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America at Sea: CDR Salamander on People, Bureaucracy and Focus

America at Sea: Voices That Matter continues with CDR Salamander, the retired Navy commander whose writing on naval affairs has been required reading for years [1]. He served 21 years on active duty, from Desert Storm to Afghanistan, and today he’s one of the sharpest independent voices on the Navy we have.

We asked him the same three questions we ask everyone. His answers go past the usual talking points to people, bureaucracy and focus. Watch below.

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

What we heard

What’s working: people. Everything in uniform, he says, funnels down to a young man or woman holding the line. Budgets and programs don’t matter without the right people. He points to the Navy and the other services meeting their recruiting goals early two years running, and to Navy retention above 100% across the first 14 years of service, by the figures he cites.

“People are policy. People run programs. People work budgets.” — CDR Salamander

What’s in the way: bureaucracy and the defense industrial base. We still run on a system built around Goldwater-Nichols in 1986, when the worry was the Soviet Northern Fleet. Consolidation in the 1990s left a few big prime contractors. And when billions go to stock buybacks, he says, that money isn’t going to higher pay for welders and shipfitters, better shipyards or capital investment.

“Like any other large object with a lot of inertia, when you stop pushing on it, it regresses to the mean. This is going to require sustained efforts.” — CDR Salamander

What he’d fix first: mindset and focus. Do it in a bipartisan way. Look at a map: America is a maritime and aerospace power, and that’s our competitive advantage. Fund and focus to match, out to space, and be willing to take risk elsewhere, including moving more ground forces into the Guard and Reserve and building up the Naval Reserve.

“We are a maritime and aerospace power. That also happens to be our competitive advantage.” — CDR Salamander

And the ships? More “holes in the water” follow from getting the focus right, he says. But the sealift, prepositioning and merchant marine we’d need to sustain a fight across the Pacific are in rough shape. He notes that two replenishment ships earned the Presidential Unit Citation for operations off Iran this year because they “did almost the impossible,” and says that shouldn’t have to be the expectation.

The three questions

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

We’ll post each new voice here over the coming weeks. At the end of November, we’ll publish a common-ground report: what these voices agree on, in their own words.

Transcript

Lightly edited for readability.

Introduction

I’ve been telling people for a long time, I’m kind of your standard issue. Retired U.S. Navy O-5, commander. I did 21 years on active duty, did a lot of deployments, and I left active duty in 2009. My first deployment was Desert Storm, so I’m one of the cohort of baby junior officers who got the last end of the Cold War, got to chase the Soviets around the Atlantic and the Mediterranean a bit, did the Desert Storm thing as well. My last deployment, back in 2009, I came home about four months before I went on terminal leave, after a deployment to Afghanistan. So I kind of did the broad, older-cohort Gen X standard issue. Nothing too dramatic, nothing very exciting. My experience was in line with kind of the center of the curve, so to speak.

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

What’s working? It’s always fun and exciting, and goodness knows I do it. Today I wrote a little bit about long-range anti-ship missiles and having the Air Force do a little bit of our sea control. Many people will go back to their comfort spot on the tactical level. I was an operational planner for years, so I love talking about courses of action and decisive points and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, and this may be a funny thing for a person from the Navy to say, everybody who wears a uniform or supports them, it all funnels toward a young man or woman standing on a street corner holding a long arm, looking around and going, “This is mine, not yours. I control it.”

That’s people. People are policy. People run programs. People work budgets. You can have great budgets and great programs, but if you don’t have the right people, you’re going to have some trouble. In the volunteer system that we have, nobody’s drafted. There are no great levies on the population to fill the spots that we need. You have to create an environment where people not only want to join, but they want to stay. And we are a type of society where people do have choices.

There are some people who wouldn’t know what to do if they ever got out of the military. I originally was one of those guys. I’m not an academy guy; I was a contract ROTC guy. I was going to do a few years because I didn’t like communists, and then I was going to go get a real job in the civilian world. And as my wife reminds me, I didn’t do that. I stayed in and made a full career out of it. But you have to have a situation where people not only have a job that they value, but they think is valuable and is worth staying in for. And not everybody has to make a career out of it. Sometimes people do one or two tours.

A primary indicator when things are not working is when you can’t get people to join, and when you can’t get the ones that you have to stay. And numbers matter. You don’t want just the bare minimum. You want more than the bare minimum so you can do a quality cut, where you don’t have to take everybody. Those that maybe don’t have the best indicators for future success in uniform can be invited to pursue excellence elsewhere: don’t bring them on board, or they don’t re-enlist.

We’ve heard recently that the Navy and the other services, for the last two years, have reached their recruiting goals early. That means they were bringing in new men and women, and for those that like demographics, every year there are fewer people you can recruit, just because there are fewer children than what we had seen previously. So that’s getting new people into the pipeline.

But especially in our military, which is very high tech, it requires a lot of training, years of training for some specialties, before you’re actually usable to the combatant commanders. Retaining your smart people is what you want to do. I dug around a bit and found these figures, and I think they’re pretty good. Officer figures are difficult to come by, but from what I’ve seen from the Chief of Naval Personnel, and I’m just focusing on the Navy here, there’s been a steady increase in officer retention over the last three years, which is where you want to go.

On the enlisted side of the house, everybody who’s been involved in mentoring sailors, bringing sailors up, giving them jobs, letting them know why their jobs are important and rewarding them, should all give themselves a pat on the back, or get a little gold anchor to hang off their door or something. Zone A, for those that aren’t familiar with the manpower side of the house, is people who’ve been in zero to six years: 108.9% retention. Zone B, six to 10 years: 117.9%, we’ll call it 118. And Zone C, 10 to 14 years in the service: 111.3%. So that, I think, is what’s working. We’re bringing in the people that we need, and we’re retaining more than what we need, which is good, because that way you have more people on the right end of the bell curve to put in your critical jobs.

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

So, okay, we’ve got the people coming in. We’re keeping people. So what tools are we giving them? That’s what I think is in the way. And this isn’t unique to the U.S. military or the U.S. government. There’s a reason for phrases like “Ottoman bureaucracy” or “that’s Byzantine,” or, for those who have had to deal with European bureaucracies, “I’m sorry, that’s not possible.” It’s just the nature of bureaucracies.

I think it’s kind of embarrassing that a communist government, the People’s Republic of China, seems to be experimenting and building and innovating a little bit faster than we are. Some of it might be Potemkin, but holes in the water are holes in the water. Compared to where they were 20 years ago, tremendous advancements. I think our bureaucracy is the thing that’s in the way, with these programs, these systems, and people you can’t fire. I almost wrote about it today, and I may do it next week: an IG report where, instead of one person accusing someone, you had dozens and dozens of people accusing a senior executive. It had been a known problem for years, and they just couldn’t get rid of her. When you read the summary, she worked in the IG’s office, of all things. It gives people a little flavor of how difficult it is to move people. Going back to the first point: people are policy. And civil service reform is a dead letter, for a variety of reasons.

We have laws, and we have policies, and we have instructions. The one I like to use is Goldwater-Nichols, 1986. That’s when our biggest worry was the Red Banner Northern Fleet, Admiral Gorshkov’s children coming over North Cape, west of Bear Island. We still live under that system, and since it came on board, it’s developed all these accretions, all these additions, all these refinements, so that it’s not really fit for the 21st century. Time flies when you’re having fun. We’re already in the second quarter of the 21st century, and we’re still living inside a construct whose foundation is based in 1986. So the bureaucracy has got to change.

We also have a big problem that’s the byproduct of Perry’s “Last Supper” in the 1990s, with defense consolidation. We have what we call the primes, our prime defense contractors, and there aren’t that many options. Boeing is going to be building both the F-47 and whatever we end up calling the new Navy fighter. You’ve got Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman. There’s not much competition there.

Corporate governance is important, because it establishes priorities and it establishes short-term and long-term requirements. One of the problems with the primes being publicly traded companies is their boards. I love my defense primes. Every time I talk to those folks, they have great professionals working for them. But I’d encourage everybody to go look at their boards of directors, look at the backgrounds of the board members, all publicly available, and look at who the primary shareholders are. Shareholders vote. If you own a pension fund, you’ve got BlackRock, you’ve got Vanguard, you’ve got Fidelity, and a couple of others in there. Their primary goal is not national defense. Their primary goal is shareholder value. General Dynamics is one of the companies that actually has a fair bit of private money coming in.

When you’re spending billions of dollars on stock buybacks, and that’s money coming from the federal government paying for weapons systems, you’re not paying larger salaries for your welders, your shipfitters, your staff. You’re not improving shipyards. You’re not doing capital investment. You’re buying back your own stock to get incremental, in some places fractions of a cent per share, advances in share price, because that benefits the shareholders, Vanguard and BlackRock, who own the majority of the stock and get to pick the board members who make those decisions. And I’ll give the administration credit: inside the last year, they’ve started some moves in that regard.

So those are the things I think are in the way. Our bureaucracy is not moving as fast as the executive branch and the legislative branch would like to see things move. There’s progress there. But like any other large object with a lot of inertia, a lot of mass, a lot of density, when you stop pushing on it, it regresses to the mean. So this is going to require sustained efforts.

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

The first thing is, and this needs to be done in a bipartisan way, both what’s in the way and what you’d fix first. Because if it becomes a partisan thing, national defense isn’t going to benefit, people wearing the uniform aren’t going to benefit, our allies aren’t going to benefit. Who’s going to benefit are those whose self-interest lies in other things besides national defense and allied defense.

So I would like a conversation that will upset people in Congress, too, because you’re going to upset some rice bowls. But it’s something I’ve advocated for a long time. And I know I wear blue and gold here. Fine. However, I put myself on equal footing with my boys in blue here.

I encourage everybody: everybody should have a map on the wall. If they don’t, they should definitely have a little globe, or a big globe. I have a big globe, about three feet in diameter, that I keep in my library. Look at the map. Go on Google Earth if you have to, and do a couple of great circle routes to where most of the threats to our national security lie. We are a maritime and aerospace power. That also happens to be our competitive advantage. Yes, the Chinese now have the world’s largest navy, but are their Type 055s the same as our Flight IIA Arleigh Burkes? Probably not, because we have a lot of combat experience, especially over the last few years, and we’ve been able to refine our systems. Our technology is the best. China’s trying to steal its way into a capability that looks like SpaceX, but they don’t have a SpaceX.

And when I say aerospace power, I’m not just talking about the B-21 Raider. I’m talking about low Earth orbit, cislunar space, I think is what the cool kids call it. We have to dominate space between here and the Moon, because if we don’t, the Chinese will. Do you want the rest of the solar system to run on the language, the culture, the policies and the rule of law of the U.S., the European Union, Japan, Australia and Korea? Or do you want it run by the authoritarian Chinese, with an assist from the Russians? I think you want the former. And to properly fund it, and not just fund it but focus the mind of everybody within a commute of D.C., whether you work in the Pentagon, at a think tank, as a congressional staffer, or you’re a member of Congress, you need to be thinking about the United States as a maritime and aerospace power.

We have to be willing to assume risk on what we are not. We are not a continental land power. We do not need huge standing armies. When you look at our obligations overseas through our alliances, not just NATO but our alliances with Japan, Australia and a few others, these are nations, especially on continental Europe, that are land powers, whether they want to spend on it or not. France, Germany and Poland should be able to hold the land just fine. We can help them in the aerospace and maritime domains. And if they do need our ground forces, we should have the balance of our ground forces, except for a few high-readiness, highly expeditionary forces, in the National Guard and the Reserves.

Does that mean, like we saw in Desert Storm, that it takes a while to get those units up to speed, compared to a large active-duty armored or infantry division? Sure does. And this is where my opinion gets unpopular with people. But that gives the American people and our government, as designed, with the executive and the legislative branch, time to decide together: yes, this issue, whatever and wherever it is, is worth the national effort, worth telling a whole bunch of constituents, “Shipmate, it’s not one weekend a month and two weeks in the summertime.” Though for the last 20 years that’s not been true either. You’re getting activated, and you’re probably going to war. That requires a lot more national buy-in than you have with a large standing ground force. I’d also like to see more in the Naval Reserve than what we’re doing. The Air Force recaptures a lot of its active-duty experience in the Reserve and the Air National Guard. The Navy, I think, has always shortchanged that capability.

So what I’d fix first is the mindset and the focus, toward a maritime and aerospace power, with extra emphasis on space. I grew up with Star Trek, and they were ahead of their time: it is the final frontier. If you look at it from a civilizational and a species point of view, 200 years from now I would much rather have the people managing resource extraction in the asteroid belt have a union, an appeals process and contracts subject to tort claims, than a system where if you don’t meet your quota, you wind up mining the asteroid yourself until you die, which is what you have in authoritarian systems.

Bill Cullifer: How about holes in the water?

Holes in the water, I think, will come as a byproduct of emphasizing that we’re a maritime and aerospace power. I remember one of my friends came back from being a third-tier junior officer at one of our large war games in the 1990s, updating our operations plan for Korea. He came back and said, “We don’t have enough to do what they want to do, but we’re going to pretend we do.” And I thought, that’s true. If we can get the focus right, we can get more holes in the water, and more shadows on the ramp.

Our commitments are mostly overseas, or across the Caribbean if you’re Venezuela, I guess. That requires strategic airlift and strategic sealift, and we barely have enough of that. We’re flying the wings off our C-17s as it is, and we don’t have a heavy-lift strategic airlifter in production. If you’re over 40, you may not have looked at what has happened to our Maritime Prepositioning Force, which existed in pretty good numbers as late as 2010, or the state of the merchant marine that is supposed to sustain us. It’s nightmarish, if you look at sustaining combat operations west of the International Date Line, which we’ll be required to do.

There’s a reason two replenishment ships received the Presidential Unit Citation, an award usually given to submarines that do things nobody can talk about, for operations off Iran this year. They did almost the impossible, and everybody should be really proud of what they did. But that shouldn’t be the expectation. We shouldn’t have to create miracles on a regular basis. We should have the funding and the foresight to have a merchant marine and auxiliary force that can actually support our forces forward.

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

References

[1] CDR Salamander, Substack: https://cdrsalamander.substack.com

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America at Sea: The SHIPS Act, the Shipyard Floor, and Why It Matters

Yesterday we kicked off America at Sea: Voices That Matter. Today you’ll meet the two people who will be with us to the finish line: our moderator, Captain Brent Sadler, U.S. Navy, retired, and Clay Wirsing, founder of U.S. Maritime Action, which is hosting this series with us.

Brent explains the SHIPS for America Act, where it stands and how he came to this work. Clay talks about starting out in a shipyard, and why that got him into this fight. Watch below.

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

What we heard

The SHIPS for America Act is big, and that’s the point. Brent calls it the first serious effort since the Nixon years to revive America’s maritime industrial base: naval shipbuilding, ship repair, commercial shipping and the training behind all of it, from skilled shipyard workers to naval architects [2]. That reach is also what makes it hard to move. So many committees own a piece of it.

Where it stands. Parts of the bill passed the House this summer as amendments to the defense bill [1]. The Senate hasn’t acted yet, and the two chambers are expected to work it out in conference. Brent says support is wide and bipartisan, and the White House backs reviving the maritime industrial base.

“It’s not just something for a few technocrats here in Washington, D.C., because that’s not going to work. It’s never worked in the past.” — Capt. Brent Sadler, USN (Ret.)

Why more voices matter. Brent’s point is simple. A strong Navy needs a strong maritime industrial base, and getting there takes technical experts, business leaders, workers and the public, not just a few people in Washington.

From the shipyard floor. Clay started as a welding engineer at Newport News Shipbuilding in 2017. About a year in, Navy officials came to talk about speeding up the yard’s pace to compete with China. It was his first look at how far we’ve fallen behind as a maritime nation.

“Unfortunately, not a lot has changed since then in terms of actual shipbuilding capacity, but we do now see a ton of momentum.” — Clay Wirsing

A long time coming. Clay notes that China revisits its maritime policy every five to ten years. The United States hasn’t made a major update since the Merchant Marine Act of 1970.

How the series works

Over the next 45 days, we’ll post each new voice here. Everyone gets about ten minutes and the same three questions:

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

At the end of November, we’ll publish a common-ground report: what these voices agree on, in their own words.

Transcript

Bill Cullifer: Welcome to America at Sea: Voices That Matter. I’m Bill Cullifer with Americans for a Stronger Navy. Today I’m joined by two people who will be with us to the finish line. Our moderator, Captain Brent Sadler, U.S. Navy, retired, and Clay Wirsing, founder of U.S. Maritime Action, a not-for-profit organization based in San Diego. Thank you both for being here today. Brent, let’s start with the SHIPS for America Act. You’ll hear a lot about this. Do most Americans know what it is?

Brent Sadler: No, absolutely not. And I’ll try to be as concise… I mean, it’s a massive piece of legislation. Historic. It’s the first time since Nixon was in office that there’s been an effort to try to revive and update America’s maritime industrial base. So this is naval shipbuilding, it’s the repair, it’s our shipping industry, it’s the academics of that. So it’s the training of highly skilled blue-collar workers on robotic systems like welding, but also the naval architects, which we don’t educate enough, that do the design work and solve problems in the shipyard so that we can keep things moving.

So it’s a very comprehensive bill. It also makes it very hard to get through Congress, because it has so many committees that are responsible for parts of it. And so the origin of this, about a dozen or so folks pulled together here in D.C. from industry, academia, government, military, to put together what would be the most workable, but most importantly effective, approach to reviving America’s maritime industrial base. And as we know from the COVID recovery, the war in Ukraine, the war right now with Iran, shipping is extremely vulnerable, and it has a huge impact on our daily lives and economy, but most importantly also our security. And so this is all very deadly serious.

The bill itself right now has been passed by the House. The Speaker of the House pulled a few elements out of it for the revenue creation part, per House rules, so that they could put it as an amendment to the defense budget. So it’s sitting over with the Senate. They’re going to go into what’s called conference, and hopefully before Christmas have it on a floor vote.

As far as popularity of this bill, it started back in 2023, formally, and the first time it was brought to the floor, sadly, didn’t get a vote, was in December of 2024. And then it was brought forward again in April of 2025. Now it’s being revised and it’s coming again. The popularity of it, you know, set all that aside. It has wide bipartisan support. It definitely has the White House’s support. President Trump has been very strongly advocating for reviving America’s maritime industrial base, to be very clear. So if this was a vote today, set all the processes and Congress’s procedures aside, high confidence that it would pass. But it means that you’ve got to stay aware and get more and more awareness to keep that momentum going, because the historical consequences of not getting it right, or not doing this window of opportunity, will put us really in a bad situation.

Bill Cullifer: Thank you, Brent. That’s a lot of history in a short time. Why does it matter to bring all of these individuals and these voices together? And tell us a little bit about how you came into this work, please.

Brent Sadler: Well, thanks again for pulling together this effort. And the more voices and the more people that are engaged, technical experts, business leaders, political leaders, everyone coming together and continually updating themselves as to why we need to have a strong maritime industrial base and a strong Navy that’s enabled by that. It’s important and it requires a lot of participation. It’s not just something for a few technocrats here in Washington, D.C., because that’s not going to work. It’s never worked in the past. So thank you for your efforts on this very important and historic moment.

My own personal background: 26-year Navy veteran, retired at the height of COVID in 2020. And I’ve been at the Heritage Foundation here in Washington, D.C., and critically, when I left the military, I was able to get my own voice and to follow where the facts lead, and I had quite a lot of friends in industry, all the political tribes here in D.C., and 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, the president’s executive orders on this, helping also inform some of our treaty allies like Japan and South Korea, the French, the Australians, all who have, in recent, like the last couple of years, started to get much more engaged in bringing billions of dollars into our maritime industrial base. So I’ve been involved in that for quite a while, at least since 2022, on this particular effort, reviving our American maritime strength.

Bill Cullifer: Thank you, Brent. Clay, you came from the shipyard floor. Tell us about your background and why does this matter to you.

Clay Wirsing: My name is Clay Wirsing. I started off as a welding engineer back in 2017 at Newport News Shipbuilding. At the time I really didn’t have any idea what the global situation was with shipbuilding or maritime. And I can remember about a year after I started, some high-level officials from the Navy came in and talked to us about speeding up the pace of our shipyard in order to compete with China, and that was kind of my first introduction there to how far we’ve fallen behind as a maritime nation, especially in shipbuilding. Unfortunately, not a lot has changed since then in terms of actual shipbuilding capacity, but we do now see a ton of momentum, which has been great to see, with the SHIPS for America Act, a lot more public recognition of what’s going on. And so I just want to continue to contribute to that, and hope to see more people join the movement and let our politicians know that maritime is an important space for both our economy and national defense, and we need to have the right laws and policies that allow us to succeed in that domain.

Bill Cullifer: Thank you, Clay. Here’s how this works. Over the next 45 days, we’ll post each new voice at the StrongerNavy.org blog. Everyone gets about 10 minutes and the same three questions. Question number one: What’s working? Number two: What’s in the way? And three: What would they do to fix first? At the end of November 2026, we’ll publish a common-ground report: what these voices agree on, in their own words, as well as a summary of the entire series. So with that, Brent, any closing thoughts?

Brent Sadler: Yeah, just to reiterate, I mean, the last time that America had been in a situation where there’s this much political, public, industry interest in our shipbuilding and shipping sector, Nixon was in the White House. But the challenges with China today are very real and very threatening this decade. So if we are effective at getting a stronger maritime industrial base, and things like the SHIPS for America Act are part of that, we’ll be able to better deter China, and if we get into a war, to be able to sustain a wartime economy and sustain the Navy that’s necessary to fight and win that war. So it’s a very real threat. It’s a very real time in our history that we have to all kind of appreciate the challenges, but also the risk of inaction. And so hopefully we’ll see things moving forward. And the more voices that are out there, the more people that are engaged, the better. And thank you again for pulling this together.

Bill Cullifer: Clay, what about you?

Clay Wirsing: Well said, Brent. And I’ll just add to that, that a lot of countries, especially China, are coming and revisiting their maritime policy every five years, maybe a decade or so. As you mentioned, the U.S. hasn’t really had a major effort in revisiting or revising its policy since the Merchant Marine Act of 1970. So it’s long overdue. I hope to see some bills like the SHIPS for America Act come through and pass in Congress, and then not only that, but as we continue to move forward as a nation, that we continually revisit these issues and make sure that our maritime laws and policies are appropriate for the conditions that we face in our current period.

Bill Cullifer: Brent, Clay, thank you both. To everyone watching, weigh in. Reply on X and tell us what’s working, what’s in the way, and what you would fix first. While we argue, China plans. It’s time to start building America. Let’s roll.

Coming up

Next, the voices start answering the three questions. We’ll post each one here as it comes in.

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

References

[1] 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
[2] S. 1541, SHIPS for America Act of 2025: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119s1541is/html/BILLS-119s1541is.htm

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Americans for a Stronger Navy Launches America at Sea With National Maritime Kickoff on October 18, 2026

While we argue, China plans. The issues, the people, and the stories behind America’s maritime comeback.

Americans for a Stronger Navy in collaboration with U.S. Maritime Action, today announced America at Sea, a national effort that begins with a free, virtual maritime kickoff on October 18, 2026. It is the first step toward a standing collective of the people who build, crew, move and pay for America’s ships.

The country has a Maritime Action Plan, legislation moving in Congress, and wide agreement that the fleet and the industrial base behind it must be rebuilt. What it doesn’t have is a public that knows the people who do this work, or a place where every part of the maritime world can speak with one voice. America at Sea is built to start both.

To join the October 18, 2026 kickoff or the founding group, complete our contact page.

“Most Americans have no idea who builds, crews and repairs the ships this country depends on. We want to change that by telling their stories, finding out what they agree on, and giving them a common voice. While we argue, China plans. It’s time we pulled in the same direction,” said Bill Cullifer, founder and executive director of Americans for a Stronger Navy and a former Navy destroyer sailor.

Captain Brent Sadler, U.S. Navy (Ret.), will moderate, helping draw out those stories and the common ground behind them. Sadler served 26 years in the Navy, including nuclear submarine operations in the Pacific and service as a military diplomat in the Indo-Pacific. He is the author of *U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century* and *Naval Power in Action*, and is a leading advocate for rebuilding America’s shipbuilding industrial base and merchant marine.

U.S. Maritime Action, a new grassroots maritime advocacy group founded by shipyard engineer Clay Wirsing, is collaborating on the effort and will lead outreach to shipyards and the waterfront.

“I spent my Navy years on the bridge of a destroyer. Clay has spent his in the yards building them. He saw the same need I did, that the people who weld, wire and repair these ships have to be part of this conversation. That’s why I wanted him involved from day one,” said Cullifer.

“I’ve spent eight years on the waterfront building and repairing the ships this country depends on. The people doing that work know where the problems are, but they’re rarely in the room when the decisions get made. If we want more ships, the builders, the mariners and the people buying the ships have to work the problem together,” said Wirsing, who has worked in three shipyards on the new construction and repair of aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines and auxiliary supply ships.

On October 18, the organizers will share the story and the vision for America at Sea and open a founding group. Invitations are going out to:

– Shipbuilders, ship repair yards and their suppliers
– Shipyard workers, mariner unions and longshore labor
– Merchant mariners and sailors
– Ship owners and operators, domestic and international
– Ports, carriers and shippers, including agriculture and energy
– Maritime training and education
– Advocates, think tanks and independent voices, including advocates for reform
– The media who cover the maritime world
– Congressional staff, as observers

After the kickoff, America at Sea will continue as a series of conversations introducing Americans to the people behind the nation’s ships, explaining how the maritime world really works, and building a common voice on where they agree.

The effort is independently organized and underwritten by Americans for a Stronger Navy [and U.S. Maritime Action]. No company or interest group has paid to shape its agenda, and the effort does not take positions on behalf of its members.

To join the October 18, 2026 kickoff or the founding group, complete our contact page.

About Americans for a Stronger Navy
Americans for a Stronger Navy is a nonpartisan and non for profit organization based in Folsom, California, focused on naval readiness, the maritime industrial base, and the question of who pays to rebuild American seapower.

About U.S. Maritime Action
U.S. Maritime Action covers U.S. shipbuilding, shipping, ports, the Navy and the Coast Guard. maritimeaction.us

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

By Bill Cullifer | Americans for a Stronger Navy

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

What Happened

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

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

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

Why This Is a Different Problem Than Last Time

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

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

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

What It Means for the Fleet

Three concrete pressures follow directly from this:

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

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

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

Why We’re Raising This Here

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

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

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

References

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

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THE CASE FOR BRENT SADLER AS MARITIME SECURITY ADVISOR

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rest of the Case

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

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

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

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

Where This Stands Right Now

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

What We’re Asking

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

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

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

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THE CASE FOR A MARITIME SECURITY ADVISOR

WHAT IS THE SHIPS FOR AMERICA ACT?

For readers new to this: the SHIPS for America Act (S. 1541 / H.R. 3151) is a bipartisan, bicameral bill—introduced by Sen. Mark Kelly, Sen. Todd Young, Rep. Trent Kelly, and Rep. John Garamendi—aimed at reversing decades of decline in the U.S. shipbuilding industrial base and the American-flagged merchant fleet. Its core provisions include rebuilding domestic shipyard capacity, growing and training a maritime workforce, expanding cargo preference requirements that favor U.S.-flagged vessels, and establishing a Maritime Security Trust Fund to reinvest industry fees back into maritime infrastructure. Its core provisions are currently riding inside the FY27 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 8800), which passed the House in July but remains stalled in the Senate as of this writing. One of its most structurally important provisions is the subject of this piece: the creation of a Maritime Security Advisor and Maritime Security Board inside the White House.

BACKGROUNDER — FIRST IN A SERIES

This is the first in a series examining the Maritime Security Advisor role created by the SHIPS for America Act—a new White House post that could end up mattering more than almost anything else in the coming maritime revival. This piece lays the groundwork: what the role actually controls, why it was created, and why the decision about who leads it deserves public attention now, before it’s resolved one way or another. Later pieces in this series will look more closely at the landscape of who could fill it, how it fits into the broader package of maritime legislation moving through Congress this fall, and what coordination work is already happening inside the administration to prepare the ground for it.

Most of the public debate over the SHIPS for America Act has focused on ships—fleet targets, funding mechanisms, shipyard capacity. Getting far less attention, though it’s been argued for by the people actually working this issue for well over a year, is a provision in Title I of the bill that may end up mattering as much as any of that: the creation of a new Maritime Security Advisor, housed in the Executive Office of the President. If the bill becomes law, this single office could do more to fix America’s maritime coordination problem than any funding mechanism in the bill.

The Problem This Position Is Designed to Solve

Right now, no single person in the federal government is responsible for American maritime strategy as a whole. The Navy, the Coast Guard, the Maritime Administration, and Military Sealift Command all operate in their own lanes, reporting up through different departments, with different budgets and different priorities [1]. The National Security Council has directors for regions and for functional issues like counterterrorism—but nobody with a standing brief to ask “what is America’s maritime strategy?” and get everyone else in the building to answer to it [1].

The Heritage Foundation’s own analysis of the maritime legislative landscape makes a related structural point: with four separate bills moving through different committees—SHIPS for America, the Shipbuilding Investment and Workforce Act, the FLEETS Now Act, and the Ready Reserve Force Modernization Accountability Act—the risk isn’t a shortage of good ideas. It’s that good ideas arrive at conference as competing claims on the same floor time rather than as a coordinated package [2]. A standing coordinating office would help avoid that same fragmentation once bills become law and start needing joint implementation.

What the Job Actually Controls

The bill text gives the Maritime Security Advisor real authority, not just a podium. As a Special Advisor to the President, the position chairs a Maritime Security Board that spans every federal agency with a stake in the maritime domain [3]. Its responsibilities include:

— Developing, updating, and implementing the National Maritime Strategy [3]
— Setting fleet-size targets for the U.S.-flagged commercial fleet [3]
— Independent oversight of federal cargo preference programs [3]
— Coordinating the national maritime workforce buildout [3]
— Setting R&D priorities for next-generation shipbuilding technology [3]
— Aligning federal policy to favor U.S.-flagged vessels in international commerce [3]
— Protecting U.S. vessels from physical and cyber threats [3]

Put simply, this office doesn’t just advise on maritime policy from the sidelines—it runs point on it, across every department that touches a ship, from the Pentagon to the Department of Commerce to the Federal Maritime Commission.

A position with real cross-agency authority is only useful if the person in it can actually use that authority—which means the credentials and judgment of whoever fills this chair will matter as much as the statute that creates it.

Why This Is Bigger Than It Looks

It’s worth being precise about scale here. The Maritime Administrator at MARAD is a real and important job—but it’s a single-agency post inside the Department of Transportation, with authority bounded by MARAD’s own statutory mission. The Maritime Security Advisor sits above that, in the West Wing, with a mandate that spans defense, commerce, transportation, and diplomacy simultaneously. It’s the closest thing the American maritime enterprise has ever had to a single point of accountability.

This Office Doesn’t Need to Wait for Congress

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

Where the Legislation Actually Stands

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

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

References
[1] Heritage Foundation research on maritime coordination gaps across Navy, Coast Guard, MSC, and MARAD.
[2] The Heritage Foundation, “Maritime Legislation: Explainer and Next Steps,” Factsheet No. 285, August 12, 2026.
[3] SHIPS for America Act of 2025 (S. 1541 / H.R. 3151), Sec. 101, Title I—Oversight and Accountability; Senate Commerce Committee, “SHIPS for America Act Section-by-Section,” Apr. 30, 2025.
[4] H.R. 8800 (FY27 NDAA), House passage 216-212, July 22, 2026; S. 4784 cloture failed 50-46, July 14, 2026; no further Senate floor action as of Sept. 2026.
[5] Brent D. Sadler, “Reviving America’s Maritime Strength: Comprehensive by Necessity,” The Heritage Foundation, July 24, 2025.

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

Bill Cullifer, Founder
Bill Cullifer, Founder

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.

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The “China + 1” Illusion: What Global Trade Shifts Mean for U.S. Naval Readiness

Maritime analyst Dr. Sal Mercogliano recently highlighted a critical dynamic shaping modern trade: “The world is diversifying around China, not away from it.”

While economic headlines often celebrate Western supply chains “decoupling” from Beijing, maritime shipping data tells a very different story. Between 2023 and 2025, Chinese containerized exports surged to regional manufacturing hubs—up 40% to India, 36% to Vietnam, and 37% to Thailand.

Rather than pulling manufacturing out of China’s sphere of influence, companies are increasingly relying on a “China + 1” strategy. Raw materials, components, and machinery are still produced in Chinese factories, shipped to South and Southeast Asia for final assembly, and then sent onward to Western markets.

For the U.S. Navy and the defense industrial base, this isn’t true decoupling—it’s re-routing. And it presents serious risks to American sea power.

The Hidden Risks to the Fleet

Naval power relies on secure, resilient supply chains. The expansion of China’s sub-tier manufacturing network impacts U.S. naval readiness across three primary fronts:

  • Deep Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Vulnerabilities: Federal regulations strictly forbid purchasing major military hardware directly from strategic competitors. However, Tier-3 and Tier-4 sub-suppliers—who provide basic electronics, circuit boards, and specialized alloys—remain heavily dependent on Chinese inputs. In a crisis, Beijing could restrict exports of critical sub-components, stalling U.S. ship construction and maintenance.
  • The Critical Mineral Bottleneck: Modern warships depend on Rare Earth Elements (REEs) for permanent magnets, radar systems, sonar arrays, and electric motors. An Arleigh Burke-class destroyer requires roughly 5,200 lbs of rare earth elements, while a Virginia-class submarine requires 9,200 lbs. Because China controls over 80% of global REE refining capacity, shifting final assembly to third-party nations does not resolve this primary vulnerability.
  • Strained Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs): Multi-leg supply chains (China \rightarrow Southeast Asia \rightarrow U.S.) make maritime trade routes longer and more fragmented. This places greater operational demand on the U.S. Navy to monitor, protect, and maintain freedom of navigation across critical maritime chokepoints like the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca.

Policy Action: The Return of Domestic Industrial Mobilization

Recognizing these deep supply chain risks, federal leaders recently announced the revival of a World War II-era model: the Smaller War Plants Commission (SWPC), spearheaded by the Department of Defense and the Small Business Administration (SBA).

Because roughly 70% of the defense industrial base consists of small businesses, this initiative targets the exact lower-tier chokepoints that threaten naval readiness. By expanding capital access and streamlining support for small domestic manufacturers, the SWPC focuses on critical areas:

  • Domestic production of microelectronics and legacy chips.
  • Critical mineral refining on American soil.
  • Specialized castings, forgings, and shipbuilding components.

Rebuilding the U.S. Fleet requires ensuring American warships aren’t grounded by missing foreign-sourced parts during a crisis. Programs like the SWPC are essential steps toward restoring true maritime sovereignty.

Rebuilding True Maritime Strength

Securing U.S. naval readiness requires moving past the illusion of trade diversification:

  1. Map Deep-Tier Supply Chains: Track sub-tier components to eliminate single-point dependencies on foreign raw materials.
  2. Onshore Critical Refining: Leverage domestic programs to build processing facilities for critical minerals and defense components.
  3. Expand Shipyard Infrastructure: Invest directly in U.S. commercial and naval shipyard capacity so the fleet can build, maintain, and repair vessels independently.

As Dr. Mercogliano’s analysis reminds us, trade routes may shift on paper, but strategic dependencies remain. Rebuilding American sea power means securing the industrial foundation behind every ship, sensor, and sailor.

Take Action for American Sea Power

Join Americans for a Stronger Navy in advocating for policies that rebuild domestic shipbuilding, secure defense supply lines, and maintain a fleet capable of protecting global freedom of navigation.

  • Sign up for updates at strongernavy.org
  • Share this analysis on social media to spread awareness about U.S. maritime security.

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

Bill Cullifer, Founder
Bill Cullifer, Founder

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.

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Allied ‘Say Versus Do’ Gap Raises New Questions Over U.S. Sea Power

Bill Cullifer, Founder
Bill Cullifer, Founder

In a conversation with CDR Salamander, I explore allied readiness, the Strait of Hormuz, burden-sharing and the Navy’s structural crisis.

America’s allies often say the right things about maritime security. The harder question is whether they can still do them.

That “say versus do” gap sits at the center of my conversation with CDR Salamander — a retired U.S. Navy officer, former NATO staff officer, and one of the most respected independent voices in naval commentary for nearly two decades.

We discussed Europe’s shrinking naval capacity, the Strait of Hormuz, burden-sharing, the industrial base, and the structural failures that have brought the U.S. Navy to a readiness crisis that many veterans recognize all too well.

I came to the conversation as a student. I left it convinced that Americans need a wider, more honest debate about sea power, allied obligations, and the real cost of keeping global trade moving. His explanation of the global economy is one of the most important parts of the interview.

Why I Asked These Questions

I started Americans for a Stronger Navy about two and a half years ago. Before that, I spent over three decades in telecommunications and web technologies — building and leading organizations at the intersection of global internet infrastructure, international business, and nonprofit professional management. I traveled to China and Russia during the early 2000s tech transfer era — and to other emerging markets in between — and watched, firsthand, how economic integration and strategic naivety can compound into serious long-term risk. That ground-level view of how these economies operate, and how they think about America, shapes everything I do at StrongerNavy.org.

I am not a think tank fellow. I am not a defense contractor. I am not a retired flag officer. I am a former blue water destroyer sailor who stood watches aboard USS Henry B. Wilson in the 1970s during the original hollow Navy era.

That outsider status used to feel like a liability. I’ve come to think it’s an asset. Fresh eyes — from someone who has managed global organizations, tracked technology transfer across borders, and spent thirty years watching how interconnected systems succeed and fail — can sometimes see patterns that are harder to spot from inside a specialized community. That’s not a criticism. It’s an argument for a bigger tent.

My goal has never been to be the loudest voice in the room. It has been to listen carefully, learn honestly, connect what we learn to concrete legislative action — and help build the coalition this moment requires.

Which is why I reached out to CDR Salamander. If you want to understand where the naval community’s thinking actually is, you start there.

What follows is that conversation. I hope you’ll read it the same way I tried to have it.

Europe’s Readiness Gap

Q: The Royal Navy was significantly larger in 1982 than it is today, and they barely scraped together a task force to retake the Falkland Islands. The RAF was making the case that carriers were obsolete and land-based air could handle everything — they were months away from not having that carrier in the South Atlantic at all. France, the Netherlands, Denmark — Europe had a real, robust military then. Fast forward to 2026. Is that capability still there?

We find ourselves in a situation where there’s a certain inertia to assumptions — we just assume our allies can do something. You see announcements like the French carrier getting underway with a European strike group to help defend Cyprus because the British can’t get a single destroyer underway. And that’s great. But the French have one carrier. Some of their allied units are genuinely impressive — the Spanish F-100 Aegis destroyer is a fine piece of kit — but there just aren’t that many of them. They can do this one deployment. They have no follow-on. They have no endurance.

Even they themselves still carry this inertia of a memory of a military that could do things. And it’s simply not there anymore.

CDR Salamander: You have to be very careful what you take from Europe at face value, because a lot of what they’re proposing isn’t what’s best — it’s what they’re capable of. We make fun of the “strongly worded letter,” but if that’s all you have, that’s what you lean on. If you need things to delay, to push to the right, to wait for a UN or EU meeting — that’s what you’re going to do, because you don’t have the military capability to do anything else.

And even as NATO allies approach that 2% GDP threshold — which is laudable — you have to ask: what can they actually do with that? A lot of our assumptions, everything from mine sweeping to escort ships to underway replenishment, don’t hold up when you look at the actual order of battle. Mike Mullen’s “Thousand-Ship Navy” concept still echoes, but do we really have allies who can fill those billets?

Even in the Red Sea the operational experience has been revealing. CDR Salamander noted that one allied navy’s top-line unit deployed and discovered its hardware couldn’t communicate with a partner nation’s radar systems. And on the British Type 45 destroyers — everybody loves those ships — CDR Salamander observed that at least one was unable to use its main gun against air targets in the Red Sea because of a software capability that had not been purchased, a cost-saving decision that reflected years of accumulated underinvestment.

That’s the “say versus do” problem. A lot of what Europeans are saying cannot be backed up because they have so under-resourced their militaries. They can posture, protest, and stand at sight. That’s it.

Politics and NATO

Q: Is this primarily a capability problem, or is politics a bigger factor in why allies haven’t stepped up?

CDR Salamander: It depends on the nation. I say this as a former NATO staff officer who genuinely loves the alliance. I loved who I served with. In Afghanistan, I spent more time with NATO partner nations than with Americans. But out of respect — because they speak clearly to us — we should speak clearly back.

There are a couple of powerful undercurrents in Europe. One is a latent anti-Americanism that’s part of the political landscape. The other — especially in France and to a lesser degree Germany — is a desire for EU primacy over NATO. They resent American influence in the alliance. Any opportunity to position the EU as an alternative to NATO is taken, because if they can detach European security from the American relationship, the EU becomes more powerful.

You also have national habits. Some allies are simply accustomed to the US carrying the load — and then commenting from the sidelines in ways that play well domestically. And the Israel dimension cannot be discounted. The fact that the US is operating alongside Israel has triggered large portions of the European electorate in ways that make allied political leaders unwilling to be seen as part of this operation — even when it’s clearly in their own economic interest.

This was true under Carter, Clinton, and Obama as much as under Reagan, Bush, and Trump. The Europeans just don’t map their political spectrum onto ours, and right now that disconnect is making things worse.

Why Hormuz Still Matters

A note before this next section: whether you follow naval policy closely or you’re coming to this conversation for the first time, what follows is the most important part of this interview. CDR Salamander explains, in plain language, why the Strait of Hormuz matters to Americans who don’t buy a drop of Gulf oil — and why the global economy is far more fragile than most people understand. It deserves close attention.

Q: What’s the one thing Americans aren’t getting from traditional news coverage about the Strait of Hormuz?

CDR Salamander: The hardest thing to explain — but the most important — is that the US hasn’t relied on Hormuz hydrocarbons for a long time. We’re energy self-sufficient. So when people ask why this matters to Americans, the answer isn’t about our gas prices. It’s about the entire architecture of the global economy.

After the Cold War, decisions were made across North America and Europe to de-industrialize. That doesn’t mean you stop needing manufactured goods — it means you offshore the manufacturing to Asia, and you don’t have to see any of it. That works until it doesn’t. And it doesn’t work when the energy supply chain feeding Asian manufacturing gets disrupted.

The vast majority of hydrocarbons moving through the Strait of Hormuz are going to China, Japan, India, Thailand, Australia. If that energy supply is disrupted, the cost of hard industrial manufacturing in Asia rises to the point where supply chains feeding Western industries start to collapse. The whole system wavers.

And it’s not just oil. It’s fertilizer derived from natural gas — the feedstock that made the Green Revolution possible and held back mass starvation. It’s helium, a byproduct of natural gas production, essential for semiconductor manufacturing and fuel cell development. People don’t see those connections.

What they really don’t understand is that if you want to stop economic migration, you need strong economies in Southeast Asia. If you want a buffer against an expansionist China — and a Russia probing NATO’s eastern flank and an Iran that has spent forty years treating the Gulf as its own private lake — you need viable economies in Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Australia. That can’t happen if those nations can’t access hydrocarbons at market prices.

Burden-Sharing Without Mercenaries

Q: Asian economies receive the overwhelming share of crude moving through the Strait of Hormuz — China, India, Japan and South Korea among the largest exposed markets. We’re backstopping maritime insurance, deploying carrier strike groups, burning through hardware and personnel. What’s the value proposition for the American taxpayer?

CDR Salamander: Too many people in positions of political power don’t know how money works. They don’t understand interconnected economic systems. And they’re operating in a political environment where maintaining their coalition comes before strategic clarity.

Some of them genuinely believe that contributing to an escort operation in the Strait of Hormuz means being part of the conflict. We saw that when Italy and Spain withdrew base access for operations involving Israel. They’re making decisions out of spite and domestic political calculation — even though the disruption will hurt their own economies far more than it hurts ours.

The argument that the beneficiaries of American naval protection should contribute more is legitimate. But how you structure that contribution matters enormously.

Q: We’ve had financial models before where countries paid for protection. Kuwait in 1987. Japan in 1991. Is there a precedent for a more formal burden-sharing arrangement?

CDR Salamander: I guess in theory it could work, but I’m not a fan of the concept as it’s usually framed. America has a voluntary military. These are the sons and daughters of American citizens who chose to serve their country. If we do anything that even smacks of being somebody else’s mercenary force, I don’t want to be the one explaining to a mother why her kid came home in a box because someone was cutting us a check to do their job for them.

Now — contributing nations don’t have to contribute forces. If Iceland doesn’t have a military but will buy diesel fuel for the operation, that counts. Resources and services in lieu of forces — that’s legitimate burden sharing. That’s the Daughters of the American Revolution model: you don’t need an ancestor who fought at Yorktown. Someone who drove a supply wagon qualifies too.

But pure payment for services rendered? That leaves a bad taste. Why is Bangladesh so active in UN peacekeeping? Because they like the money. I don’t want the United States Navy in that equation.

What the Navy Commission Must Confront

Q: The National Commission on the Future of the Navy has begun its work. If you were advising the commission — not on ship counts, but on structural questions — what are the two or three things they absolutely cannot afford to skip?

CDR Salamander: First, back up and ask why this commission exists at all. It exists because the institutions given stewardship over American sea power have done a poor enough job over the last three decades that Congress felt compelled to create external oversight. So the question isn’t “what ships do we need” — it’s “what structural dysfunctions produced this situation?”

My answers are unsexy. But the foundations of a house are unsexy. Plumbing is unsexy. You can’t have a functioning structure without them.

The first thing is industrial base. The only reason we won World War II is our industrial capacity — including our maritime industrial capacity. Right now we have submarines waiting over a year for repairs. We have dry dock capacity so constrained that ships are receiving depot-level maintenance in 2026 at a rate that would have gotten people fired in 1986. We need incentives and disincentives that grow, support, and sustain a geographically and institutionally diverse shipbuilding and maintenance industry. That will take a decade to fix. Start now.

Second: officer corps incentives. How we promote people and why. The current system is not fit for purpose. If it were, we wouldn’t be where we are.

Third: geographic presence. The Navy has disappeared from the view of too many Americans. San Francisco Bay is geographically ideal for naval facilities and sits at the center of American technology and influence — and we BRAC’d our way out of it. The “Master Base” concept — concentrating everything in San Diego, Jacksonville, and Norfolk — only makes sense to an accountant. It certainly doesn’t make sense in an era of drone swarms that can take out entire airfields. We need a distributed presence.

And underneath all of this: we need a national understanding of maritime power, not just a maritime strategy document. By geography and economy, we are a maritime and aerospace nation. Our budgetary priorities don’t reflect that. Changing them will require taking resources from what is not our comparative advantage as a non-continental land power. We have to be willing to make that fight. We need more Vice Admiral Tom Connollys and fewer officers who can’t get through a sentence without the word “joint.”

The Case for Sea and Air Power

Q: Final question. What’s the key takeaway — for Navy professionals and for civilians who might be listening?

CDR Salamander: There’s an opportunity here, and it’s being missed.

Every carrier deployed for nine, ten, eleven months is proof we don’t have a large enough navy. Every static airfield attacked ashore is an argument for sea-based power projection. Every Houthi missile fired at a merchant ship is a demonstration that the only answer is at sea. Every Chinese fishing fleet strip-mining the territorial waters of a South American coastal nation is a mission for the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. Every Russian submarine probing undersea infrastructure in the North Atlantic is a reminder of who owns the depths. Every Iranian fast boat swarming a merchant vessel in the Gulf is a test of resolve we cannot afford to fail.

The Western Pacific threat is maritime and aerospace. What Australia, Japan, the Philippines, New Zealand need most is help securing their maritime connections and their airspace. That is our lane.

All the argument points have been delivered to us on a plate. We have the receipts. And I’ve been frustrated for a while that the stars are aligned, the case is right there, but too much of our senior leadership would rather talk about “joint” — or worse, say nothing at all.

This isn’t parochial. It’s about the security of the Republic. We have secure land borders. Europe has the population and economy to handle most of its own land and air requirements. We don’t need to find ourselves in another land war in Asia. But we do have a unique, irreplaceable role at sea and in the air.

If conflict comes — something like what we’re watching off Iran right now — the best outcome for America is one where we limit our involvement to sea power and air power. That’s not isolationism. That’s strategy. It’s the argument we should be making every day, because it’s an easy argument to make — and right now, the world is making it for us.

Bill’s Takeaway

A few honest reflections after sitting with this conversation.

CDR Salamander is an exceptional teacher. His ability to move from a 1982 carrier nearly decommissioned by RAF budget politics to a 2026 British destroyer unable to use its main gun in the Red Sea — and have both illuminate the same structural failure — is a gift. I’d encourage every reader to go back through his answers on the global economy section slowly.

What he makes clear — and what most people never connect — is that we do not live in silos. The fertilizer derived from natural gas that feeds billions also underpins the modern technology supply chain. The strong economies in Southeast Asia that buffer against Chinese expansionism are the same economies that prevent mass migration crises from landing on our doorstep. Freedom of navigation isn’t an abstraction. It is the load-bearing wall of the modern world. Remove it and everything above it comes down.

That lesson applies closer to home too. The naval advocacy community has its own silo problem. Veterans organizations, individual advocates, civic groups, and policy voices are all making versions of the same argument — but separately, in parallel, without a unified message. A trade association of defense contractors speaks for an industry. A coalition of veterans, citizens, and civic advocates speaks for the Republic. Those are not the same thing, and the difference matters.

I don’t agree with everything he said. I want to be straightforward about that, because intellectual honesty is the only foundation worth building on.

His objection to burden-sharing — the mercenary framing — is one I take seriously. He made it with conviction and genuine feeling for the men and women who serve. I respect that completely.

But here’s my honest position: The United States is not operating from a position of unlimited fiscal strength. Debt-service costs are rising, readiness needs are growing, and the nations benefiting most from open sea lanes — China, India, Japan and South Korea among the largest — have an obligation to contribute to the cost of keeping them open. That isn’t mercenary. That’s arithmetic.

And here’s where I think CDR Salamander and I are actually closer than it might appear. His own instinct — Iceland buying diesel fuel, basing access, logistics support, the wagon driver — is a barter framework. Contributions in kind rather than cash. I’ll take it. That’s a step in the right direction. The principle that beneficiaries contribute is the thing that matters. The mechanism is a conversation worth having.

We will have more to say about the legislative path forward at StrongerNavy.org in the weeks ahead. Watch this space.

CDR Salamander and I share the core conviction: the United States is a maritime and aerospace power, the Navy is underfunded and structurally undermined, and the window to fix it is narrow. That is enough to work with.

Stronger together. Break the silos.

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

About CDR Salamander

CDR Salamander is a retired U.S. Navy officer and former NATO staff officer. He has written at CDRSalamander.com for nearly two decades and publishes regularly on Substack. His post “Europe’s Say v. Do Problem” served as the starting point for this conversation.

About Americans for a Stronger Navy

I founded Americans for a Stronger Navy (StrongerNavy.org) after serving as a Quartermaster/helmsman aboard USS Henry B. Wilson (DDG-7) in the 1970s. Our mission is simple: advocate for a properly funded, capable U.S. Navy as a cornerstone of American security and economic prosperity. Full audio of this interview is available at StrongerNavy.org.