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Category: Analysis
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Welcome back to America at Sea: Voices That Matter. Today we hear from Commander Jim McLaughlin, U.S. Navy. He is a graduate of the California Maritime Academy, worked as a junior project manager at General Dynamics NASSCO, sailed as a licensed merchant mariner on offshore supply vessels in the Gulf, and now serves as an active-duty Navy commander. His views are his own and not those of the U.S. Navy, the Department of War or the U.S. government. Same three questions as everyone: what’s working, what’s in the way, and what he’d fix first.
“American shipbuilding still uses 1980s know-how and 1940s infrastructure.” CDR Jim McLaughlin: shipyard, merchant mariner, now an active-duty Navy commander, with his plan to fix it. America at Sea: Voices That Matter pic.twitter.com/jmpvzxQcWE
Why it matters: “The health of the merchant marine and the United States Navy are indissolubly linked.” A strong merchant fleet and shipbuilding base are what make a strong, affordable Navy possible, and what keep the country supplied in a crisis.
What’s working: The push to re-industrialize America, and joint ventures between American and foreign shipbuilders, like Hanwha and Philly Shipyard. “American shipbuilding still uses 1980s know-how and 1940s infrastructure.”
The biggest barrier: Economic competitiveness. Most of the world’s merchant fleets, he says, are not free-market businesses but state-run cartels that depend on subsidies.
Fix first: Consistent demand for ships. He lays out a detailed plan: a 10-year build plan funded up front, starting with Military Sealift Command, whose ships average more than 40 years old; training pipelines for mariners and shipbuilders; a 20-year average fleet age; and fixed-price contracts instead of cost-plus.
“Steady, predictable orders are the lifeblood of the industry.”
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. We’ve got a great lineup this week, and a big thank you and a shout-out to everyone who’s taking part. Today we hear from Commander Jim McLaughlin, a Cal Maritime grad who has worked in a shipyard, sailed as a merchant mariner, and now serves as an active-duty Navy commander. His views are his own. If you find this worthwhile, please like and share it. Commander Jim McLaughlin, over to you.
Introduction
Jim McLaughlin: Hello, my name is Jim McLaughlin. I’m a commander in the United States Navy. I previously had command of USS Canberra (LCS 30), where I participated in Operation Epic Fury and the ensuing blockade. I’m currently in command of USS Jackson (LCS 6), and I hold a B.S. in Marine Engineering Technology from the California Maritime Academy. Before my naval service, I worked as a junior project manager at General Dynamics NASSCO and as a licensed merchant mariner aboard offshore support vessels in the Gulf of America. The opinions expressed here are my own and not the opinions of the United States Navy, the Department of War or the government of the United States.
For the general public, I think the main question we need to ask and answer is: why does America need to grow the merchant marine and shipbuilding sectors? We need to grow them to ensure we have, and can afford, the world’s strongest Navy, and that in times of war or crisis we can move the materials required to sustain our armed forces and our economy. The health of the merchant marine and the United States Navy are indissolubly linked. It’s very hard to have a healthy Navy without a healthy merchant fleet and shipbuilding industry.
Question 1: What’s working right now that we should do more of?
Jim McLaughlin: At a macro level, the push to re-industrialize America is probably the most important thing required to expand the merchant and naval fleets. As we’ve seen with the Chinese, you can’t be competent in naval construction unless you’re competent in commercial construction, and you can’t be competent in commercial construction unless your nation has a large and competent manufacturing base.
At a micro level, joint ventures such as the one between the Hanwha Group and Philly Shipyard must be expanded. To a large degree, American shipbuilding still uses 1980s know-how and 1940s infrastructure. The only way we’re going to modernize quickly is by partnering with firms that excel at modern ship construction, and by offering monetary incentives to expand and upgrade shipbuilding infrastructure.
“American shipbuilding still uses 1980s know-how and 1940s infrastructure.”
Question 2: What’s the biggest barrier to rebuilding America at sea?
Jim McLaughlin: The single largest barrier is economic competitiveness. Unfortunately, most of the world’s merchant fleets are not true private, free-market enterprises. They’re state-run cartels. They’re not inherently profitable, and they rely heavily on state subsidies to build and operate ships. The American government will have to provide some degree of subsidy to incentivize investment in the industry.
Question 3: If you could fix one thing first, what would it be?
Jim McLaughlin: There’s a lot more than one thing that needs to be fixed, but the main thing I would do is ensure consistent demand for ships, to achieve consistent investment in shipbuilding. The government is the only customer capable of doing this. If Congress were to commit to and fund a set number of orders over the next decade, it would result in a healthy shipbuilding ecosystem.
As always, the devil’s in the details. Here’s how I would lay out my plan.
Congress should commit to a 10-year build plan. Congress should also appropriate all the funds required to execute that plan in year one, meaning all the money is allocated and sitting in an account, ready to be spent over the course of 10 years. That ensures a steady flow of orders that aren’t subject to annual wrangling over funding.
I would start by expanding the Military Sealift Command fleet. The average age of MSC ships is over 40 years, and the fleet is far too small for a major peer-on-peer conflict. Logistics ships are also generally easier to build than warships. As the industry gains proficiency building logistics ships, it can apply that proficiency to building warships.
I would incentivize private construction of commercial vessels through favorable government lending or construction subsidies.
We also need to address the personnel side, because without sailors and welders, a ship and a shipyard are pretty useless. I would start a reserve officer training corps for Military Sealift Command. To grow the cadre of merchant mariners, MSC or the Maritime Administration should offer scholarships to students at maritime colleges, on the condition that once they’re licensed, they work four years for MSC or aboard another privately operated American vessel. Kings Point, the federal maritime academy, already works this way, and it could be expanded to the state maritime academies.
I would also streamline the process for upgrading a merchant mariner’s license and eliminate unneeded requirements. On a personal note, I let my own license expire some years ago. I reported a minor case of sleep apnea to the Coast Guard, and they sent mountains of paperwork requesting sleep studies and physicals. At the time I was on active duty and fully fit for the Navy, and I simply didn’t have time to deal with it, so I let my license lapse.
I would also grow the cadre of shipbuilders by offering similar scholarships for students to attend trade schools, with an obligation to work a set number of years at a public or private shipyard.
I would commit to maintaining a set fleet size for the Navy, MSC and the merchant fleet. And I would commit in law to maintaining a 20-year average fleet age for both MSC and the Navy. Those two steps would ensure the construction of new vessels and a steady improvement in shipbuilding infrastructure. Steady, predictable orders are the lifeblood of the industry. We must avoid a feast-and-famine environment like the 1940s, when we crash-built thousands of ships in a few short years and then sharply cut orders for decades afterward.
“We must avoid a feast-and-famine environment like the 1940s.”
Finally, the vast majority of government ship purchases need to be fixed-price contracts instead of cost-plus contracts. Under cost-plus, contractors bill the government for their costs and then get an agreed profit based on a set percentage of those costs. The higher the costs, the higher the profit. That’s exactly the kind of incentive we don’t want. We want builders to be efficient and to keep improving their infrastructure and skills, and the way to do that is consistent orders over a long period at fixed unit prices. A fixed-price contract sets what the customer will pay per unit, and the contractor has to build below that price to make a profit. Fixed prices plus the certainty of steady orders push contractors to innovate, upgrade equipment and upskill employees to increase their margins. Over time, that results in a healthy, competent shipbuilding sector that produces more ships of higher quality, and eventually at a lower unit cost.
Once again, the opinions expressed are my own, not the opinions of the United States Navy, the Department of War or the government of the United States. Thank you.
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 do not represent the U.S. Navy or the Department of War. 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?
America at Sea: Voices That Matter continues with Clay Wirsing, founder of U.S. Maritime Action. Clay started his career as a welding engineer at Newport News Shipbuilding. He answers the same three questions we ask everyone, from the shipyard floor up.
New to the SHIPS for America Act? Clay gets into the details, so you may want to 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: momentum. Clay sees real energy behind the SHIPS for America Act and more public attention to maritime policy than ever. He calls it “an overwhelmingly positive bill for the maritime industry.”
What’s in the way: shipyard capacity. Clay walks through j JM mmthree parts of the bill and asks whether our yards can deliver. The cargo rules for government cargo, imports from China and LNG exports would each call for more U.S. ships than today’s yards can build quickly. The yards that build commercial ships produce about five ships a year at peak, many are tied up with government work, and there’s already a shortage of welders and other tradesmen.
“I like the initiative behind this. I think it’s just getting a little bit ahead of ourselves.” — Clay Wirsing
What he’d fix first: start with what we know how to build. Begin with standard tankers, container ships and bulk carriers, including bulk carriers to secure supply chains like rare earth elements, before moving to complex LNG carriers. Phase the government cargo requirement in, at something like 75 to 90 percent, as the fleet grows.
The long view. China revisits its maritime policy every five to ten years. The United States hasn’t made a major update since the Merchant Marine Act of 1970. “It’s long overdue,” Clay says, and the work shouldn’t stop with one bill.
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 hear from Clay Wirsing, founder of U.S. Maritime Action in San Diego. He started his career on the shipyard floor in Newport News, Virginia. Same three questions as everyone: what’s working, what’s in the way, and what he’d like to fix first. Clay, over to you.
Introduction
Clay Wirsing: My name is Clay Wirsing. I started off as a welding engineer back in 2017 at Newport News Shipbuilding. At the time I really didn’t have any idea what the global situation was with shipbuilding or maritime. And I can remember about a year after I started, some high-level officials from the Navy came in and talked to us about speeding up the pace of our shipyard in order to compete with China. That was kind of my first introduction to how far we’ve fallen behind as a maritime nation, especially in shipbuilding.
Unfortunately, not a lot has changed since then in terms of actual shipbuilding capacity, but we do now see a ton of momentum, which has been great to see, with the SHIPS for America Act, and a lot more public recognition of what’s going on. And so I just want to continue to contribute to that, and hope to see more people join the movement and let our politicians know that maritime is an important space for both our economy and national defense, and we need to have the right laws and policies that allow us to succeed in that domain.
What’s working right now that we should do more of?
I love the momentum that’s being built up behind the SHIPS for America Act. It’s great to see that there’s a lot of attention to our maritime policy and laws, and that’s becoming more recognized by the public. And I think we need to just continue to join that discussion and get as many people involved, to let our politicians know that maritime policy is an important part of our country.
The SHIPS for America Act is an overwhelmingly positive bill for the maritime industry. I think there are some little tweaks that I would urge our politicians to consider, to better suit the needs of our maritime industry and also have realistic policy.
What’s the biggest barrier to rebuilding America at sea?
In section 412 of the bill, there is a mandate for 100% U.S. government cargo preference going to U.S.-flag ships. I think this is a great initiative, but we might be a little bit ahead of ourselves just because of the small size of the U.S. fleet. If we increase this more modestly, to something like 75% or even 90%, then it does give us a little bit of flexibility when we don’t have U.S. ships available to take our government cargoes. And I think that’s something we could revisit down the line. Assuming our fleet does grow, we will be able to have 100% government cargo preference in the future.
Section 415 mandates that within 15 years, 10% of all cargo imported from China to the U.S. will be carried on U.S.-flagged vessels. Currently there are about a million TEU, twenty-foot equivalent containers, shipped from China to the U.S. each year. We’re only carrying about 2 to 3% of that trade currently, and that’s all through Matson’s CLX line. So to carry 10% of that trade, I think we’re looking at either 10 very large ships or around 50 container ships. And the shipyards we have doing commercial work right now aren’t really large enough to build these huge container ships. It’ll basically lead to a point where we need to build a lot of ships in a very short amount of time, which I don’t think is realistic. Again, I like the initiative behind this. I think it’s just getting a little bit ahead of ourselves.
Another section that might be problematic is section 420, which requires that 15% of total seaborne LNG exports be carried on U.S.-flag vessels by 2043. This is going to require somewhere between 15 and 25 LNG ships, depending on their size. LNG ships these days are quite large. They’re actually much bigger than the ships currently built at General Dynamics NASSCO or Hanwha Philly Shipyard, and those shipyards are building about five ships per year in total at their peak capacity. We currently see a lot of these shipyards tied up with government contracts, so I don’t think there’s a lot of capacity to take on LNG work. On top of that, LNG vessels are pretty complex to build, especially their containment tanks. And we already have shortages of welders and other tradesmen, which will make it difficult to build these in a cost- and time-effective manner.
If you could fix one thing first, what would it be?
I think it would be better to start off with a more reasonable ship type, things that we’ve already built: standard oil tankers, container ships, or maybe even a simple ship type like bulk carriers to secure our rare earth elements or other parts of our supply chain, rather than going straight for the complex LNG vessels. Again, I like the sentiment behind this. I just think we’re not quite where we need to be with yard capacity to pull off some of the shipbuilding requirements laid out in this bill.
A lot of countries, especially China, are revisiting their maritime policy every five years, maybe a decade or so. The U.S. hasn’t really had a major effort in revisiting or revising its policy since the Merchant Marine Act of 1970. So it’s long overdue. I hope to see some bills like the SHIPS for America Act come through and pass in Congress, and then, not only that, but as we continue to move forward as a nation, that we continually revisit these issues and make sure that our maritime laws and policies are appropriate for the conditions we face in our current period.
While we argue, China plans. It’s time we started building.
Americans for a Stronger Navy is a nonpartisan not for proft organization.
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.
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.
The Heritage Foundation published a factsheet this month that does something rare in this space: it lays out, in plain language, exactly where the nation’s maritime revival stands and exactly what Congress needs to decide next [1]. We want to highlight one recommendation in particular, because we think it’s the single most important structural fix available to Congress right now and because it’s the kind of nonpartisan, process-focused idea a nonpartisan organization like ours can endorse without reservation.
Heritage recommends that, whether or not the Senate consolidates the current maritime bills into one, congressional leadership should create a Select Committee for Maritime Industrial Revival to coordinate across the committees that currently have jurisdiction [1]. We think that recommendation deserves support from anyone who has watched this effort unfold over the past three years.
The Problem the Committee Would Solve
The maritime revival effort is not lacking for good bills. The April 2025 version of the SHIPS for America Act carries genuine bipartisan support — 29 Senate cosponsors (15 Republican, 14 Democrat) and 140 House cosponsors (75 Democrat, 65 Republican) as of its last recorded action [1]. Alongside it sit the Shipbuilding Investment and Workforce Act, the FLEETS Now Act, and the Ready Reserve Force Modernization Accountability Act — each addressing a different piece of the same problem, each sponsored by different members, and each currently routed through different committees [1].
That’s not a failure of ideas. It’s a failure of coordination. A House amendment to the FY27 NDAA passed with two of these maritime provisions attached, and the whole package is now headed to House-Senate conference in September [2]. Conference is exactly the moment when overlapping, uncoordinated bills either get reconciled into something workable or get quietly dropped in the scramble to close out a defense authorization. A Select Committee — standing up now, ahead of that conference — is the difference between these bills arriving as a coordinated package and arriving as competing claims on the same limited floor time.
Why This Matters Beyond the Bills Themselves
We’ve spent three years arguing that naval readiness is fundamentally a “who pays” problem — allied burden-sharing through the Gulf Act, and a debt-neutral corporate demand signal through the SEAS Act’s Strategic Technology Responsibility Contribution [3]. Neither of those mechanisms competes with what’s already in SHIPS for America. Heritage’s own factsheet shows SHIPS for America’s funding model leans on shipping-side fees — non-U.S.-flagged vessel fees and Section 301 penalties tied to Chinese-built ships feeding a self-sustaining Maritime Trust Fund [1]. That’s a shipping-side answer to “who pays.” The SEAS Act is a corporate-side answer. The Gulf Act is an allied-side answer. None of these ideas need to compete for the same dollars or the same bill number — but they do need a body capable of seeing all of them at once, which is precisely what a Select Committee would provide.
What We’re Asking
We’re not asking Congress to adopt any specific funding mechanism in this post — ours or anyone else’s. We’re asking Congress to create the structure that would let good mechanisms be evaluated on the merits rather than lost to committee turf. A Select Committee for Maritime Industrial Revival, stood up before September conference, would let Congress treat this as the “generational task” Heritage rightly calls it [1], instead of a jurisdictional scramble.
The nation’s maritime revival has been, in Heritage’s words, a bipartisan, bicameral effort since its inception [1]. It should stay that way through conference. A Select Committee is how it does.
References
[1] The Heritage Foundation, “Maritime Legislation: Explainer and Next Steps,” Factsheet No. 285, August 12, 2026. [2] H.R. 8800 (FY27 NDAA), House passage with maritime amendments, 2026; expected House-Senate conference, September 2026. [3] Americans for a Stronger Navy / Center for Maritime Strategy, “Defense Reinvestment as Naval Strategy,” March 2026.
A recent C-SPAN clip of President Trump discussing South Korea has been circulating, and it’s worth pausing on — not for the politics, but for the arithmetic. Trump described renegotiating South Korea’s cost-sharing agreement for U.S. troop protection, contrasting the roughly $3 billion Seoul agreed to pay against an initial ask of $10 billion, and questioning why the U.S. maintains 39,000 troops defending a wealthy ally that declined to assist with a related Middle East operation [1]. He extended the same complaint to NATO, noting the hundreds of billions the U.S. spends defending Europe from Russia [1].
Set aside whether you think that negotiation was handled well. The underlying question — who pays for the protection America provides? — is one we’ve been asking about naval power for three years, and it’s one the country can no longer afford to leave unanswered.
The Number That Changes the Conversation
As of this month, the U.S. gross national debt stands at roughly $40 trillion — up more than $2.8 trillion in the past year alone, or about $7.9 billion in new borrowing every single day [2]. Net interest now consumes nearly 14 percent of federal outlays, a share the Congressional Budget Office expects to keep climbing [2]. Debt held by the public is already above 100 percent of GDP, and CBO’s own long-term outlook shows that ratio climbing toward 120 percent by the mid-2030s absent reform [3].
That’s the fiscal backdrop against which every naval modernization request, every shipbuilding appropriation, and every forward-deployed carrier strike group now has to be justified. Taxpayers are not wrong to push back on open-ended commitments funded by more borrowing. As Washington debates spending, the Navy’s own leadership has been blunt that this is fundamentally a resource issue, with the Chief of Naval Operations citing a Congressional Budget Office estimate that an adequate fleet requires something on the order of $38 billion a year in shipbuilding funding alone [4] — funding that has to come from somewhere.
The Gulf Act: Burden-Sharing Where It Belongs
This is exactly the gap the Gulf Maritime Protection and Burden-Sharing Act is built to close. The Strait of Hormuz example is almost too on-the-nose: the U.S. Navy underwrites the security of a chokepoint that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil, much of it bound for nations that are not proportionally sharing the cost of keeping that lane open. China alone receives well over a third of the crude that transits the Strait, with India, Japan, and South Korea rounding out the bulk of the remainder — while the United States itself, thanks to domestic shale production and a supply chain built on Canada and Mexico, takes in only a small fraction of that flow [5].
The Iran war earlier this year gave us a live test of what happens when that lane actually closes, and the results make the case for burden-sharing sharper, not weaker. China and Japan largely rode out the closure on strategic reserves and pipeline diversification; India surprisingly weathered it too, on the strength of a decade of stockpile-building [6]. But none of that resilience came free. It meant months of elevated prices, emergency reserve drawdowns, and — for economies like Vietnam with thin buffers — real shortages and rationing [6]. Self-insuring against a closed strait is expensive and imperfect. A functioning U.S. Navy presence that keeps the strait open in the first place is the far cheaper alternative — which is precisely why it’s in these nations’ own economic interest to help fund it, not simply a matter of fairness to the American taxpayer. Trump’s complaint about allies who “don’t want to get involved” in guarding their own energy lifeline is, functionally, the same diagnosis the Gulf Act was written to fix. The Act doesn’t ask American taxpayers to absorb more debt to police a chokepoint for other nations’ benefit — it asks the beneficiaries to pay a proportional share for a service that is, by their own recent experience, worth far more to them than its cost.
The SEAS Act: A Demand Signal That Doesn’t Touch the Debt
The Strategic SEAS Act applies the identical logic domestically. Rather than asking Congress to appropriate still more borrowed dollars into shipbuilding, the Act’s Strategic Technology Responsibility Contribution draws a modest, offset-eligible assessment from U.S. companies with the deepest revenue dependence on China’s economy — the same offshoring era that hollowed out American shipyard capacity in the first place. It creates a dedicated, predictable demand signal for shipbuilders, which is the single thing industry has said it needs most to justify capital investment, without adding a dollar to the $40 trillion balance sheet [7].
That “no new debt” framing matters more today than it did when we first proposed it. Fiscal conservatives, China hawks, and taxpayers who are simply tired of watching the debt clock spin are, for once, aligned on the same conclusion: national defense funding mechanisms that don’t require more borrowing are worth building.
Builders, Not Critics
We’re not in the business of scoring political points off a South Korea negotiation. We’re in the business of pointing out that the underlying math — protection without proportional payment — shows up everywhere, from allied burden-sharing to Wall Street’s China exposure to a shipbuilding budget the Navy itself says is underfunded by billions a year. The Gulf Act and the SEAS Act are the constructive answer: mechanisms that ask the actual beneficiaries of American sea power, foreign and domestic, to help sustain it — instead of asking an already over-leveraged taxpayer to do it alone.
References
[1] C-SPAN, “Trump says Kim Jong Un has responded to overtures,” transcript, 2026. [2] Joint Economic Committee (Republicans), Monthly Debt Update, August 2026. [3] Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036, February 2026. [4] Remarks by Adm. Daryl Caudle, CNO, West 2026 conference, San Diego, February 12, 2026, as reported by Janes. [5] International Energy Agency, “Strait of Hormuz Factsheet,” February 2026; U.S. Energy Information Administration, Q1 2025 destination data. [6] Gulf International Forum, “Hormuz Disruptions and Asia’s Energy Resilience,” March 2026; The National Interest, “How China Turned the Strait of Hormuz Crisis into an Advantage,” June 2026; India Narrative, “The Strait That Didn’t Break India,” July 2026. [7] Americans for a Stronger Navy / Center for Maritime Strategy, “Defense Reinvestment as Naval Strategy,” March 2026.
Ask most people following naval policy what’s happening with the Ships for America Act, and you’ll get a confident answer. Ask a second person, and you’ll often get a different one—not because either is wrong, but because “the Ships for America Act” isn’t one bill anymore. It’s four, moving on four different tracks, with four very different odds of becoming law. Even close observers conflate them.
That confusion isn’t a footnote. It’s the story—and it reveals a fundamental truth about how naval policy is won or lost in Congress.
The Reality of Legislative Fragmentation
Complex national security policy rarely moves in a single, neat package. To survive Capitol Hill, broad policy visions get carved up to fit whatever legislative doors are open:
The Core SHIPS for America Act (NDAA Track): By folding key fleet expansion provisions into the must-pass FY27 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), lawmakers gave the core vision institutional momentum heading into the Senate conference.
The FLEETS Now Act (Standalone Track): Focused on maritime diplomacy and allied coordination, this standalone effort faces steep legislative odds without a major annual defense vehicle carrying it forward.
The Ready Reserve Force Modernization Accountability Act (Senate Track): A targeted companion bill addressing the nation’s aging military sealift fleet, moving along its own distinct procedural path.
The Shipbuilding Investment and Workforce Act (Ways & Means Track): Because House rules prohibit tax-code modifications inside a defense authorization bill, essential capital investment credits and workforce incentives had to be split into a separate revenue bill.
None of this is scandalous; it’s standard legislative mechanics. But when complex maritime strategies fracture across different committees—Armed Services, Ways & Means, Transportation & Infrastructure—it creates a massive messaging gap for advocates. A citizen calling their representative to “support the Ships for America Act” during NDAA conference is taking the right action for one piece, but leaving tax incentives, workforce programs, and sealift readiness completely unaddressed.
Beyond Four Bills: Tracking the Issues That Matter
This challenge extends far beyond a single legislative package. Rebuilding American maritime power requires sustained focus across four core operational pillars:
Sealift & Reserve Readiness: Tracking the age, operational availability, and crew readiness of the Ready Reserve Force and domestic merchant fleet.
Dedicated Funding Mechanisms: Following structural proposals like Maritime Security Trust Funds and capital tax credits that end damaging boom-and-bust budget cycles.
Allied Maritime Cooperation: Monitoring frameworks that coordinate shipbuilding, repair capabilities, and diplomacy with international partners to counter peer competition.
When policy breaks apart across Capitol Hill, grassroots energy usually breaks with it. Winning requires tracking not just the intent of a bill, but the procedure driving it.
A Job for a Committee, Not a Comment Section
Following this ecosystem across two chambers, five committees, and a shifting calendar rewards patience and consistency over expertise. It is work that single reporters or think tanks cannot easily sustain—but it is precisely the gap an organized network of volunteers can close.
StrongerNavy.org is establishing a Volunteer Legislative & Policy Tracking Committee. We aren’t building a team of lobbyists; we’re mobilizing citizens willing to check Congress.gov, monitor committee markups, and help translate dense legislative movements into plain-language monthly updates.
By assigning volunteers to monitor specific pieces of the maritime puzzle, we turn confusing Capitol Hill mechanics into clear, targeted action—showing supporters exactly when, where, and to whom a phone call or letter matters most.
No single volunteer needs to master the entire defense budget. The power is in numbers, consistency, and plain English. If you want to help ensure great maritime policies become enacted law rather than missed opportunities, join us.
Reach out and sign up at StrongerNavy.org.
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.
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.
Today is National Maritime Day — May 22 — and for the first time since Richard Nixon sat in the Oval Office, there is genuine presidential attention on reviving America’s maritime and naval power. A 30-year Navy shipbuilding plan. Executive orders. Legislative proposals. And now, a compelling call from one of Washington’s sharpest naval analysts for the President himself to break the legislative logjam.
The vision is finally taking shape. The ambition is real. But a bold maritime revival still has a critical gap at its center: how do you sustain it?
Sadler’s TRUMP Act: The Right Diagnosis
On May 20 — two days before National Maritime Day — Brent Sadler, Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for National Defense, published a powerful op-ed in The Washington Times calling for President Trump to invoke his constitutional authority under the Recommendation Clause (Article II, Section 3) to personally propose legislation to Congress.[1]
Sadler’s argument is straightforward: the SHIPS for America Act — a bipartisan, bicameral bill first introduced in December 2024 — has stalled in Congress. Again. Presidential sponsorship, he argues, is the only force capable of breaking that logjam before Congress heads into summer recess and political attention fractures.
He proposes calling it the Transformative Revival and Urgent Maritime Program — the TRUMP Act. The branding is deliberate, and Sadler knows exactly what he’s doing.
His three modifications to the existing SHIPS Act framework are sound:
Adjusted incentives for workforce and shipbuilding infrastructure reinvestment
Regulatory relief through Maritime Prosperity Zones to accelerate industrial investment
A new Maritime Department consolidating the Coast Guard, MARAD, FMC, and NOAA into a unified commercial maritime revival body
“More navel-gazing in Washington is unacceptable. With Congress’ summer recess fast approaching, national political attention will shift from bipartisan endeavors, such as a national maritime revival, to vote-seeking.” — Brent Sadler, The Washington Times, May 20, 2026 [1]
He’s right. And the constitutional argument is well-constructed. James Madison’s Federalist No. 47, FDR’s first 100 days, Eisenhower’s Congressional Relations office — Sadler lays the groundwork for a president who likes to move fast.
Notably, Sadler elaborated further on the Lunch Hour Podcast this week, framing the entire challenge as an engineering problem first, a business problem in the middle, and an engineering problem again at the end. On the Jones Act debate consuming Washington, he was direct: the real problem is that “leadership and industry have not had the appropriate focus or incentive structures.”[2] That is a precise diagnosis — and it points directly to the gap this article addresses.
The Navy’s 30-Year Plan: The Ambition Is There
Sadler’s op-ed lands against a significant backdrop. On May 11, the Navy published its 2026 Shipbuilding Plan — a 30-year vision for what it calls the “Golden Fleet.”[3] The fiscal year 2027 request alone is $68.5 billion, a 57 percent increase over the prior year.[4]
The plan explicitly acknowledges what advocates have been saying for years: decades of inconsistent demand and misaligned priorities left the fleet smaller, the shipyards atrophied, and American workers facing unacceptable risk.[3] Executive Order 14269, “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance,” and the February 2026 Maritime Action Plan are cited as the catalyst for a long-overdue reindustrialization.[3]
That’s the right framing. The harder question is whether the funding architecture can sustain the ambition across political cycles.
The Pier Review: Even Navalists Are Sounding the Alarm
On the same day Sadler published his TRUMP Act proposal, the Center for Maritime Strategy — the Navy League’s policy arm — released a landmark 141-page report titled Pier Review: Leveraging the Allied Maritime Industrial Base for U.S. Shipbuilding.[5] Authored by a team including Steve Wills, Admiral James Foggo, and Nick Weising, with a foreword by 77th Secretary of the Navy Kenneth Braithwaite, the report delivers a sobering conclusion: the United States cannot rebuild its maritime industrial base alone.
The Pier Review examined allied shipbuilding nations — South Korea, Italy, Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom — and returned with a frank assessment. The domestic industrial base is so severely hollowed that a bridge strategy involving allied yards, allied supply chains, and allied skilled workers may be necessary while American capacity is rebuilt.
These are not critics of American seapower. These are its most dedicated advocates. That they felt compelled to reach this conclusion is itself a measure of how deep the hollowing runs.
The Pier Review cites Canada’s National Shipbuilding Strategy as the model worth emulating — a multi-decade, consistent demand signal that ended the boom and bust cycle and gave the industrial base something durable to build around. The report calls for the United States to create a similar structure.
What neither the Pier Review nor the TRUMP Act provides is the funding mechanism that makes that structure mandatory and durable across administrations. That is the gap the SEAS Act is designed to close.
The Sustainability Gap No One Is Talking About
Here is what every current maritime proposal — the SHIPS Act, the TRUMP Act, the 30-year plan — has in common: they are all dependent on annual congressional appropriations. Fund it one year, gut it the next. That is precisely the cycle that produced the hollow fleet we are now trying to rebuild.
The last time sustained naval investment actually worked was 1982 to 1992 — a decade of consistent political will, consistent funding, and consistent production signals to the industrial base. Shipyards plan in decades, not fiscal years. They hire and train workforces over years, not budget cycles. The industrial base doesn’t respond to hope or headlines. It responds to durable, multi-year demand signals it can build a business around.
Presidential legislation — even landmark presidential legislation — does not by itself solve that problem. A bill passed in one Congress can be defunded by the next. The SHIPS Act stalled once. The TRUMP Act, if passed, could face the same gravitational pull the moment political attention shifts, a budget fight erupts, or a new administration arrives with different priorities.
That is the sustainability gap. And it is the one gap that no current proposal directly addresses.
The SEAS Act: Closing the Sustainability Gap
The Strategic SEAS Act — Shipbuilding Economic Acceleration and Security Act — is designed to do precisely that.
Rather than competing for annual appropriations against entitlements, healthcare, and every other priority in the federal budget, the SEAS Act proposes a 2 percent Strategic Technology Responsibility Contribution from U.S. companies with significant revenue from China operations, directed into a dedicated Naval Modernization account.[6]
This is a structural funding mechanism, not a budget line item. It creates the kind of durable, mandatory investment signal that the shipbuilding industrial base can actually plan around — the modern equivalent of the sustained commitment that made 1982 to 1992 work, and the American answer to the Canadian model the Pier Review recommends.
The logic behind the contribution is grounded in history. The “Triple Whammy” — the End of History complacency after 1989, the responsible stakeholder framework that opened WTO access in 2001, and the mass migration of American corporate manufacturing to China — created the conditions for naval hollowing.[7] American companies that benefited from that migration helped create the problem. The SEAS Act creates a mechanism for them to contribute to the solution.
Sadler himself named the core problem on the Lunch Hour Podcast: the wrong incentive structures. The SEAS Act corrects that — not through legislation alone, but through a mandatory funding architecture that changes the calculus permanently.
Former House Select Committee on China Chairman Mike Gallagher documented the PRC’s systematic exploitation of U.S. export control gaps and argued that Commerce consistently prioritized industry revenue over national security.[8] Palantir’s “The Technological Republic” — currently a national conversation — makes a parallel argument about Silicon Valley’s moral debt to the hard power that underwrites its commercial freedom.[9]
The SEAS Act turns that argument into a funding architecture.
National Maritime Day 2026: Vision Needs Architecture
Brent Sadler is right that presidential action is needed, and the constitutional case he makes is compelling. The TRUMP Act framework — if it moves — will be the most significant maritime legislation in a generation. The Pier Review is right that the industrial base crisis is deep and requires a generational commitment to fix.
But a generational commitment cannot be built on an annual appropriation. The 30-year shipbuilding plan requires a 30-year funding architecture. Presidential legislation opens the door. The SEAS Act keeps it open regardless of which party controls Congress or who sits in the Oval Office.
National Maritime Day has a theme each year. This year’s should be simple: build the vision, build the architecture to sustain it.
The SEAS Act is not a competitor to Sadler’s proposal or the Pier Review’s recommendations. It is the missing piece that makes them last.
Americans for a Stronger Navy will continue to advocate for all three pillars: the presidential legislative action Sadler rightly calls for, the allied cooperation framework the Pier Review recommends, and the structural funding mechanism that makes both durable. That is the complete architecture a generational maritime revival requires.
References
[1] Brent D. Sadler, “National security demands that White House act on maritime legislation,” The Washington Times, May 20, 2026.
[2] Brent D. Sadler, Lunch Hour Podcast with Andrew Langer, May 2026.
[3] U.S. Navy, 2026 Shipbuilding Plan, May 11, 2026.
[4] “U.S. Navy unveils 30-year plan to rebuild American shipbuilding,” The Washington Times, May 12, 2026.
[5] Matt Reisener, ed., Pier Review: Leveraging the Allied Maritime Industrial Base for U.S. Shipbuilding, Center for Maritime Strategy, Navy League of the United States, May 2026. Foreword by Secretary of the Navy Kenneth J. Braithwaite.
[6] Americans for a Stronger Navy, Strategic SEAS Act framework, StrongerNavy.org.
[7] Americans for a Stronger Navy, “The Triple Whammy,” StrongerNavy.org.
[8] House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Export Control Enforcement Reports, 2023–2024.
[9] Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, The Technological Republic, 2025.
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.
