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.
The Questions Americans Deserve Answered (Part 1 of 8)
Bill Cullifer, Founder
I served as a blue-water destroyer sailor in the 1970s, and like many veterans, I’ve spent the years since trying to understand how America maintains the naval strength that protects our country, our allies, and the global sea lanes we all depend on.
The charts and analysis below help tell part of that story.
This article is part of Charting the Course: Voices That Matter, our ongoing educational series exploring the future of American sea power and the policies, people, and industrial strength that sustain the U.S. Navy.
This article also launches a focused 8-part series within Charting the Course examining some of the most important questions facing the Navy today — from shipbuilding capacity and fleet readiness to workforce challenges and the future of maritime deterrence.
We’re calling it The Questions Americans Deserve Answered.
For most Americans, the Navy is something we think about only in moments of crisis. A conflict erupts, a carrier group deploys, or a headline mentions tensions in the Pacific or the Middle East.
But the strength of the U.S. Navy is not decided during those moments. It is determined years — sometimes decades — earlier in shipyards, classrooms, industrial plants, research labs, and congressional hearings.
Today the United States faces serious questions about shipbuilding capacity, industrial readiness, and long-term naval strategy. China is building ships at a pace the world has not seen in generations. Russia continues to challenge Western stability at sea. Critical maritime infrastructure and supply chains are increasingly vulnerable to disruption.
And yet many Americans remain understandably disconnected from the decisions shaping the future of our fleet.
The strength of the U.S. Navy is determined long before ships sail into crisis—it is built in shipyards, sustained by skilled workers, and shaped by decisions made years earlier in industry, technology, and national policy.
Why Americans Should Care
America is, and has always been, a maritime nation.
Nearly 90 percent of global trade moves by sea. The global economy depends on secure shipping lanes. Energy markets, supply chains, and the stability of democratic alliances all rely on freedom of navigation.
The U.S. Navy has quietly safeguarded those sea lanes for generations.
But maintaining that advantage requires more than ships — it requires people, industry, technology, and public understanding.
Chart: Global Operational Demand on the U.S. Navy
This Heritage Foundation chart illustrates the geographic reach of U.S. naval operations across multiple regions. Carrier Strike Groups and Amphibious Ready Groups are routinely deployed worldwide, highlighting the constant global demand placed on the fleet.
The Questions Americans Deserve Answered
Over the coming weeks, this series will explore several critical questions about the future of U.S. sea power.
Can America rebuild the shipbuilding capacity required to compete in a new era of great power competition?
Do we have enough skilled workers — engineers, welders, and naval architects — to sustain fleet growth?
How serious is the maintenance backlog affecting submarines and surface ships?
Are current procurement processes helping or hurting the Navy’s ability to modernize?
How should the United States balance aircraft carriers, submarines, uncrewed systems, and logistics platforms?
What role do civilian shipyards and maritime infrastructure play in national security?
Can the United States scale submarine production fast enough to match emerging threats?
And perhaps most importantly: how do we ensure the American public remains engaged in decisions that affect the future of the fleet?
These are not partisan questions. They are national questions.
Understanding the Industrial Challenge
Much of the discussion about naval power focuses on ships already at sea. But the true story begins on land — in America’s shipyards and industrial base.
Chart: Age Distribution of Chinese and U.S. Naval Fleets
This chart compares the age distribution of Chinese and U.S. naval fleets. China’s fleet contains a larger number of relatively new ships, reflecting rapid shipbuilding expansion in recent years.
China now possesses the world’s largest shipbuilding industry by a wide margin.
Meanwhile, American shipyards face workforce shortages, supply chain constraints, and unpredictable funding cycles.
Chart: U.S. Navy Ships Nearing or Exceeding Service Life
This chart shows the growing number of U.S. Navy ships approaching — or exceeding — their expected service life, placing additional strain on fleet readiness and modernization timelines.
The Human Factor
Ships and technology matter — but ultimately the Navy is built on people.
From sailors standing watch at sea tonight to the skilled workers building submarines and carriers at home, the strength of the fleet depends on the dedication and expertise of thousands of Americans.
Implications for Our Allies
America does not operate alone at sea.
Alliances with countries such as Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and NATO partners form a critical part of global maritime stability.
These partnerships reinforce an important truth: deterrence is strongest when democracies stand together.
Public Engagement Matters
The U.S. Navy ultimately belongs to the American people.
Yet the complexity of defense planning can make it difficult for citizens to understand how decisions about shipbuilding, budgets, and strategy affect national security.
That is one of the reasons we created StrongerNavy.org.
Our goal is simple: help Americans better understand the challenges facing the fleet, the industrial base that supports it, and the people who serve at sea and in shipyards across the country.
The Questions Americans Deserve Answered — Series Guide
Part 1 – Understanding the Industrial Challenge (this article)
Part 2 – Can America Rebuild Shipbuilding Capacity?
Part 3 – The Submarine Production Challenge
Part 4 – Maintenance and Fleet Readiness
Part 5 – Workforce and the Maritime Industrial Base
Part 6 – The Role of Allies in Sea Power
Part 7 – Procurement, Policy, and the Future Fleet
Part 8 – Why Public Engagement Matters
That’s why we launched Charting the Course: Voices That Matter — an ongoing educational series breaking down how we got here, what went wrong, and what must happen next.
Our goal is simple: educate the public, connect the dots, and build the support needed to close the readiness gap before it’s too late.
Cutting through the noise on the world’s most critical waterway — and why this moment calls for resolve, not panic.
There is a lot of noise right now about the Strait of Hormuz. Some of it is accurate. Some of it is not. All of it is loud. Before you form an opinion about what this crisis means — and what America should do about it — you deserve the facts, stated plainly, without an agenda.
That is what we do at StrongerNavy.org. Plain language. Verified facts. No spin.
What Is Actually Happening
The Strait of Hormuz — a 21-mile-wide waterway on Iran’s southern border — is the single maritime exit for the Persian Gulf. Every barrel of oil produced in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Iran that leaves by sea passes through this one gap. It carries 20% of the world’s oil and a substantial share of global liquefied natural gas. There is no alternative route. Ships that cannot use the strait must sail around the southern tip of Africa — adding two to three weeks to every voyage.
Since February 28, that strait has been effectively closed to nearly all commercial shipping. Let’s be precise about what that means.
It is legally open. The U.S. Central Command has confirmed the strait “remains open to international navigation.” Iran has not formally closed an international waterway — it cannot under maritime law.
It is operationally closed. Ship traffic is down 94%, according to the Joint Maritime Information Center. The world’s largest shipping companies — Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, MSC, CMA CGM — have all suspended transits. Approximately 750 ships are caught in or around the strait, unable to move.
The reason ships stopped is not Iran’s navy. It is marine insurance. A European regulatory framework called Solvency 2 requires insurers to hold capital sufficient for a once-in-200-year loss event at all times. When conflict escalated, insurers recalculated their exposure overnight. Cancelling war risk coverage takes seven days. Raising new capital takes months. The math was simple — and 90% of the world’s commercial fleet lost its coverage. As maritime historian Sal Mercogliano put it plainly on March 4: “It’s not the Iranians closing the strait. The decision was made by the shipping companies.”
Iran’s weapon is not its fleet. It is economic fear. And it has worked — for now.
What It Tells Us
None of this should be a surprise. The vulnerability of the Strait of Hormuz has been documented for decades. Naval planners have war-gamed this scenario repeatedly. The question was never whether it could happen. The question was whether America would be ready when it did.
On March 3, President Trump ordered the U.S. Development Finance Corporation to provide government war risk insurance for all maritime trade in the Gulf — effective immediately, at what he described as “a very reasonable price.” It was the right instinct. Private insurers had fled the market overnight, and the insurance gap — not Iranian guns — was what stopped the ships.
Whether it moves the needle remains to be seen. The shipping industry has signaled the offer may not be sufficient to restore confidence on its own. And if vessels are damaged, American taxpayers could face a bill in the hundreds of millions — potentially billions. The commitment is real. The details are still emerging.
On March 4, President Trump pledged the U.S. Navy would escort commercial tankers through the strait. Within hours, Lloyd’s List reported the Navy had privately told shipping industry leaders it does not currently have sufficient assets to fulfill that commitment. Approximately 125 ships transit the strait daily under normal conditions. The U.S. has roughly eight guided-missile destroyers and three Littoral Combat Ships in the region. As Mercogliano noted: “This is nowhere near enough assets. They just do not have the assets to do it.”
There are no frigates available — because the U.S. has not yet built a replacement frigate. The Littoral Combat Ships present cannot reliably provide air defense against drones and missiles, as the Red Sea campaign demonstrated. And even as U.S. forces degrade Iran’s conventional navy — including the March 4 torpedo sinking of the Iranian corvette IRS Dena, the first U.S. submarine sinking of a warship since World War II — the asymmetric threat remains. Drones, mines, and fast boats do not require a functioning navy. The Houthis proved that. The Ukrainians proved that in the Black Sea.
We also do not know the full readiness picture of the ships operating in the Gulf tonight — because the Navy’s Board of Inspection and Survey readiness reports have been classified since 2008. The American public cannot independently verify whether those vessels are fully mission-capable. That is unacceptable. #FreeTheData
The gap between the President’s public commitment and the Navy’s private assessment is not a failure of this administration alone. It is the accumulated result of a generation of deferred shipbuilding, underfunded shipyards, and what we have long called seablindness — America’s institutional tendency to underinvest in naval power during periods of relative peace, then scramble when a crisis arrives.
You cannot build a destroyer in a crisis. The fleet available tonight was determined by decisions made — and deferred — over the past decade.
We Have Been Here Before
I want to say something that tends to get lost in the noise: America has fixed this before.
I served aboard USS Henry B. Wilson in the 1970s. That was the hollow Navy — undermanned, underfunded, demoralized after Vietnam, outpaced by a Soviet fleet that was growing faster than ours. The readiness gap then was real. The threat was real. The concern among those of us who served was real.
And then America came together and fixed it.
The Reagan-era naval buildup — driven by bipartisan recognition that sea power was not optional for a global superpower — took a Navy that could barely sustain itself and rebuilt it into the 600-ship force that helped end the Cold War without firing a single shot at its primary adversary. It did not happen because of panic. It happened because enough Americans, in and out of uniform, looked at the problem clearly and decided the answer was investment, not retreat.
That is the moment we are in again. The Strait of Hormuz crisis is not the end of the story. It is the alarm clock.
What America Does Now
The framework for action already exists. The President signed Executive Order 14269 restoring America’s maritime dominance. The Maritime Action Plan, released in February 2026, identified exactly the investments needed — shipbuilding capacity, workforce development, industrial base expansion, a Maritime Security Trust Fund with dedicated funding. The National Commission on the Future of the Navy is preparing public hearings in Q2 2026. The SHIPS for America Act has bipartisan support in Congress.
The architecture is there. What has been missing is national will — the public demand that elected representatives treat naval power as the non-negotiable strategic necessity it is.
That is what StrongerNavy.org exists to build. Not alarm. Not partisanship. Not finger-pointing. A clear-eyed, evidence-based, nonpartisan case that a strong Navy is not a Republican issue or a Democratic issue. It is an American issue — as fundamental to our security and prosperity as any question before the country today.
The Strait of Hormuz will reopen. Insurance markets will recalibrate. Ships will move again. But the underlying readiness gap — the shipyard capacity shortfall, the escort deficit, the classified readiness reports, the two-theater question that nobody in Washington wants to answer plainly — will still be there the morning after.
The question is whether this crisis produces the national conversation that leads to real investment, or whether we absorb the shock, breathe a sigh of relief, and go back to sleep.
America does not have to choose seablindness. We chose our way into this. We can choose our way out.
“The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” — John F. Kennedy
The sun is not shining right now. But when it does — and it will — let’s make sure we remember what this week felt like. And build accordingly.
Stay Informed. Stay Engaged.
StrongerNavy.org has been covering the naval readiness gap for over two years — plain language, verified facts, no spin. If this post was useful, share it with someone who needs to understand what is at stake. And follow our ongoing coverage as this crisis develops.
This is America’s wake-up call. What we do with it is up to us.
Sources: USNI News | Lloyd’s List | Bloomberg | CNBC | Axios | Breaking Defense | Navy Times | Seatrade Maritime | AAA | Kpler | S&P Global | Joint Maritime Information Center | U.S. Central Command | Rapidan Energy Group | U.S. Energy Information Administration | Sal Mercogliano, What’s Going On with Shipping (March 4, 2026)
For years, maritime decline has been treated as a niche issue — something for defense insiders, shipyard executives, or Navy circles to debate quietly. That is beginning to change.
Recently, Senator Todd Young published, in American Affairs Journal a thoughtful piece arguing that rebuilding America’s maritime industrial base is essential to both economic strength and national security. He traced the issue back to the Revolution, through Mahan, and into the present-day competition with China.
That matters.
Not because of who wrote it. But because of what it signals.
Maritime Power Is Back in the Conversation
For decades, America has allowed its commercial fleet to shrink. Shipyards have closed. Skilled labor has aged out. Foreign-flagged vessels now move the overwhelming majority of our trade.
Meanwhile, China designated shipbuilding a strategic industry and built accordingly.
This is not about panic. It is about arithmetic.
Eighty percent of global trade moves by sea. Most of America’s trade does too. If we cannot build, repair, and crew ships at scale, we are strategically exposed — economically and militarily.
The encouraging sign is that leaders are once again speaking openly about maritime strength.
That is progress.
Policy Is Necessary — But Not Sufficient
Legislation like the proposed SHIPS Act is an important step. Tax incentives, regulatory reform, maritime academy modernization — these are serious proposals.
But here is the harder truth:
Industrial revival cannot be sustained by legislation alone.
Shipbuilding capacity requires:
Workforce development Steel production Port modernization Cybersecurity resilience Long-term capital investment And, above all, public understanding
Without public buy-in, even well-crafted policy fades with political cycles.
This Is Not a Coastal Issue
One of the most overlooked truths in this debate is that maritime strength touches every American.
Indiana steel feeds shipyards. Midwestern grain moves to global markets by sea. Energy exports rely on tankers. Supply chains run through ports.
Sea power is not about nostalgia. It is about jobs, commerce, resilience, and deterrence.
When ships deploy longer because the fleet is too small… When maintenance backlogs grow… When sealift capacity shrinks…
Those are not abstract statistics. They are signs of strain in a system Americans depend on every day.
Civic Engagement Is the Missing Ingredient
We can debate fleet numbers. We can debate funding mechanisms. We can debate industrial policy.
But unless Americans understand why this matters — and choose to participate in the conversation — nothing lasting will change.
Rebuilding sea power is not simply a government project. It is a civic project.
It requires voters who ask informed questions. Taxpayers who demand accountability. Educators who teach maritime history and strategy. Industry leaders willing to invest long-term.
America’s maritime strength has always rested on the character and engagement of its people.
That spirit has not disappeared.
The conversation is shifting. That is a good sign.
Now the responsibility shifts to us.
That’s why we launched Charting the Course: Voices That Matter — a 24-part educational series breaking down how we got here, what went wrong, and what must happen next. Our goal is simple: educate the public, connect the dots, and build the support needed to close the readiness gap before it’s too late.
Protecting America’s Naval Edge Strategic competition, documented technology theft, and military-linked research highlight why protecting America’s technological advantage is essential to maintaining naval superiority.
Abstract
Naval power in the 21st century is shaped as much by technological innovation as by fleet size. Strategic competitors are investing heavily in research, industrial capacity, and military modernization to close the technological gap with the United States. This article analyzes the implications of documented research security concerns, the role of military-linked academic institutions, and the broader strategic environment, and argues that preserving America’s technological advantage requires informed public engagement, policy alignment, and sustained national awareness.
Introduction
For decades, America’s naval superiority rested on more than ships—it rested on technological advantage. That advantage was built in American shipyards, laboratories, universities, and research institutions. Today, that technological edge is being challenged by strategic competitors who have invested heavily in naval expansion, industrial capacity, and military-relevant technologies. Increasingly, naval professionals, policymakers, and national security experts are raising concerns about how technological competition is unfolding—and how little public awareness exists about its implications. Some documented cases involving technology theft, undisclosed foreign military-linked affiliations, and strategic research competition have received only limited public attention. Americans deserve to understand what is happening, why it matters, and what it means for the future strength of the United States Navy.
Naval Power Begins Long Before a Ship Is Built
Every modern U.S. Navy platform depends on breakthroughs in science and engineering:
Nuclear engineering enables submarine propulsion and carrier endurance
Advanced materials determine hull strength, stealth, and survivability
Semiconductors power radar, communications, and weapons systems
Artificial intelligence and autonomy are reshaping the future of naval warfare
The future DDG(X) destroyer, unmanned naval systems, and next-generation submarines will rely heavily on research happening today in American universities, national laboratories, and federally funded programs.
These institutions are essential to national strength.
But the knowledge they produce exists in a world defined by strategic competition.
Documented Cases Show the Risk Is Real
Concerns about research security are not theoretical. Federal investigations and criminal prosecutions have confirmed cases involving the theft of sensitive technology, undisclosed foreign affiliations, and illegal transfer of research with national security implications.
In January 2026, a U.S. federal jury convicted a former Google engineer of stealing more than 2,000 confidential artificial intelligence and supercomputing files and transferring them to entities linked to China. These technologies have direct military and intelligence applications.
In 2021, Harvard University professor Charles Lieber was convicted for failing to disclose his financial relationship with China’s Thousand Talents Program while receiving U.S. federal research funding. Federal authorities determined he had concealed foreign financial ties tied to a Chinese state-affiliated university.
U.S. authorities have also prosecuted multiple export control violations and research-related concealment cases involving sensitive technologies, including advanced materials, computing, and engineering fields directly relevant to military capability.
The FBI has warned repeatedly that China operates one of the most extensive technology acquisition efforts in modern history, targeting critical research sectors tied to national defense.
These are documented cases—not speculation.
What the “Seven Sons” Represent
U.S. government reports and independent research institutions have identified a group of Chinese universities known as the “Seven Sons of National Defense” as central to China’s military research and development ecosystem. These institutions maintain deep ties to China’s defense industry and serve as primary training grounds for engineers and scientists supporting naval, aerospace, and weapons development.
China’s Military-Civil Fusion strategy explicitly integrates civilian research with military advancement, accelerating defense capability development.
This structural integration differs fundamentally from the decentralized American system and highlights the importance of protecting the technological advantage that underpins U.S. naval superiority.
Why Americans Are Only Beginning to Hear This Story
Many of these cases involving technology theft, undisclosed affiliations, and research security concerns have been publicly reported—but rarely remain in the national spotlight long enough for Americans to see the broader pattern.
Through our China Watch coverage, Americans for a Stronger Navy has documented the larger strategic picture: rapid Chinese naval expansion, sustained investment in military-relevant technologies, and long-term efforts to close the technological and industrial gap with the United States.
This is not a moment for panic—but it is a moment for awareness.
Naval superiority depends on technological leadership. And technological leadership depends on national awareness.
Congress Recognized the Challenge — But the Debate Continues
In 2025, Congress passed the SAFE Research Act in the House of Representatives to strengthen transparency and accountability in federally funded research involving foreign adversary-linked institutions.
However, the provision was removed from the final National Defense Authorization Act after opposition from major academic organizations.
Organizations raising concerns included:
Association of American Universities (AAU)
Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU)
American Physical Society (APS)
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF)
These organizations warned the legislation could harm scientific collaboration, innovation, and America’s ability to attract global talent.
Their concerns reflect legitimate interests in preserving America’s research leadership.
At the same time, the strategic competition affecting naval power continues to accelerate.
Both realities exist.
Why This Matters to the Future of the U.S. Navy
Naval superiority is no longer determined solely by fleet size.
It depends on maintaining technological leadership in:
Nuclear propulsion
Artificial intelligence
Advanced materials
Autonomous systems
Sensors, communications, and computing
These technologies determine whether future American ships remain dominant—or vulnerable.
Shipbuilding matters. Industrial capacity matters. But technological leadership remains decisive.
If America protects its technological edge, it protects its naval advantage.
If it does not, ship numbers alone will not be enough.
Why Americans Should Care
The U.S. Navy protects global trade, deters conflict, and secures the maritime foundation of the American economy.
Every American depends on maritime security.
But naval strength requires more than ships. It requires public awareness, industrial strength, and national alignment.
Americans cannot support what they do not understand.
That is why awareness matters.
Conclusion: A National Conversation Worth Having
America’s openness has fueled generations of innovation and built the most capable Navy in history.
But strategic competitors have studied our system, invested heavily, and worked deliberately to close the gap.
The question is not whether America should remain open.
The question is whether America will remain aware.
Naval superiority cannot be taken for granted. It must be protected—not just in shipyards, but in laboratories, in policy decisions, and in the national will of the American people.
That’s why we launched Charting the Course: Voices That Matter — a 24-part educational series breaking down how we got here, what went wrong, and what must happen next. Our goal is simple: educate the public, connect the dots, and build the support needed to close the readiness gap before it’s too late.
