way: a market tilted against us. After World War II, America chose not to dominate shipping and helped allies build their yards. That opened the door to China, which Sal says went from building 5% of the world’s ships in 1999 to 70% today.

“The free market doesn’t work when the other sides are putting their foot on the scale.” — Dr. Sal Mercogliano

He suggests a target of five to 10 percent U.S.-built, U.S.-flag ships in American international trade, up from about 2% now. And he pushes back on blaming the Jones Act: in 1920, he says, it was part of a whole national security strategy, and over the past century we took the rest of that strategy apart.

What he’d fix first: leadership. Sal says the SHIPS Act’s national maritime advisor is what’s needed, because authority today is spread across agencies.

“I think we need one. I really do. We need someone who can sit there and direct it, because what we have right now is diffusion.” — Dr. Sal Mercogliano

He points to history: Edward Hurley at the U.S. Shipping Board in World War I, and Adm. Emory S. “Jerry” Land in World War II, who between them oversaw thousands of ships. Since the 1980s, he notes, the House lost its Merchant Marine Subcommittee, and today each advocacy group speaks for its own slice. “There’s really no one doing it for the entire sector holistically.” (For more on Land, see our Backstory post, The Last Time One Person Led America at Sea.)

Why education matters. “I’m an educator,” Sal says. “What you’re doing here with America at Sea is an important element… we need to be educating people about this. We’re a maritime nation.”

The three questions

1. What’s working right now that we should do more of?
2. What’s the biggest barrier to rebuilding America at sea?
3. If you could fix one thing first, what would it be?

Transcript

Lightly edited for readability.

Bill Cullifer: Bill Cullifer here with Americans for a Stronger Navy. Welcome back to America at Sea: Voices That Matter. Today we’re here with Sal Mercogliano, maritime historian, former merchant mariner and host of What’s Going On With Shipping? Same three questions for everyone: what’s working, what’s in the way, and what he’d fix first. Sal, over to you.

Introduction

Sal Mercogliano: I’m Sal Mercogliano. I’m a professor at Campbell University and chair of the Department of History, Criminal Justice and Political Science. I’m a former merchant mariner. I sailed and worked ashore in the industry. And I’m adjunct at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, where I teach a course in maritime industry policy. Five years ago now, I started a YouTube channel called What’s Going On With Shipping, where I talk about all global shipping, logistics, U.S., international, you name it, along with a little history thrown in there.

What’s working right now that we should do more of?

When you look at what’s working in the United States, there’s a couple of things. I don’t like to be the Debbie Downer here all the time. In truth, during my entire career — I graduated from the State University of New York Maritime College in 1989 — the maritime industry in many ways has been on the decline. We’ve gone from 450 ships when I graduated down to 180-some ships today, deep-draft oceangoing vessels involved in both international trade and the Jones Act.

But there are certain areas where we’re pretty robust: inland waters, coastal waters, the tug and ferry industry. We have good small and medium-sized shipyards. Where we’re at odds is really on the international scope, building deep-draft vessels that compete on the international market. And in truth, that was never an objective of the United States. The U.S. came out of World War II never wanting to be the dominant shipper on the planet. We didn’t want to take the role of the British. Instead, we very much believed it was better for everyone if you had a diverse shipping fleet out there. Ownership was diverse, nationalities were diverse. And what we focused on was the U.S. Navy, making sure the seas were protected.

Unfortunately, what we’re seeing today is that’s the problem. We’re seeing a challenge to freedom of the seas, and most importantly, in the United States our maritime industrial base has largely shifted since the ’80s to just supporting the U.S. Navy and not a commercial industry.

I think we need to look at how we do shipbuilding on a smaller and medium scale and ramp that up. What are we doing with tugs? With small to medium-sized vessels? If we start building at that level even more, I think we can start building at a larger level. That starts building the industrial base: the steel industry, the pipefitters, electricians, pumps, all those elements we can use to build larger ships.

We also need to look at technology, which is a big thing for the United States. Our big shipyards are so far behind that we can completely modernize them. Automation and autonomy are systems we could be using to build new shipyards or add-ons to existing ones. And we could be bringing forth new technology for ship propulsion, such as small modular nuclear reactors. That could be a game changer. What I’ve seen historically is that technology allows the U.S. to compete over the costs associated with the United States, which tend to be a little bit higher. So I think we’ve got to lean in to that technology.

What’s the biggest barrier to rebuilding America at sea?

What’s in the way is a lot of things that we structured and created ourselves. The United States created the open registries on the international market. We facilitated the European, Japanese and Korean shipyards to build up, and in many ways that’s the barrier today, because they’re very efficient, especially the Japanese and Korean yards. And one of the problems is we opened the door for the rise of China. We’ve seen China go from building 5% of global ships in 1999 to building 70% here in 2026. That’s a major impediment.

We have got to get into our mindset that we are competing in shipbuilding and sailing ships on an international market, and the free market doesn’t work when the other sides are putting their foot on the scale. If you want to use free-market capitalism in international shipping, you’ve got to do something to remove the advantages that China, Korea, Japan, the Liberian flag, the Marshall Islands and Panama have. Otherwise it’s not a fair measurement. You can say it costs three to five times more to build a ship in the United States. Well, give us the advantages and incentives these other countries have, and that cost goes down tremendously. It’s still going to be expensive, but not as expensive as that.

One of the big things in the way is recognizing that shipping is a national security issue. What we did in the 1980s was offshore our shipbuilding base. Now we’re coming to realize that’s a problem, and we need to bring that back onshore. I’m not talking about building 100% of all ships in international trade in the U.S. But we should have a good target: somewhere between five to 10 [percent of] ships carrying American trade internationally should be U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged vessels. We’re at 2% right now. We can also buy ships on the international market and put them into international trade. That’s not coastal. That doesn’t violate the Jones Act.

At the same time, we need to revitalize domestic shipbuilding. The cabotage provision of the Jones Act, the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, was never intended to be sufficient to sustain U.S. shipbuilding on its own. It was part of a larger whole. That’s the argument I have with lots of people who say the Jones Act is the problem. The Jones Act, as created in 1920, was a holistic act. It was a national security strategy. What we’ve done over the past 106 years is dismantle it. So we’ve got to start fixing some of those provisions and putting them back in place.

We should also be looking at how other countries go about their shipbuilding and maritime strategy, China, Japan and Korea particularly, and see what we need to emulate. And one of the biggest things we need to do is get Congress to act, to push through legislation that’s sitting there right now, things like the SHIPS Act. That needs to be done.

If you could fix one thing first, what would it be?

If Sal was king for a day — and I said this in testimony before Congress — there needs to be leadership. One of the things the SHIPS Act has is a national maritime advisor, kind of a maritime czar. I think we need one. I really do. We need someone who can sit there and direct it, because what we have right now is diffusion. The Maritime Administration has a very narrow view and control over what it has. Same thing with the Navy’s shipbuilding office.

We really need someone who can be the advocate here, up on the Hill in congressional offices, out there in the public, out there with businesses, talking about this maritime issue. I’m an educator. I think we need to do more. What you’re doing here with America at Sea is an important element, because we need to be educating people about this. We’re a maritime nation. We’ve been a maritime nation since we were 13 little colonies looking out at the Atlantic. And even though we became a massive continental power, we’re still dependent on trade. We’ve seen recently how easily trade can be disrupted, by nations and even by non-nations like the Houthis.

If you look at the two big shipbuilding programs in the history of the United States in the 20th century, you had a guy like Edward Hurley, who headed the U.S. Shipping Board. He revitalized it and was able to produce about 2,700 ships during and after the First World War. Then in World War II, you had Emory S. Land, Jerry Land, in charge of the U.S. Maritime Commission, along with the War Shipping Administration and the U.S. Maritime Service. He was able to build 5,777 ships from 1937 to 1945.

So I just think we need some leadership here, someone advocating for the merchant marine and the maritime sector on a continual basis. I do it, but it’s not a full-time job for me. You’re doing it. Others are doing it. But what we definitely need is somebody out there making the call. Since the 1980s, we’ve seen this kind of curtailment. We lost the Merchant Marine Subcommittee in the House, which was a great place for it, because there was a lot of expertise on that committee. Today what we have are advocacy groups advocating for their slice of the maritime sector, but really no one doing it for the entire sector holistically. And I think that’s what’s been missing.

While we argue, China plans. It’s time we started building.

Americans for a Stronger Navy is a nonpartisan organization. America at Sea is educational and does not urge support for or opposition to any legislation. Views expressed by guests are their own.

References

[1] FreightWaves, speaker profile, “Salvatore R. Mercogliano, Ph.D.”: https://live.freightwaves.com/event-speakers/salvatore-r-mercogliano-ph-d

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America at Sea: Glenn Mallo on People, Ownership and Results Over Effort

Welcome back to America at Sea: Voices That Matter. Today we hear from Glenn Mallo, Command Master Chief, U.S. Navy (Ret.). He came up through the Navy’s nuclear power program and spent most of his career aboard aircraft carriers and with forward-deployed naval forces. Today he works in the defense industrial base, so he sees the same problems from the other side. Same three questions as everyone: what’s working, what’s in the way, and what he’d fix first.

What we heard

What’s working: People. Sailors, shipbuilders, engineers, tradespeople and government civilians deliver when they are trained, mentored and led. New technology helps, but “we need people to know how to put it to work.”

The biggest barrier: A system that separates responsibility, authority, incentives and consequences. Workforce, supply chain and infrastructure problems are real, but leaders also have to ask which contracting practices and management incentives let those problems persist.

“A for effort, but D minus for results. The system has got to stop measuring effort as though it was readiness.”

Fix first: Ownership of delivery. Try many approaches, fail fast, learn fast, and hold leaders accountable for results without lowering standards. He welcomed the “First Breakfast” approach to working with industry [1], a play on the 1993 “Last Supper” that set off defense industry consolidation [2].

New to the Last Supper and the First Breakfast? Read our explainer: [LINK TO FIRST BREAKFAST POST]

Full transcript

Lightly edited for clarity.

Bill Cullifer: Bill Cullifer here with Americans for a Stronger Navy. Welcome back to America at Sea: Voices That Matter. Yesterday we heard from a merchant mariner about the people who sail our ships. Today, a retired Command Master Chief on the people who build them, fix them and crew them. Two different worlds, same message: you can’t rebuild America at sea without the people. And as he puts it, effort isn’t the same as results. Glenn Mallo, over to you.

Introduction

Glenn Mallo: Thanks, Bill. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I’m humbled and honored to join you in this conversation.

I’m Glenn Mallo, a retired United States Navy Command Master Chief. I spent most of my career serving aboard aircraft carriers and with forward-deployed naval forces. I started in the Navy’s nuclear power program and had the privilege of serving in engineering, shipyard, industrial and training environments.

As I got more senior in the Navy, I was privileged to be selected for senior enlisted assignments. I served aboard the USS Ronald Reagan pre-commissioning unit, the carrier USS Enterprise, and the USS George Washington twice: once here in Norfolk, Virginia, and again when she was forward-deployed in Yokosuka, Japan. I also had the great honor of leading the chiefs mess aboard the USS Carl Vinson during the carrier’s refueling and complex overhaul.

Now I work in the defense industrial base, where I see the other side. The same foundational principles apply, and that reinforces what I strongly believe: America’s maritime strength depends not just on our ships, but on our sailors and the industrial base that supports and sustains the whole ecosystem.

Question 1: What’s working right now that we should do more of?

Glenn Mallo: I’d start with our people. And truly, it’s not just the sailors. As I alluded to in my intro, it’s everybody: our civilian counterparts, now that I’m on the commercial side, as well as our government people who make everything work.

Having spent much of my career aboard aircraft carriers and with forward-deployed naval forces, I know what American sailors can accomplish when they are properly trained, mentored and led. I believe that same concept extends to our shipbuilders, our engineers, technicians and tradespeople, and the government civilians who support the whole ecosystem.

One thing the Navy taught me is that we have got to invest in our people. Coming up through the nuclear power training pipeline, where high standards, technical competence and accountability were not optional, I learned that we have to train people, invest in mentoring and equipping them, and set them up for success. We’d all be surprised by what they can deliver.

In naval nuclear power, we were trained to understand our systems, take ownership of our responsibilities and operate safely under demanding conditions. We need more of that across the maritime industrial base. Set up apprenticeships and technical education. Get the senior folks to provide mentorship and opportunities for young Americans, so they can see and believe that they can build meaningful careers in this industry.

I am encouraged by the advances in robotics, advanced systems and autonomy, and by different approaches to shipbuilding and maintenance, like Korean shipbuilders coming here to work with us. Those are novel concepts. But technology, in my humble opinion, is not the answer by itself. We need people who know how to put it to work.

Leadership matters too. Throughout my career I learned that you cannot lead from behind a desk. Our leaders have got to get out where the work happens, understand the challenges and take care of the people. With good people, the right training, leadership and the mission, we’re going to be amazed at what our people can deliver.

Question 2: What’s the biggest barrier to rebuilding America at sea?

Glenn Mallo: I think the biggest barrier is really the system. Right now, in my opinion, it separates responsibility, authority, incentives and consequences.

I’ve heard the workforce shortages, the supply chain problems and the aging infrastructure described eloquently many times. Those deserve attention. But we also need to ask leadership what decisions, contracting practices and management incentives are allowing those problems to persist. I’ve read about the Last Supper, and now I’m very excited about the First Breakfast.

We cannot keep asking the waterfront to overcome the instability and friction created upstream from the deck plates. More money and more technology will not deliver their full value if we do not address the root causes. The underlying execution system has got to change.

The standard should be operational results. I’ve seen it, and you know it, Bill. We have to deliver qualified components, build and repair ships, and deliver on time. And the Navy has to have sailors ready to operate them. Not just activity that looks like progress.

Across the seven chiefs messes where I served as command master chief, I’m guilty of giving a performance assessment that said, “A for effort, but D minus for results.” Effort matters. But in my experience, effort alone did not mean we had accomplished the mission.

“The system has got to stop measuring effort as though it was readiness.”

Question 3: If you could fix one thing first, what would it be?

Glenn Mallo: I’d continue with what we’re doing right now. I’m excited about the First Breakfast approach. One thing I would emphasize is that there are many different solutions, and I’m all in on that. Let’s experiment and try them all. It’s not going to be one size fits all, where somebody says, “This is what we’ve got to do. Contract it this way.” We have to try them all.

Most importantly, though, we have to fix the ownership of delivery. It’s results, not excuses. Leadership matters a lot. Marshal all those different ideas, run them through experimentation, then tweak. If we don’t see the right results, let’s try something else. We have to do that fast. We should not be afraid to fail, as long as we fail fast, learn from it and turn it around quickly.

I keep going back to my naval nuclear power experience, where quality, safety and accountability are not in conflict. They’re inseparable. And when I had the opportunity to lead sailors, we had to take care of them and set them up for success.

In the world we’re in right now, with leadership taking charge and a maritime czar who will marshal all this and be accountable for the results, I think the same principles I’ve seen apply directly to rebuilding America at sea. Give capable people room to work, remove the obstacles, and hold leaders accountable for results.

We cannot lower our standards. Fail fast, fail often and learn, yes, but that means we get better and apply those lessons. We’ve been repeating the same lessons. It’s time to look at the results, ask what we haven’t been doing correctly, and get it done.

“Clear ownership, disciplined execution, measurable results. That’s where I believe we should start. It’s fixing the system.”

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.

Join the conversation on X. What’s working? What’s in the way? What would you fix first?

References

[1] Josh Kirshner and Jonathan Green, “The ‘Last Supper’ era is over — it’s time for the ‘First Breakfast’,” Breaking Defense, December 2024. https://breakingdefense.com/2024/12/the-last-supper-era-is-over-its-time-for-the-first-breakfast/

[2] “Last Supper (defense industry),” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Supper_(defense_industry)

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America at Sea: Voices That Matter starts today.

Over the next 45 days, we’ll hear from voices across America’s maritime world, each answering the same three questions. Watch the kickoff below, then join the conversation.

Join the conversation. Reply to the post above on X and tell us what’s working, what’s in the way, and what you’d fix first. Not on X? Reach us through StrongerNavy.org.

The three questions

1. What’s working right now that we should do more of?
2. What’s the biggest barrier to rebuilding America at sea?
3. If you could fix one thing first, what would it be?

Transcript

Greetings. I’m Bill Cullifer, founder of Americans for a Stronger Navy. Welcome to America at Sea: Voices That Matter. This is a 45-day conversation about one question: how do we rebuild America at sea?

Why it matters

Here’s where we are. Last year China built more than half of all the new commercial ships in the world. The United States built about one-tenth of one percent [1][2].

China’s navy has more than 370 ships and is headed to 435 by 2030. Ours is about 290 [3][4]. And China builds its warships in the same yards as its cargo ships, so when it needs more, it can surge. We can’t.

Ask yourself why. A country doesn’t build a fleet like that by accident. It builds one to control the waters around it and to put its hand on the trade routes the rest of the world depends on. This summer, off Taiwan’s east coast, a Chinese fishing boat that’s part of its maritime militia was spotted working alongside its coast guard for the first time. Taiwan believes China is rehearsing a blockade [5].

Almost everyone in Washington agrees we need more ships. The arguments are about which ships, who builds them and who pays. And while we argue, China plans. So we’re trying something different. Instead of starting with the fights, we’re starting with what we already agree on.

Why start with common ground

Because agreement is where action begins. When shipbuilders, mariners, labor and the Navy community say the same thing, it’s hard to ignore, and much easier to get done.

Arguments stall. Common ground moves.

And for you, this is a chance to hear from the people doing the work, in their own words, without the spin. Much of what you buy comes to this country by sea. The ships that protect those sea lanes, and the jobs that build them, are in communities across America. This is your chance to understand what it will take, and what it means for you.

What we’re doing

Over the next 45 days, we’ll hear from voices across America’s maritime world. Each gets about ten minutes and the same three questions. What’s working right now that we should do more of? What’s the biggest barrier to rebuilding America at sea? And if you could fix one thing first, what would it be?

Same questions for everyone. Shipbuilders, large and small. Merchant mariners and the unions that train them. The skilled workers in our yards and ports. The companies that move our cargo. The Navy and Coast Guard community, active and retired. The people in Congress and their staffs who write the laws. And the writers and analysts who have been making the case for years. The shipyard worker and the admiral, side by side. We don’t all agree, and that’s the point.

The SHIPS for America Act

You’ll hear a lot about the SHIPS for America Act in this series. It’s the most comprehensive bipartisan effort in decades to rebuild our commercial fleet, our shipyards and our maritime workforce. Parts of it passed the House this summer, and Congress is deciding the rest now [6]. We’ll come back to it often, and we’ll hear from experts on where it stands.

One piece of it is worth knowing from the start. The bill creates a Maritime Security Advisor in the White House [7]. Today our maritime policy is spread across the Navy, the Coast Guard, Transportation, Commerce, Labor and more. No one person owns the whole picture. The Maritime Security Advisor would. That person would lead a board of every agency with a stake at sea, keep the national maritime strategy, and oversee a dedicated fund to pay for it. One hand on the helm.

How you can take part

The ten-minute voices are by invitation, so we can keep the conversation focused. But everyone has a part to play. Watch. Listen. Share it with someone who cares about this. And most important, weigh in. Reply on X and tell us what you think. If you know someone who should be heard, tell us that too. We read every response.

We’ll post each voice here as it comes in, starting today. And at the end of November, as Congress works to finish this year’s defense bill, we’ll publish a common-ground report: what these voices agree on, in their own words.

America at Sea is hosted by Americans for a Stronger Navy. It’s free, it’s open to everyone, and it’s nonpartisan.

Coming next

Tomorrow, you’ll meet the two people who will be with me to the finish line.

The first is Captain Brent Sadler, U.S. Navy, retired: a former nuclear submarine officer, diplomat and strategist. We asked Brent to be our moderator, and he graciously agreed. That doesn’t mean running a panel. It means guiding this series and advising us along the way. Few people know both the Navy and the maritime world the way Brent does, and he’s widely respected by his peers in both.

The second is Clay Wirsing, founder of U.S. Maritime Action, which is hosting this series with us. Clay spent eight years in American shipyards building and repairing carriers, destroyers and submarines.

Each of them will tell you, in his own words, why this matters to him.

While we argue, China plans. It’s time we started building.

Let’s roll.

Americans for a Stronger Navy is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization. America at Sea is educational and does not urge support for or opposition to any legislation.

References

[1] China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, 2025 shipbuilding figures, via Invest in China: https://investinchina.chinaservicesinfo.com/s/202602/09/WS698968cd498e23165e06d613/chinas-shipbuilding-sector-maintains-global-lead-in-2025.html
[2] CSIS, “Are U.S. Policies Eroding China’s Dominance in Shipbuilding?”: https://www.csis.org/analysis/are-us-policies-eroding-chinas-dominance-shipbuilding
[3] Congressional Research Service, China Naval Modernization (RL33153): https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/2024-08-16_RL33153_2580aa1e1d4021a5a9beb242ca3ee7aa56e21743.html
[4] U.S. Navy FY2027 shipbuilding plan, via World Ports: https://www.worldports.org/?p=742671
[5] Taipei Times (Reuters), “Taiwan spots first China militia boat in east,” Oct. 9, 2026: https://www.taipeitimes.com/
[6] K&L Gates, “House Passes Historic NDAA Maritime Amendments,” July 24, 2026: https://www.klgates.com/thought-leadership/House-Passes-Historic-NDAA-Maritime-Amendments-7-24-2026
[7] S. 1541, SHIPS for America Act of 2025, Sec. 101: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119s1541is/html/BILLS-119s1541is.htm

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Two Chokepoints, One Fleet: What the Houthi Push into the Red Sea Means for the U.S.Navy

By Bill Cullifer | Americans for a Stronger Navy

Three weeks ago, this space made the case that Hormuz burden-sharing was the clearest test of “who pays” for American sea power [1]. This week, that test got harder in a way we didn’t fully anticipate: the chokepoint problem just became a two-front problem.

What Happened

Houthi rebels completed a rapid push to take control of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, capturing the port city of Mocha and Perim Island near the Bab el-Mandeb strait late last week [2]. That’s not a minor tactical detail. Perim Island sits astride one of the three chokepoints the entire global shipping map depends on, and maritime historian Dr. Sal Mercogliano told USNI News that holding it gives the Houthis the ability to visually track vessels transiting the strait — meaning Saudi ships can no longer make quiet, “dark” transits through the Red Sea the way they could before [3].

At nearly the same time, drones launched from Iraq struck Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, forcing Riyadh to shut down the line entirely [4]. That pipeline matters because it was Saudi Arabia’s workaround for exactly this kind of crisis: after tensions rose in the Strait of Hormuz following the U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran in late February, Saudi Arabia had shifted to moving oil overland to its Red Sea port of Yanbu, bypassing Hormuz altogether [3]. Regional officials briefed on the damage say the line — with capacity for up to seven million barrels a day — will be mostly out of service for three to five weeks while repairs continue at a major pumping facility [5].

Put those two facts together and you get the problem: the workaround route is now also compromised. Mercogliano’s read is direct — the Houthi push into Red Sea territory could force Saudi Arabia back toward loading oil through its Hormuz-adjacent ports, which puts those shipments back inside Iran’s engagement envelope, where attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz have continued through September [3].

Why This Is a Different Problem Than Last Time

We wrote in August about what happened when Hormuz briefly closed during the Iran war: China and Japan largely absorbed it through strategic reserves, India rode it out on a decade of stockpiling, and thinner-margin economies like Vietnam saw real shortages [1]. That was a single-chokepoint event with a known, if costly, playbook for how the region adapts.

What’s different now is that both chokepoints — Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb — are contested at the same time, for the first time in this conflict. There is no “safe alternate route” logic left to fall back on. For the U.S. Navy and CENTCOM, that means covering two maritime flashpoints with the same finite pool of carrier strike groups, surface combatants, and Military Sealift Command shipping that was already stretched thin planning for one.

A stalled bill, a shut pipeline, a captured island — these are three different stories in the news cycle. For the fleet that has to respond to all three at once, they are one story: not enough hulls to go around.

What It Means for the Fleet

Three concrete pressures follow directly from this:

Escort and interdiction tempo rises. With the Houthis now able to put eyes directly on shipping through Bab el-Mandeb, expect renewed pressure for the kind of escort and maritime interdiction operations the Navy ran under Operation Prosperity Guardian — this time potentially layered on top of, not instead of, Hormuz-area tasking.

Magazine depth gets tested twice as hard. The recurring Red Sea vulnerability has always been the cost mismatch: expensive interceptors fired against cheap drones and missiles. A simultaneous two-front commitment accelerates that burn rate at exactly the moment the industrial base is still working to close the shipbuilding capacity gap this organization has spent three years documenting.

Tanker escort demand collides with fleet size. If Saudi crude shifts back toward Hormuz-adjacent loading, that’s more demand for U.S. and allied escort of commercial tankers, stacked on an already undersized surface fleet. This is the same fleet-size arithmetic — 291 ships today against a stated goal of roughly 450 by FY2031 — that we and others have been tracking against the FY2027 shipbuilding request all year [6].

Why We’re Raising This Here

We don’t run this organization to chase headlines, and we’re not naval strategists — we’re a nonpartisan advocacy group asking the same “who pays” question we’ve asked since day one, this time applied to a live, unfolding crisis rather than a hypothetical. The Gulf Act’s core argument was always that the nations most dependent on Hormuz traffic — not the U.S., which draws only a small share of its own oil through the strait — should share proportionally in the cost of keeping it open [1]. A two-chokepoint crisis doesn’t weaken that argument. It sharpens it: the beneficiaries of open sea lanes are about to need those lanes protected in two places at once, and the bill for that protection doesn’t shrink just because it’s split across more water.

The same logic applies to the SEAS Act’s shipbuilding-capacity argument. A Navy asked to sustain simultaneous commitments in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea is a Navy that needs the reload capacity — the missiles, the hulls, the yard throughput — that mechanism was designed to help fund, without adding to a federal debt load already near $40 trillion [1].

We’ll be watching whether the pipeline repair holds to its three-to-five-week estimate, whether the Houthi position around Bab el-Mandeb hardens into something more permanent, and whether the Navy’s tasking in theater reflects a genuine two-front commitment or a temporary surge. We’ll report back on what we find — credit where it’s earned, and a flag where it isn’t.

References

[1] Americans for a Stronger Navy, “Who Pays for Protection? A $40 Trillion Debt Says We Can’t Keep Doing This the Old Way,” StrongerNavy.org, August 31, 2026.
[2] NBC News, “Strikes shut down key Saudi pipeline as Iran-backed Houthis tighten grip on crucial shipping lane,” September 11, 2026.
[3] USNI News, “Houthis, Yemen Fighting Continues, Saudi Arabia Faces Pipeline Challenges,” September 14, 2026.
[4] Fox News, “Saudi Arabia pipeline drone Yemen Houthi,” 2026.
[5] ABC News / Associated Press, “Yemen’s Houthis seize more key islands in Red Sea, tighten grip on shipping routes,” September 15, 2026.
[6] Americans for a Stronger Navy, “U.S. Naval Readiness, Three Years In: The Foundation Is Laid — Now Comes the Test,” StrongerNavy.org, September 13, 2026.

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U.S. Naval Readiness, Three Years In: The Foundation Is Laid — Now Comes the Test

We’re publishing this ahead of Hudson Institute’s September 16 gathering on the SHIPS for America Act’s prospects, deliberately. Every name in this piece — Sen. Young, Bryan Clark, Brent Sadler, and the industry and labor voices joining them — will be in that room discussing exactly the questions this report raises. We’d rather put our read on the record first and let it be tested by the people actually doing the work than publish a victory lap after the fact. If we’ve got the balance wrong, we want to hear it there. If we’ve got it right, we hope it moves the conversation in the room toward the accountability this moment actually calls for.

Who You’ll Be Hearing From on September 16

For readers who want to follow the event itself, here’s who’s in the room and why they matter to the questions this piece raises:

Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) — Co-lead of the SHIPS for America Act, returning to Hudson to address the bill’s odds in what’s being called this Congress’s “homestretch.” His read on the September conference timeline is the single most consequential data point this piece’s “In Motion” section is waiting on.

Joe Russell — Deputy Legislative Director for Sen. Mark Kelly, the bill’s other lead sponsor. The clearest inside view on where the Maritime Security Trust Fund actually stands in negotiations.

Bryan Clark — Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, Hudson Institute. The connective tissue across SFAA, FLEETS Now, and the Navy’s own Golden Fleet plan; moderating the day’s discussion.

Brent Sadler — Senior Research Fellow, Naval Warfare and Advanced Technology, Heritage Foundation. A 26-year Navy veteran and former nuclear submariner; the sharpest read available on whether the fleet-size numbers this piece flags as stalled are likely to turn, and when.

Michael Roberts — Senior Fellow, Center for Defense Concepts and Technology. Focused on the commercial-shipbuilding side of the bill — the Strategic Commercial Fleet Program mechanics behind the 250-ship target.

Todd Tucker — Director of Industrial Policy & Trade, Roosevelt Institute. An industrial-policy perspective on whether investments like Factory 4 can outpace the broader waterfront erosion this piece cites from MARAD’s own data.

David Sullivan — General Vice President, Eastern Territory, International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers. The labor voice missing from most of these conversations — directly relevant to the wage-and-conditions workforce argument this piece raises.

Chris McVickers — Chief Financial Officer, Fairbanks Morse. A finance-side read on whether capital is actually moving into the industrial base, or still sitting on the sidelines as the skeptics argue.

Bleu Hilburn — VP Government Business Development, Crowley Maritime Corp. Established commercial-shipping industry perspective on cargo preference enforcement and fleet expansion.

Larry Ryder — SVP Business Development, Naval Programs, Hanwha Defense USA. A shipbuilder’s-eye view on distributed shipbuilding and where the Navy’s 10-to-50-percent goal actually stands on the shop floor.

Ian Bennitt — Senior Director of Government Relations and Shipbuilding, Saronic. Ben Cipperly — Chief Strategy Officer, Havoc AI. Both represent the newer, autonomous-vessel side of the industrial base — the “we can build this now” posture this piece’s “What We’ve Learned” section points to.

We’ll be watching for direct answers on the appropriations timeline, the fleet-size trendline, and the workforce diagnosis — the same three items on our own scorecard below.

Three years ago is when we started Americans for a Stronger Navy, because the country had stopped noticing its own vulnerability at sea. That was the easy part to fix — awareness. The harder question was always going to be: once people noticed, would anything actually move?

Three years later, we can say something we couldn’t say when we started: yes, something is moving. Not everything. Not fast enough. But the shift from “recognizing the problem” to “building the fix” is real, and it’s worth an honest accounting — the wins that are locked in, the ones still being fought for, and the ones that will only be real if the country holds people to them.

What’s Actually Law and Funded

Two things in this list are not proposals. They happened.

Executive Order 14269. Signed April 9, 2025, “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance” directed a whole-of-government Maritime Action Plan, mandated an assessment of tools like the Defense Production Act to rebuild the maritime industrial base, and created the framework for a national Maritime Security Advisor [1]. The White House released the resulting Maritime Action Plan in February 2026 [2]. This is a standing directive, not a bill waiting on a vote.

The FY2027 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan. The Department of the Navy’s “Golden Fleet” plan requests $65.8 billion in shipbuilding funding for FY2027 alone, targeting a battle force of roughly 450 manned and unmanned vessels by FY2031, up from 291 ships today [3][4]. Worth being precise here: this is a budget request, not an appropriation. Congress still has to fund it. But the plan itself — including the goal of moving distributed shipbuilding work from about 10 percent to 50 percent of Navy projects across non-traditional industrial sites — is now the Navy’s official position, not a think-tank white paper [4].

Factory 4, Muscle Shoals, Alabama. This $2.4 billion public-private facility (roughly $900 million in federal investment layered with $1.5 billion in private capital) opened in March 2026 and is already producing components for Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines [5]. It’s worth being specific about what it is: a submarine-component manufacturing hub, not a general hull-construction yard. Navy leadership has said it’s the first of three planned facilities meant to relieve industrial bottlenecks [5]. One factory doesn’t fix the industrial base. But it’s steel in the ground, not a slide in a briefing.

“This factory is the first of three facilities designed to address the most critical bottlenecks in the maritime industrial base.” — Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan [5]

What’s Still In Motion — and Why That Matters

This is the part of the report that’s easy to get wrong, and we’d rather get it right than get it impressive.

The SHIPS for America Act (S. 1541). This bill, led by Sens. Mark Kelly and Todd Young with Reps. Trent Kelly and John Garamendi, would establish a Maritime Security Trust Fund and a Strategic Commercial Fleet Program aimed at growing the U.S.-flagged international fleet by 250 ships over a decade [6]. It has genuine bipartisan authorship and real momentum. It is not law. It’s been reintroduced, it has committee support, and companion legislation (the FLEETS Now Act, the Ready Reserve Force Modernization Accountability Act) is moving alongside it — but as of this writing, the path forward runs through a House-Senate conference expected this fall, likely bundled with the FY27 NDAA [7]. Anyone who tells you this fund already exists is ahead of the facts. It’s close. It isn’t done.

The workforce and unmanned-systems provisions — folding uncrewed surface and undersea vehicles into official force-structure procurement counts, and standing up maritime academy and mariner-credentialing incentives — are part of the same legislative and budgetary picture: real proposals with real support, still working their way through appropriations rather than sitting on the books as settled policy.

Why the distinction matters for this movement specifically: our credibility with the people who actually read this stuff — Hill staffers, the Midrats and USNI crowd, the shipyard workforce we claim to speak for — depends on us being the group that doesn’t round up. Overstating “passed” when the real status is “introduced” costs us the next argument we need to win.

What the Skeptics Are Saying

An honest progress report has to sit with the people who don’t think there’s much progress to report. Three worth taking seriously:

The fleet number moved the wrong way. WorkBoat’s own progress check in January 2026 cited Center for Maritime Strategy data showing the U.S.-flagged oceangoing fleet actually fell to 178 cargo ships, about 0.57 percent of world tonnage, even after the executive order and the SHIPS Act push began [8]. If the goal is closing the gap with a 5,500-ship Chinese fleet, that’s the one number that should be climbing, and as of this writing it hasn’t.

The money hasn’t landed yet. At a February 2026 maritime finance conference, one shipyard-side capital advisor put it bluntly: interest is real, but results are not [9].

“Tangible results to date – no.” [9]

That’s a financing-industry read on the same gap this report flags in its “In Motion” section — plans and requests are not yet appropriated dollars or delivered ships.

The industrial base has kept eroding underneath the good news. A MARAD report — reportedly held back internally for nine months before its release — found that 27 to 40 percent of U.S. waterfront industrial facilities have disappeared over the past twenty years [10]. New facilities like Factory 4 are real, but they’re being built against a backdrop of continued, not yet reversed, decline elsewhere on the waterfront.

The workforce fix may be aimed at the wrong pool. A Wharton graduate student who has studied U.S., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean yards — and who served as a junior officer with Navy construction units in Asia — argues the real workforce question isn’t why we can’t recruit 150,000 new kids into shipbuilding, but why the 30 million Americans already in construction, manufacturing, and transportation refuse shipyard jobs [11]. His answer: shipyard work sits on the wrong side of the toil-versus-earnings line compared to what construction and auto work now offer, because pay and conditions in those industries improved over the past 30 years in ways shipbuilding didn’t. If that diagnosis holds, academy incentives and credentialing streamlining address supply for new entrants, not the wage-and-safety gap keeping the existing skilled workforce away — which means our own scorecard needs to track pay and working-condition trends at the yards, not just enrollment and hiring counts.

We’re not citing these to talk ourselves out of the progress documented above — the EO, the budget request, and Factory 4 are real regardless of what the skeptics think. We’re citing them because a movement that only quotes its own wins isn’t one the public should trust, and because these are exactly the kind of numbers our own scorecard needs to keep watching.

The Accountability Scorecard: What We’re Watching Next

Building consensus on the problem was phase one. This is phase two — and it means holding institutions to the numbers they’ve put on paper, including our own.

1. Appropriation, not just authorization. Does the FY2027 defense package actually fund the $65.8 billion shipbuilding request, and does the SHIPS for America Act’s Maritime Security Trust Fund get enacted in the September conference — or slip again?

2. Yard output versus dollars in. Distributed shipbuilding is supposed to move from 10 percent to 50 percent of Navy projects. We’ll be tracking whether ship deliveries and on-time performance at key yards actually move, not just whether the money shows up.

3. Real people in real jobs — and what those jobs actually pay. Factory 4 promises up to 1,000 skilled manufacturing jobs [5]. Maritime academy incentives and mariner credentialing reforms are supposed to rebuild the workforce pipeline. But if the diagnosis above is right, the test isn’t just enrollment and hiring numbers a year from now — it’s whether entry-level shipyard pay and working conditions actually close the gap with construction and manufacturing, since that’s the gap keeping the existing skilled workforce away in the first place.

We’ll publish updates against these three benchmarks as the facts come in — credit where it’s earned, and a flag where it isn’t.

What We’ve Learned — and What We Actually See Improving

Numbers and bill statuses are one way to measure three years. Here’s the other way: what’s changed in the room, not just on paper.

The conversation itself has moved. Three years ago, “why does the Navy matter” was still a question we had to answer from scratch, on almost every call, with almost every audience. We don’t get that question much anymore. The “who pays” framing — the idea that national will has to turn into budgets, budgets into priorities, priorities into behavior, and behavior into readiness — used to be a hard sell. Now it’s closer to common ground, even across people who disagree about almost everything else in this fight.

The bipartisan coalition is more durable than we expected. A Navy-veteran-turned-astronaut Democrat and a Naval Academy Republican leading the same bill together isn’t a coincidence three years in — it’s a sign the “national security, not partisan security” framing we’ve pushed from the start actually took. That coalition surviving a change in administration, an election cycle, and a government funding fight is itself a data point.

Industry is showing up before Washington asks it to. The volunteered testimony, the willingness of yards, suppliers, and even new entrants like the autonomous-vessel builders to say “we can do this now, fund us or not” — that’s a different posture than three years ago, when the industrial base mostly waited to be told what to build.

What we’ve learned, plainly: awareness moves faster than appropriations, and appropriations move faster than delivered ships. Each stage takes longer than the one before it, and it would be a mistake to assume this pace picks up just because the last stage did. We also learned that the “builders not critics” posture works better than we expected at keeping doors open on both sides of the aisle — and that it only keeps working if we stay honest about what hasn’t happened yet, which is exactly why the sections above separate the real from the pending.

Where We Go From Here

We’re not critics of this effort. We’re builders who happen to think the public deserves the real state of play, not the highlight reel. The country spent two decades not noticing its own maritime decline. It would be a strange way to fix that to start exaggerating the recovery. The honest version of this story is good enough to tell on its own — and it’s the only version worth standing behind a year from now.

References

[1] Executive Order 14269, “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance,” The White House, April 9, 2025.
[2] Seward & Kissel, “White House Releases Maritime Action Plan Following April 9, 2025 Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance Executive Order,” February 2026.
[3] The Defense Post, “US Navy Unveils 30-Year ‘Golden Fleet’ Modernization Plan to Reach 450+ Ships,” May 2026.
[4] ExecutiveGov, “Navy Unveils FY2027 Shipbuilding Plan,” 2026.
[5] U.S. Navy Office of Information / Navy.mil, “Advanced Shipbuilding ‘Factory of the Future’ Opens in Alabama,” March 20, 2026.
[6] Cozen O’Connor, “The SHIPS for America Act,” May 7, 2025; Rep. John Garamendi press release, April 30, 2025.
[7] Jones Walker LLP, “Update on the SHIPS for America Act.”
[8] WorkBoat, “Gauging Progress on US Shipbuilding After Trump’s Pledge,” January 28, 2026.
[9] Seatrade Maritime, “Momentum Slows on Trump’s US Maritime Action Plans,” February 13, 2026.
[10] Craig Hooper, Forbes, “MARAD: 27-40% U.S. Waterfront Industrial Facilities Gone In 20 Years,” March 3, 2026.
[11] The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Why Don’t Construction and Factory Workers Want to Build Ships?” interview with Gary Kim, September 2026.

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My 9/11 Story: Windows of the World & Let’s Roll

Two Weeks Before

In late August 2001, I was in Manhattan, kitty-corner from the Twin Towers, to deliver a web design course to community college instructors. I was there on behalf of the World Organization of Webmasters — WOW, for short an organization I founded in 1996. 

On the final day of the course overview to the program managers, around 5:30 in the evening, I walked into the World Trade Center and rode up to the Windows of the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower. I was still wearing my WOW blue denim. The staff took one look at the shirt, assumed I was a friend of the owner, and treated me like one — a glass of wine, an open table, no questions asked. I sat there taking in the whole of Manhattan below me, having no idea what that room, and that building, would mean to the country two weeks later.

The Week Everything Changed

That week, the course was taught to the Borough of Manhattan Community College web design instructors — BMCC, just blocks from the towers. It would become a command center within hours of the attack.

My two trainers that week were themselves community college instructors, my partners on a national train-the-trainers program run in collaboration with Apple Education and Cisco Systems, part of a $1.2 million U.S. Department of Education grant. Within an hour of the first plane hitting, my instinct took over: get them in a rental car and get them out of the city, to family in Pennsylvania. That drive — through a Manhattan that no longer had a skyline, past a country that didn’t yet know what was happening to it is a memory I still carry.

I think about that room at Windows of the World often. The wine, the view, the ordinary kindness of strangers who thought I belonged there — and then, seventeen days later, a building full of people who did belong there, gone.

Let’s Roll

Todd Beamer was a passenger on United Flight 93 that morning, a civilian with no training for what came next. When the hijackers took the cockpit, he got on an airphone with a GTE supervisor named Lisa Jefferson, learned what had already happened on the ground, and then turned to the passengers around him. His last recorded words were simple: “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.” [1] Minutes later, Flight 93 went down in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania — the only hijacked plane that day that didn’t reach its target. [2]

Beamer a devoted husband and father wasn’t Navy. He wasn’t a first responder. He was a father of two who saw what needed doing and organized the people around him to do it. That’s the whole of the “Let’s Roll” campaign at Americans for a Stronger Navy: not a slogan borrowed for effect, but a standard. When something needs doing — for a shipmate, a fleet, a country — you don’t wait to be asked twice.

Why I Still Tell This Story

I didn’t lose anyone I loved on 9/11. I lost a room I’d sat in two weeks earlier, and I spent that week getting two people I was responsible for out of a city that had just become a battlefield. That’s a small story next to the ones this country carries from that day. But it’s mine, and it’s why “Let’s Roll” isn’t an abstraction to me — it’s a debt.

Beamer saw the writing on the wall before anyone else on that plane did, and he acted. That’s the point of this story, and it’s the point of everything we do at Americans for a Stronger Navy: the world isn’t getting safer, and the Navy is going to carry more of the weight of that fact, not less. The 2026 National Defense Strategy says as much. We don’t have the luxury of waiting to see how it plays out. Every year on this day, I pay a little of that debt forward — it’s time to roll.

“Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.”
— Todd Beamer, United Flight 93, September 11, 2001

Non sibi sed patriae. Not self, but country. Let’s roll.

References

[1] “Let’s roll,” Wikipedia, accessed September 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_roll
[2] Daily Herald, “‘Let’s roll’: Todd Beamer’s father on the valiant fight for Flight 93,” accessed September 2026, https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20210910/lets-roll-todd-beamers-father-on-the-valiant-fight-for-flight-93

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THE CASE FOR BRENT SADLER AS MARITIME SECURITY ADVISOR

Second in a series on the Maritime Security Advisor role created by the SHIPS for America Act.

In our last piece, we made the institutional case for why the Maritime Security Advisor role matters: a new Executive Office of the President post, chairing a Maritime Security Board with authority spanning Defense, Commerce, State, and the Coast Guard—the closest thing American sea power has ever had to a single point of accountability [1]. That piece deliberately named no candidate. This one does.

We believe Captain Brent Sadler (U.S. Navy, Retired) is the right person for this role. Before laying out why, we want to address something directly rather than let it surface as a discovery later.

He Didn’t Just Study This Problem. He Proposed the Solution.

Sadler is a Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for National Security. In a July 2025 report, “Reviving America’s Maritime Strength: Comprehensive by Necessity,” he wrote the recommendation that a Maritime Security Advisor be named—co-equal to the National Security Advisor and the Director of the National Economic Council—and argued the President “should not wait” for legislation to make it happen [2].

That means the case we’re making here isn’t “a qualified person happens to be available.” It’s narrower and more direct: the person who designed this office is also, in our view, the person suited to run it. We think that’s a strength worth stating plainly, not a coincidence to talk around. Anyone can point to a resume. Few people can point to the institutional argument for the job itself, in their own name, a year before the position existed in statute.

The Rest of the Case

Set the authorship point aside, and the conventional qualifications are still substantial. Sadler was nominated by the White House for MARAD Administrator in March 2025—a nomination later redirected to another candidate, but one that means the hardest part of any new appointment, a completed White House vetting process, is largely already behind him [3].

His career built the cross-agency fluency this specific role demands: 26 years in the Navy, including operational tours as a nuclear submariner and service as a military diplomat in the Indo-Pacific helping direct billions in regional defense funding under the rebalance initiative [3]. That is not a resume built around one narrow lane of maritime policy. It’s built around coordinating defense, diplomatic, and industrial priorities simultaneously—precisely what the Maritime Security Board exists to do.

It’s also not a case he’s making for the first time under pressure. Sadler is the author of two books laying out this same argument at length: U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century: A New Strategy for Facing the Chinese and Russian Threat (2023 Naval Institute Press Author of the Year, National Security Book Award finalist), and the more recent Naval Power in Action: Seizing the Initiative in the New Cold War with China [5]. He has also testified before Congress, including before the House Foreign Affairs Committee [6]. Between the books, the Heritage report, and his record of testimony, this is a case he has been building in public, consistently, for years—not a position adopted for the occasion.

The Maritime Security Advisor isn’t a research fellowship. It’s an execution role. The strongest evidence someone can do it isn’t that they’ve written about the problem—it’s that they’ve already been trusted to act on it, at exactly this altitude, before.

Where This Stands Right Now

The FY27 NDAA, which carries the SHIPS Act’s core provisions, remains stalled in the Senate as of this writing [4]. As we noted in our last piece, that’s not actually a reason to wait: Sadler’s own 2025 report argued the President could name this Advisor today, tied to the existing April 2025 executive order on maritime dominance, without Congress acting at all [2]. If that argument was right then, it’s right now—a stalled bill doesn’t change who should hold the chair once it exists, whether that happens by statute or by executive action.

What We’re Asking

We’re not asking for a formal nomination process to be short-circuited, and we’re not claiming inside knowledge of how this decision will be made. We’re making a public case, on the merits, for a specific person—because we think the public argument matters as much as the private one, and because decisions like this benefit from being made in the open rather than settled quietly.

If you agree, add your name. We’ll be sharing the count as it grows, and using it to make the case directly to the people who can act on it.

References
[1] Americans for a Stronger Navy, “The Case for a Maritime Security Advisor,” StrongerNavy.org, September 2026.
[2] Brent D. Sadler, “Reviving America’s Maritime Strength: Comprehensive by Necessity,” The Heritage Foundation, July 24, 2025.
[3] Brent Sadler biography, The Heritage Foundation staff page; White House MARAD Administrator nomination, March 2025.
[4] H.R. 8800 (FY27 NDAA), House passage 216-212, July 22, 2026; S. 4784 cloture failed 50-46, July 14, 2026; no further Senate floor action as of Sept. 2026.
[5] Brent D. Sadler, U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century: A New Strategy for Facing the Chinese and Russian Threat, Naval Institute Press, 2023; Naval Power in Action: Seizing the Initiative in the New Cold War with China, Naval Institute Press, 2025.
[6] Brent D. Sadler, witness biography, House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, April 29, 2021.

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THE CASE FOR A MARITIME SECURITY ADVISOR

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 passed the House in July but remains stalled in the Senate as of this writing. 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 it’s resolved 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. Getting far less attention, though it’s been argued for by the people actually working this issue for well over a year, is a provision in Title I of the bill 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.

This Office Doesn’t Need to Wait for Congress

Here’s what’s easy to miss: the President doesn’t need the SHIPS Act to sign this office into existence. In a July 2025 Heritage Foundation report, Senior Research Fellow Brent Sadler argued exactly that—the President “should not wait for the [SHIPS Act] to reach his desk” and could name a Maritime Security Advisor directly, tied to the interagency framework already called for in his April 2025 executive order “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance” [5]. On that reading, the SHIPS Act doesn’t create this idea so much as it would make permanent, by statute, something the executive branch already has the authority to stand up on its own.

Where the Legislation Actually Stands

The House passed its version of the FY27 NDAA (H.R. 8800) on July 22, 216–212. The Senate’s companion bill (S. 4784) has stalled: a cloture vote to begin floor debate failed 50–46 on July 14, and as of early September, the Senate had taken no further procedural steps to bring it up [4]. Recent NDAA cycles have often skipped a formal conference committee in favor of informal House-Senate negotiation, so even “conference” may understate how this ultimately gets resolved.

None of that changes the underlying stakes. If anything, a stalled bill is exactly the moment when it’s worth being public about what’s riding on it—and a reminder that the executive branch doesn’t have to wait on the Senate to act.

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 216-212, July 22, 2026; S. 4784 cloture failed 50-46, July 14, 2026; no further Senate floor action as of Sept. 2026.
[5] Brent D. Sadler, “Reviving America’s Maritime Strength: Comprehensive by Necessity,” The Heritage Foundation, July 24, 2025.

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One Committee, One Conference, One Chance: Why Congress Needs a Select Committee for Maritime Industrial Revival

By Bill Cullifer | Americans for a Stronger Navy

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.