Naval News Archives - Americans for a Stronger Navy

October 21, 2026October 21, 2026

The SHIPS for America Act in Six Parts, and the Group That Started It,

When we asked Capt. Brent Sadler, USN (Ret.), how the SHIPS for America Act came together, he named a group most people have never heard of: Revolution in Shipping.

“It became very clear we had to do something, and formed a group called Revolution in Shipping, which is the seed corn, and basically still active in the background on putting together and crafting things like the SHIPS for America Act.” — Capt. Brent Sadler, USN (Ret.) [1]

Here’s what we know so far about the idea, the people behind it, and how it grew into the most comprehensive maritime bill in decades.

It started with a report

In May 2023, Brent and Heritage Foundation economist Peter St Onge published Regaining U.S. Maritime Power Requires a Revolution in Shipping [2]. The title became the name of the effort.

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Where did the SHIPS for America Act come from? A small group called Revolution in Shipping, started by Capt. @brentdsadler in 2023.
What’s in the bill, in six parts, and where it stands now. Details inside: pic.twitter.com/3m9fiw5c5P
— StrongerNavy (@StrongerNavy) October 21, 2026

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The report laid out the problem in plain numbers. America had fewer than 200 U.S.-flagged merchant ships, down from 636 at the end of the Cold War. U.S. yards had delivered no more than 20 large commercial ships a year since 2017, most of them for government. China, meanwhile, built more than 40% of the world’s new ships by tonnage and paid its shipbuilders $132 billion in direct subsidies from 2010 to 2018 [2].

“Nothing short of a revolution in U.S. shipping is required to compete with China’s world-class merchant fleet.” [2]

The answer it proposed wasn’t to copy China. It was a “blue ocean strategy”: build a new kind of American shipping and logistics where we can lead, not chase the old model where we can’t [2].

What it called for

The 2023 report asked Congress and the administration for five things [2]:

1. A national maritime strategy, replacing the 1989 sealift directive
2. A maritime innovation incubator, run through the Defense Department
3. Training, stipends and a fellowship for mariners and naval architects
4. Opportunity zones at ports and intermodal sites
5. Stronger tools against China’s unfair practices, including a better-resourced Federal Maritime Commission and waived port fees for U.S.-flagged ships

The people behind it

Revolution in Shipping isn’t a think tank or a lobby. As Brent describes it, it’s a working group of about a dozen people from industry, academia, government and the military, pulled together in Washington to work out “what would be the most workable, but most importantly effective, approach to reviving America’s maritime industrial base” [1].

The group works quietly, and we’re not naming its members here. Brent says it’s still active, helping shape the SHIPS for America Act and the administration’s executive orders on shipbuilding, and helping inform allies including Japan, South Korea, France and Australia as they invest in America’s maritime industrial base [1]. We hope to bring you some of those voices directly in the weeks ahead.

From vision to bill

The ideas kept growing after 2023. By 2025, Brent’s Heritage work had built them into a full program with five lines of effort (protect, ally, nurture, build and train). It called for a presidential maritime advisor, a dedicated trust fund paid for by fees on state-subsidized shipping, and a strategic commercial fleet of 250 ships over a decade [3].

The SHIPS for America Act was first introduced in December 2024 and reintroduced in April 2025 by Sens. Mark Kelly and Todd Young, with Reps. John Garamendi and Trent Kelly in the House [4]. Its core pieces will look familiar. Here’s what’s in it, in six parts [5]:

1. Leadership. A Maritime Security Advisor in the White House (Sec. 101), so for the first time one person owns the whole picture, from the Navy and Coast Guard to Commerce and Transportation.

2. Money that lasts. A Maritime Security Trust Fund (Sec. 201), so shipbuilding doesn’t start over every budget year.

3. Ships. A Strategic Commercial Fleet (Sec. 401) of American-built, American-crewed ships, about 250 over the next decade, ready to carry our cargo in peace and supply our forces in a crisis [3].

4. Shipyards. Grants and financing to build new ships and modernize the yards that build them.

5. Cargo. More government cargo moving on American ships (Sec. 411), which keeps those ships sailing and those crews working.

6. People. Training for the mariners, welders, shipfitters and naval architects we’re short on.

On July 22, the House passed its defense bill with a rewritten SHIPS for America Act of about 100 sections inside it [6]. House rules forced the revenue pieces into a separate bill, the Shipbuilding Investment and Workforce Act (H.R. 9911) [8]. The House version creates the Maritime Security Advisor and caps the trust fund at $20 billion, but it doesn’t yet name a source of money for it [9].

The Senate has not passed its version, and the final defense bill is expected after the November election. On October 9, the bill’s four sponsors, backed by maritime labor, asked Senate colleagues to urge leadership to keep the SHIPS provisions in the final bill [10].

In his July testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Brent noted that the bill’s proposed fees on Chinese shipping became a basis for later administration action [7].

Why it matters

Big laws rarely start in a committee room. They start with a few people who see a problem clearly, write it down, and keep working on it long after the first report is published. Revolution in Shipping is a reminder that rebuilding America at sea is a long game, and that it takes people willing to stay with it.

Hear Brent explain the SHIPS for America Act in his own words in our America at Sea introduction with Brent and Clay Wirsing.

Join the conversation. What’s working, what’s in the way, and what would you fix first? Tell us on X at @StrongerNavy.

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

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

References

[1] Capt. Brent Sadler, USN (Ret.), interview, America at Sea: Voices That Matter, October 2026: https://strongernavy.org/america-at-sea-the-ships-act-the-shipyard-floor-and-why-it-matters/
[2] Brent D. Sadler and Peter St Onge, “Regaining U.S. Maritime Power Requires a Revolution in Shipping,” Heritage Foundation Special Report No. 272, May 15, 2023: https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2023-05/SR272.pdf
[3] Brent Sadler, “Reviving America’s Maritime Strength: Comprehensive by Necessity,” Heritage Foundation, July 24, 2025: https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/reviving-americas-maritime-strength-comprehensive-necessity
[4] Sen. Todd Young, “Young, Kelly Introduce SHIPS for America Act,” April 2025: https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/young-kelly-introduce-ships-for-america-act-to-revitalize-u-s-shipbuilding-and-commercial-maritime-industries/
[5] S. 1541, SHIPS for America Act of 2025: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119s1541is/html/BILLS-119s1541is.htm
[6] K&L Gates, “House Passes Historic NDAA Maritime Amendments,” July 24, 2026: https://www.klgates.com/thought-leadership/House-Passes-Historic-NDAA-Maritime-Amendments-7-24-2026
[7] Statement of Capt. Brent Sadler, USN (Ret.), House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific, July 22, 2026: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA05/20260722/119432/HHRG-119-FA05-Wstate-SadlerB-20260722.pdf
[8] Brent Sadler, “Maritime Legislation: Explainer and Next Steps,” Heritage Foundation, August 12, 2026: https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/maritime-legislation-explainer-and-next-steps
[9] CrossGov, “US Shipbuilding Push Rides on the NDAA,” October 11, 2026: https://crossgov.com/us-shipbuilding-push-rides-on-the-ndaa-ships-act-provisions-a-20-billion-trust-fund-and-koreas-150-billion-pledge/
[10] Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO, “Senate Sign-On Letter: Urge Congressional Leadership to Include SHIPS Act Provisions in FY2027 NDAA,” October 9, 2026: https://ttd.org/policy/letters-to-congress/senate-sign-on-letter-urge-congressional-leadership-to-include-ships-act-provisions-in-fy2027-ndaa/

September 21, 2026September 21, 2026

Congress won’t move until we do.

The Navy’s future gets decided in the next four months. Not in a speech, not in a hearing — in a conference committee most Americans have never heard of, deciding whether $350 billion actually gets spent on American shipyards or gets quietly stripped out before anyone notices.

Here’s what’s happening, and what we’re asking you to do about it.

What’s Actually at Stake

The FY27 NDAA — the annual bill that funds the military — carries the core pieces of the SHIPS for America Act inside it. Right now, the House and Senate versions don’t match, and a small group of lawmakers in a conference committee will decide which pieces survive, get watered down, or disappear entirely. That includes funding that could total up to $350 billion for shipbuilding, and a proposed Select Committee for Maritime Industrial Revival — a dedicated congressional body to keep this problem from falling through the cracks the way it has for decades.

None of that happens automatically. Bills this size get shaped by who shows up — and right now, the loudest voices in Washington on this issue are the lobbyists paid to slow it down.

Three Things You Can Do Right Now

1. Call your rep before the NDAA conference.
Use our Contact Your Representative tool to find your member of Congress and reach their office directly. Tell them you want the shipbuilding provisions kept in the final NDAA — not traded away in conference.

2. Back the Select Committee for Maritime Revival.
Congress created single-purpose committees before when the stakes demanded it. Shipbuilding capacity — the thing that decides whether America can surge sealift in a crisis — deserves the same standing attention, not a rotating cast of committees that each own a slice of the problem and none of the whole picture.

3. Make Congress pass the $350B.
This isn’t a blank check — it’s the difference between shipyards with the capacity to build and shipyards limping along on year-to-year funding fights. Tell your rep this number matters, and that “we’ll get to it next year” isn’t good enough anymore.

Why Now

Conference committees move fast and mostly out of public view. By the time a compromise bill becomes public, it’s usually too late to change it. The next four months are the window — not because we’re saying so, but because that’s how the calendar actually works this year.

Congress won’t move until we do.

Contact your representative now →

September 19, 2026September 19, 2026

Six Weeks That Decide the Fleet

Part 1 of 4 in our series, “Six Weeks That Decide the Fleet: September 24 to November 9 — what happens to a fee meant to protect American shipyards.”

What This Series Covers

– How a 2024 labor petition turned into a real trade penalty on Chinese shipping — and why it barely survived a week
– Who’s financially backing the fight to kill that penalty, and what’s separately been reported about that same company
– What to watch for when President Trump hosts Xi in Washington on September 24
– What the people actually building ships and running unions told Congress this month, in their own words
– What happens on November 9 — the day the fee’s one-year suspension runs out

Where Things Stand, Briefly

For readers who want the fuller picture: three years in, there’s real progress and real gaps. On the plus side — an executive order creating a national maritime strategy, a $65.8 billion Navy shipbuilding request for FY2027, and a new submarine-component factory in Alabama already producing parts. On the other side — the U.S.-flagged oceangoing fleet actually shrank to 178 ships last year, the Maritime Security Trust Fund still isn’t law, and the industrial base has lost up to 40% of its waterfront facilities over two decades. Read the full three-year accounting →

A fee designed to protect American shipbuilding jobs lasted six days before someone made it disappear. This is the story of who did it, and why it should bother you even if you’ve never thought about a shipyard in your life.

Three years ago, we started asking a simple question: who pays for American naval readiness? Congress. Taxpayers. Shipyard workers who show up at 5am to weld hulls in the summer heat. That question is the whole reason Americans for a Stronger Navy exists.

This year we learned there’s a second question hiding behind the first one: who pays to make sure we never have to.

Two facts below are worth reading side by side. We’ll let you draw your own conclusion.

Let’s walk through it.

The Fee Nobody Remembers Was Labor’s Idea

This didn’t start in Washington. It started with the people who actually weld the hulls.

In March 2024, five American labor unions — not a think tank, not a senator, not us — petitioned the U.S. Trade Representative to investigate China’s dominance of global shipbuilding.[1] They’d watched it happen up close for years: American shipyards closing, skilled jobs disappearing, an entire industrial base hollowing out while China built ships by the hundreds. Nobody in Congress had acted on it yet. The workers went first anyway.

USTR agreed there was a real problem, opening a Section 301 investigation — a legal process the government uses to investigate unfair foreign trade practices. By early 2025, nearly a year after the unions first raised the alarm, the investigation confirmed what they’d been saying all along: China’s practices were “unreasonable” and burdened U.S. commerce.[2] The remedy: a modest port fee on Chinese-built and Chinese-operated vessels calling at U.S. ports — money that would help fund the rebuilding of America’s own shipbuilding capacity.[3]

The fees took effect October 14, 2025. Six days later, at a summit in South Korea, they became a bargaining chip.[4] By November 10, they were suspended for a full year — paused at $0, with the scheduled 2026 rate increase simply never happening.[5]

Two senators, one from each party, have since asked the obvious question: what exactly did the United States get in exchange for giving that leverage away?[6] As of this writing, nobody in the administration has given them a straight answer.

Who Wanted the Pause

We already knew part of this story. Our 2025 Navy year-in-review documented over $3 million in lobbying spent fighting the SHIPS for America Act and the fees meant to fund it — six times what was spent supporting it.[7] The National Retail Federation alone spent $2.27 million. The American Apparel & Footwear Association, the Consumer Technology Association, the Travel Goods Association, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce rounded out the list.

What we didn’t know then was how organized that campaign actually was. In March 2025, NRF and the Retail Industry Leaders Association — joined by more than thirty other organizations — jointly commissioned an economic study designed to make the case to USTR that the fees would hurt American consumers.[8] Their own words: “U.S. businesses and consumers will take the brunt of these service charges… many, if not all, of the leading ocean carriers capable of meeting U.S. shipping needs use Chinese-built vessels in their fleets.”

Read that sentence again. Their argument for keeping shipping cheap is that America has become so dependent on Chinese-built ships that we can’t afford to stop being dependent on them.

The Part Nobody’s Said Out Loud

Here’s what we found that nobody else has connected: the same interests fighting these fees include the company the fees were written to counter.

Companies are legally required to disclose who pays them to lobby the government — public paperwork anyone can look up. Those U.S. Senate filings show COSCO — China Ocean Shipping Company — and China Shipping Group are named directly, by address and by percentage of ownership, as the entities behind the World Shipping Council’s American lobbying activity.[9] Not a shell. Not an inference. Their names are on the federal paperwork, filed through two U.S. law and government-relations firms: Cozen O’Connor Public Strategies, and Shamrock Maritime Consultants.

In April 2025, Maritime Executive ran a headline that should have gotten more attention than it did: “Shipping Industry Joins with China Calling for U.S. to Reconsider Port Fees.”[10] The World Shipping Council’s objections and Beijing’s official objections were, functionally, the same argument, published within days of each other.

What Kind of Company Is Paying for This

Separately: just over a week ago, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies reported that COSCO uses concealed equipment aboard its own ships to intercept U.S. military communications near American coastlines.[11] The Pentagon put COSCO on its list of companies linked to the Chinese military back in January 2025.[12] Chinese law requires companies like COSCO to support state intelligence work whether they want to or not.

We’re not going to tell you what to make of those two facts sitting next to each other. Americans can draw their own conclusions.

What Wasn’t Said at Hudson

On September 16, the Hudson Institute hosted senators, industry, and labor to talk through the SHIPS Act’s path forward. Heritage’s Brent Sadler raised Chinese state shipping as an espionage vector, in general terms.[13] Sen. Todd Young described, without naming anyone, an uncomfortable conversation with congressional colleagues who wouldn’t answer whether they were comfortable continuing to route cargo through Chinese-owned shipping companies given what’s now known about tracking and targeting systems aboard some of those vessels.[14]

Nobody drew the line all the way through. Nobody said: the resistance you’re describing has a name, an address, and a line item on a federal disclosure form.

We’re Not Anti-Business. We’re Pro-Paying-Your-Share.

We’ve said from the start that this isn’t about picking a fight with retailers or the shipping industry. Companies are allowed to lobby for their interests — that’s how the system works, and we’re not interested in relitigating that.

What we’re saying is simpler than that: here are the facts, here’s who’s named on the paperwork, and here’s what’s been separately reported about that same company. Judge for yourself what it means that they line up the way they do.

The Clock

The fee suspension expires November 9, 2026. That’s the next real decision point — not a hearing, not a letter, an actual expiration date with a binary outcome: reinstate, extend, or let it lapse further.[5]

There’s an earlier date worth watching first. On September 24 — 46 days before that expiration — President Trump hosts Xi Jinping in Washington for their second summit of the year. The first time these two men met at a summit, the port fees became a bargaining chip within six days.[4] The Heritage Foundation’s own pre-summit brief argues this meeting should be judged by whether China shows “measurable progress on its previous commitments,” not by how many new deliverables get announced.[16] We’d add the obvious corollary: that standard should apply to what the United States gives up, too.

If the port fee comes up again on or around September 24 — as a “goodwill gesture,” a “de-escalation step,” or anything else dressed up as diplomatic progress — that won’t be a new development. It will be the same pattern repeating, with the same question still unanswered: what did the first suspension buy us?

Sen. Mark Kelly put the underlying stakes plainly at Hudson: 400 U.S. oceangoing ships during Desert Storm. Eighty today.[15]

Three years in, we’ve learned who’s supposed to pay for rebuilding the fleet. This year we learned who’s paying, quietly, to make sure that never happens.

Next in “Six Weeks That Decide the Fleet”: what to watch for when Trump hosts Xi in Washington on September 24 — and whether the same trade happens twice.

References

[1] Petition to USTR, five national trade unions, March 12, 2024, cited in Clyde & Co, “USTR Section 301 Fee and Tariff Measures and Their Impact to Charterparties.”
[2] USTR, Section 301 investigation determination, January 16, 2025.
[3] Federal Register, “Notice of Action and Proposed Action in Section 301 Investigation,” April 23, 2025.
[4] White House Fact Sheet, November 1, 2025; Hellenic Shipping News, “US-China Port Fee Truce.”
[5] Federal Register, “Notice of Modification of Section 301 Action,” November 13, 2025.
[6] Sens. Mark Kelly and Elizabeth Warren, letter to USTR Ambassador Jamieson Greer, June 2026.
[7] Americans for a Stronger Navy, “2025 U.S. Navy Year in Review — Follow the Money: Who’s Fighting Against American Shipyards.”
[8] Textile World / National Retail Federation, “Retailers Submit Comments In Opposition To USTR Shipping Remedies Proposal,” March 24, 2025.
[9] U.S. Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings, Cozen O’Connor Public Strategies and Shamrock Maritime Consultants, LLC, client World Shipping Council.
[10] Maritime Executive, “Shipping Industry Joins with China Calling for U.S. to Reconsider Port Fees,” April 18, 2025.
[11] Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “Yes, China’s State-Owned Shipping Giant Is Spying on the United States,” September 9, 2026.
[12] U.S. Department of Defense, list of companies linked to the Chinese military, January 2025.
[13] Hudson Institute, “Fixing Shipping and Shipbuilding: Plotting the Course Ahead,” September 16, 2026.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Andrew Harding, “Xi Comes to Washington: Expectations for the Trump-Xi Summit,” The Heritage Foundation, September 9, 2026.

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 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.

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.

March 8, 2026March 8, 2026

Understanding the U.S. Navy’s Industrial Challenge

The Questions Americans Deserve Answered (Part 1 of 8)

I served as a blue-water destroyer sailor in the 1970s, and like many veterans, I’ve spent the years since trying to understand how America maintains the naval strength that protects our country, our allies, and the global sea lanes we all depend on.

The charts and analysis below help tell part of that story.

This article is part of Charting the Course: Voices That Matter, our ongoing educational series exploring the future of American sea power and the policies, people, and industrial strength that sustain the U.S. Navy.

If you’re new to the series, you can start with the introduction here:
Inside the Navy’s Future: The Questions Americans Deserve Answered.

This article also launches a focused 8-part series within Charting the Course examining some of the most important questions facing the Navy today — from shipbuilding capacity and fleet readiness to workforce challenges and the future of maritime deterrence.

We’re calling it The Questions Americans Deserve Answered.

For most Americans, the Navy is something we think about only in moments of crisis. A conflict erupts, a carrier group deploys, or a headline mentions tensions in the Pacific or the Middle East.

But the strength of the U.S. Navy is not decided during those moments. It is determined years — sometimes decades — earlier in shipyards, classrooms, industrial plants, research labs, and congressional hearings.

Today the United States faces serious questions about shipbuilding capacity, industrial readiness, and long-term naval strategy. China is building ships at a pace the world has not seen in generations. Russia continues to challenge Western stability at sea. Critical maritime infrastructure and supply chains are increasingly vulnerable to disruption.

And yet many Americans remain understandably disconnected from the decisions shaping the future of our fleet.

The strength of the U.S. Navy is determined long before ships sail into crisis—it is built in shipyards, sustained by skilled workers, and shaped by decisions made years earlier in industry, technology, and national policy.

Why Americans Should Care

America is, and has always been, a maritime nation.

Nearly 90 percent of global trade moves by sea. The global economy depends on secure shipping lanes. Energy markets, supply chains, and the stability of democratic alliances all rely on freedom of navigation.

The U.S. Navy has quietly safeguarded those sea lanes for generations.

But maintaining that advantage requires more than ships — it requires people, industry, technology, and public understanding.

Chart: Global Operational Demand on the U.S. Navy

This Heritage Foundation chart illustrates the geographic reach of U.S. naval operations across multiple regions. Carrier Strike Groups and Amphibious Ready Groups are routinely deployed worldwide, highlighting the constant global demand placed on the fleet.

The Questions Americans Deserve Answered

Over the coming weeks, this series will explore several critical questions about the future of U.S. sea power.

Can America rebuild the shipbuilding capacity required to compete in a new era of great power competition?

Do we have enough skilled workers — engineers, welders, and naval architects — to sustain fleet growth?

How serious is the maintenance backlog affecting submarines and surface ships?

Are current procurement processes helping or hurting the Navy’s ability to modernize?

How should the United States balance aircraft carriers, submarines, uncrewed systems, and logistics platforms?

What role do civilian shipyards and maritime infrastructure play in national security?

Can the United States scale submarine production fast enough to match emerging threats?

And perhaps most importantly: how do we ensure the American public remains engaged in decisions that affect the future of the fleet?

These are not partisan questions. They are national questions.

Understanding the Industrial Challenge

Much of the discussion about naval power focuses on ships already at sea. But the true story begins on land — in America’s shipyards and industrial base.

Chart: Age Distribution of Chinese and U.S. Naval Fleets

This chart compares the age distribution of Chinese and U.S. naval fleets. China’s fleet contains a larger number of relatively new ships, reflecting rapid shipbuilding expansion in recent years.

China now possesses the world’s largest shipbuilding industry by a wide margin.

Meanwhile, American shipyards face workforce shortages, supply chain constraints, and unpredictable funding cycles.

Chart: U.S. Navy Ships Nearing or Exceeding Service Life

This chart shows the growing number of U.S. Navy ships approaching — or exceeding — their expected service life, placing additional strain on fleet readiness and modernization timelines.

The Human Factor

Ships and technology matter — but ultimately the Navy is built on people.

From sailors standing watch at sea tonight to the skilled workers building submarines and carriers at home, the strength of the fleet depends on the dedication and expertise of thousands of Americans.

Implications for Our Allies

America does not operate alone at sea.

Alliances with countries such as Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and NATO partners form a critical part of global maritime stability.

These partnerships reinforce an important truth: deterrence is strongest when democracies stand together.

Public Engagement Matters

The U.S. Navy ultimately belongs to the American people.

Yet the complexity of defense planning can make it difficult for citizens to understand how decisions about shipbuilding, budgets, and strategy affect national security.

That is one of the reasons we created StrongerNavy.org.

Our goal is simple: help Americans better understand the challenges facing the fleet, the industrial base that supports it, and the people who serve at sea and in shipyards across the country.

The Questions Americans Deserve Answered — Series Guide

Part 1 – Understanding the Industrial Challenge (this article)

Part 2 – Can America Rebuild Shipbuilding Capacity?

Part 3 – The Submarine Production Challenge

Part 4 – Maintenance and Fleet Readiness

Part 5 – Workforce and the Maritime Industrial Base

Part 6 – The Role of Allies in Sea Power

Part 7 – Procurement, Policy, and the Future Fleet

Part 8 – Why Public Engagement Matters

That’s why we launched Charting the Course: Voices That Matter — an ongoing
educational series breaking down how we got here, what went wrong, and what must happen next.

Our goal is simple: educate the public, connect the dots, and build the support needed to close the readiness gap before it’s too late.

Let’s roll.