Capitol Hill Watch Archives - Americans for a Stronger Navy

September 13, 2026September 13, 2026

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

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

Who You’ll Be Hearing From on September 16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Actually Law and Funded

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Still In Motion — and Why That Matters

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

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

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

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

What the Skeptics Are Saying

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

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

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

“Tangible results to date – no.” [9]

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

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

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

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

The Accountability Scorecard: What We’re Watching Next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where We Go From Here

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

References

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

September 10, 2026September 10, 2026

THE CASE FOR BRENT SADLER AS MARITIME SECURITY ADVISOR

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rest of the Case

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

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

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

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

Where This Stands Right Now

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

What We’re Asking

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

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

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

August 31, 2026August 31, 2026

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

By Bill Cullifer | Americans for a Stronger Navy

The Heritage Foundation published a factsheet this month that does something rare in this space: it lays out, in plain language, exactly where the nation’s maritime revival stands and exactly what Congress needs to decide next [1]. We want to highlight one recommendation in particular, because we think it’s the single most important structural fix available to Congress right now and because it’s the kind of nonpartisan, process-focused idea a nonpartisan organization like ours can endorse without reservation.

Heritage recommends that, whether or not the Senate consolidates the current maritime bills into one, congressional leadership should create a Select Committee for Maritime Industrial Revival to coordinate across the committees that currently have jurisdiction [1]. We think that recommendation deserves support from anyone who has watched this effort unfold over the past three years.

The Problem the Committee Would Solve

The maritime revival effort is not lacking for good bills. The April 2025 version of the SHIPS for America Act carries genuine bipartisan support — 29 Senate cosponsors (15 Republican, 14 Democrat) and 140 House cosponsors (75 Democrat, 65 Republican) as of its last recorded action [1]. Alongside it sit the Shipbuilding Investment and Workforce Act, the FLEETS Now Act, and the Ready Reserve Force Modernization Accountability Act — each addressing a different piece of the same problem, each sponsored by different members, and each currently routed through different committees [1].

That’s not a failure of ideas. It’s a failure of coordination. A House amendment to the FY27 NDAA passed with two of these maritime provisions attached, and the whole package is now headed to House-Senate conference in September [2]. Conference is exactly the moment when overlapping, uncoordinated bills either get reconciled into something workable or get quietly dropped in the scramble to close out a defense authorization. A Select Committee — standing up now, ahead of that conference — is the difference between these bills arriving as a coordinated package and arriving as competing claims on the same limited floor time.

Why This Matters Beyond the Bills Themselves

We’ve spent three years arguing that naval readiness is fundamentally a “who pays” problem — allied burden-sharing through the Gulf Act, and a debt-neutral corporate demand signal through the SEAS Act’s Strategic Technology Responsibility Contribution [3]. Neither of those mechanisms competes with what’s already in SHIPS for America. Heritage’s own factsheet shows SHIPS for America’s funding model leans on shipping-side fees — non-U.S.-flagged vessel fees and Section 301 penalties tied to Chinese-built ships feeding a self-sustaining Maritime Trust Fund [1]. That’s a shipping-side answer to “who pays.” The SEAS Act is a corporate-side answer. The Gulf Act is an allied-side answer. None of these ideas need to compete for the same dollars or the same bill number — but they do need a body capable of seeing all of them at once, which is precisely what a Select Committee would provide.

What We’re Asking

We’re not asking Congress to adopt any specific funding mechanism in this post — ours or anyone else’s. We’re asking Congress to create the structure that would let good mechanisms be evaluated on the merits rather than lost to committee turf. A Select Committee for Maritime Industrial Revival, stood up before September conference, would let Congress treat this as the “generational task” Heritage rightly calls it [1], instead of a jurisdictional scramble.

The nation’s maritime revival has been, in Heritage’s words, a bipartisan, bicameral effort since its inception [1]. It should stay that way through conference. A Select Committee is how it does.

References

[1] The Heritage Foundation, “Maritime Legislation: Explainer and Next Steps,” Factsheet No. 285, August 12, 2026.
[2] H.R. 8800 (FY27 NDAA), House passage with maritime amendments, 2026; expected House-Senate conference, September 2026.
[3] Americans for a Stronger Navy / Center for Maritime Strategy, “Defense Reinvestment as Naval Strategy,” March 2026.

August 31, 2026August 31, 2026

Who Pays for Protection? A $40 Trillion Debt Says We Can’t Keep Doing This the Old Way

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.

August 26, 2026August 26, 2026

Four Bills, One Vision: Why Rebuilding American Sea Power Requires a New Kind of Advocacy – Call for Participation

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:

Fleet Expansion & Industrial Capacity: Monitoring procurement rates, shipyard modernization, supply-chain resilience, and skilled workforce retention.
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.

August 21, 2026August 22, 2026

Beyond the Headlines: The High-Stakes Fight to Rebuild America’s Navy

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.

August 10, 2026August 11, 2026

The Jones Act Waiver: A Diagnostic Report on America’s Maritime Capacity Gap

The Jones Act Waiver: What It Actually Revealed

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.

Download the full report: The Jones Act Waiver — A Diagnostic Report on America’s Maritime Capacity Gap

I’ll be tagging Colin, Sal, Steven, and William when this goes live. Their work is half of what’s in it, and I’d value their read.

Stronger together. Break the silos.

— Bill Cullifer
Americans for a Stronger Navy | StrongerNavy.org

June 9, 2026June 9, 2026

A Path to the Navy Force Structure the Nation Needs — And Who Pays for It

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.

May 22, 2026May 22, 2026

The Navy Built This Nation. Now Let’s Fund It Right.

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.

April 7, 2026April 7, 2026

The Golden Fleet Needs a Funding Engine. We Built One.

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.

The full framework has been published by the Center for Maritime Strategy as “Defense Reinvestment as Naval Strategy.” [2]

One More Data Point Worth Naming

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.

References

[1] Brent Sadler, “To Build the Golden Fleet,” The Heritage Foundation Special Report No. 328, March 25, 2026. https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/build-the-golden-fleet

[2] Bill Cullifer, “Defense Reinvestment as Naval Strategy: The Strategic SEAS Act and Industrial Base Competition,” Center for Maritime Strategy, 2026. https://centerformaritimestrategy.org/publications/defense-reinvestment-as-naval-strategy-the-strategic-seas-act-and-industrial-base-competition/

[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.