America at Sea: Voices That Matter is a 45-day maritime conversation presented by Americans for a Stronger Navy, supported by U.S. Maritime Action, and moderated by Capt. Brent Sadler, USN (Ret.). Each guest answers three questions: What’s working? What’s the biggest barrier? And what would you fix first? The goal: find common ground and deliver a report to policymakers, their staffs, and the public.
Charlie Papavizas is a partner at Winston & Strawn LLP and one of the most recognized maritime lawyers in the United States. He is the author of Journey to the Jones Act: U.S. Merchant Marine Policy 1776–1920 and currently chairs the firm’s Maritime, Ship Finance & Offshore practice. A former chair of the Maritime Law Association of the United States’ Government Regulation Committee and a longtime member of the American Bureau of Shipping, Papavizas has spent four decades advising shipowners, operators, and government agencies on the legal frameworks that govern American shipping. He is currently at work on a second volume, covering the era from World War I through the Korean War. [1]
What’s Working
Papavizas begins with what he sees as the foundation — the programs that have sustained the U.S. commercial maritime industry over decades.
“We have maintained a core commercial maritime industry through several means. One, the Jones Act. Two, the security programs — maritime security program, tanker security program, cable security program. Three, through reserving U.S. government cargos to U.S.-flag commercial vessels. Those three things have maintained a pretty vibrant domestic industry. But for those things, you would have nothing.”
Those programs — the Maritime Security Program, cargo preference laws, and Jones Act cabotage requirements — form the legal scaffolding that keeps American-flag ships operating in a global market that rewards the lowest possible cost. Papavizas knows that scaffolding better than almost anyone. He helped build parts of it, and he has defended it for decades.
The Biggest Barrier
Papavizas does not sugarcoat the problem. The barrier, he says, is the same one identified by the Lynch Commission in 1870, and by every commission and study since.
“They always point to one basic factor — the commercial maritime industry around the world can move anywhere and do everything that’s needed anywhere. That means lowest cost is driven to very lowest cost. And the U.S. standard of living does not permit us to have the very lowest cost, because you can’t hire people. You can’t maintain the shipyards here at those levels of cost.”
An American chief engineer, Papavizas notes, could just as easily make a substantial salary at a power plant. He or she is not going to work for what a Croatian captain or Indian chief engineer will accept. That is not a policy failure. It is math. And that math has shaped every maritime debate in Washington for more than a century.
What Would You Fix First
This is where the conversation turns urgent. Papavizas identifies two overlapping priorities — and both require the federal government to act.
First: rebuild the shipyard base through series production.
“We really need to provide for an order book that will give them the ability to plan. And the essential element for that is series production. Standard design, no design variance, long series production. Which commercial owner can do that? Well, there aren’t any. No one’s going to order 50 ships from U.S. shipyards, or 100 or 150. But the U.S. government can. We did it in the lead-up to World War II when private owners were not ordering enough ships. The U.S. government stepped in and ordered ships to its designs.”
He points to the 1950s Mariner program, when the government ordered 50 advanced break-bulk ships — relatively fast, with military utility. A substantial investment, but one that kept yards alive and workforces trained. The same model could work today: pick a commercial design, spread it across four or five yards on a 10- to 15-year horizon. And there are signs of movement: Kiewit and Hyundai recently announced plans for a new shipyard in Ingleside, Texas — the kind of greenfield investment the industry has not seen in decades. [2]
Second: offer tariff incentives for U.S.-flag shipping.
“The very first promotional program for U.S.-flag shipping in 1789 was a discount on the carriage of tea from China to the United States. If you carried it in a U.S.-flag vessel, you paid a lower tariff. Tariffs have come back in style. Well, why don’t we just automatically have a 10 percent discount across the board? Any tariff, 10 percent discount, use a U.S.-flag ship. People would re-document ships in the United States.”
He and his clients have studied the numbers — especially in cars, where a 10 percent discount on a 25 percent tariff is a big deal. He notes the SHIPS Act and other current proposals as positive steps, but warns they may not move quickly enough. Even if ships were ordered tomorrow, the first hull would be three and a half years out. [3]
Why Americans Should Care
Papavizas reaches back more than a century to make the case. In 1914, when war broke out in Europe, every available ship was chartered to carry war materiel. The United States — officially neutral — suddenly could not move its own exports. Unemployment spiked. The economy tanked.
“This is what happened when we had no merchant marine to speak of in the foreign trade, even in 1914, as a hedge. We had no hedge. So what happens today if the Chinese government or some other government does that to the United States? What’s our hedge? We don’t have a hedge. We don’t have anywhere near enough ships for that eventuality.”
The second argument is military logistics. The U.S. cannot fight anywhere beyond its own continent — including to defend Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Guam — without commercial sealift. And foreign-flag crews have refused to enter war zones before. During Vietnam, crews on foreign vessels declined to sail into combat areas. It is, Papavizas notes, their right under international maritime law — and a risk the United States cannot afford to take again. [4]
He draws a line through every major American conflict: in World War I, in World War II, and in Korea, the country needed years to build up shipyard capacity and tonnage. A Harvard study commissioned by the Navy after World War II asked the obvious question — and gave a blunt answer.
“Harvard did a study commissioned by the Navy and by the War Shipping Administration. Basically, how big of a fleet do we need? And the Harvard study was pretty blunt: In World War I, we had time before we got into the war to build up a capacity. And that saved us. In World War II, we had time to build up a capacity, and that saved us. Is that going to be the same the next time? Harvard said, there’s no reason to think that that’s going to be the case.”
Papavizas also raises the once-significant Effective U.S. Controlled Fleet — foreign-flagged vessels owned by American companies, often registered in Panama or Liberia. The theory was that in a crisis, those ships could be called into service. That fleet, he says, effectively no longer exists. The Maritime Administration no longer tracks it the way it once did, and nobody should count on it as a strategic reserve. [5]
The Takeaway
Charlie Papavizas has spent a career inside the legal architecture of American shipping. His message is plain: the programs that sustain U.S.-flag shipping work, but they are not enough. The shipyard base needs a long-term government order book — series production of standard commercial designs, sustained over a decade or more. And tariff incentives could put market forces to work rebuilding the American-flag fleet. The history is clear. Every time the United States needed ships and did not have them, it paid in time, treasure, and sometimes blood. The question is whether Washington will act before the next crisis answers it for us.
About America at Sea
America at Sea: Voices That Matter is a 45-day conversation about the future of American sea power. Presented by Americans for a Stronger Navy, supported by U.S. Maritime Action, and moderated by Capt. Brent Sadler, USN (Ret.), the series asks shipbuilders, mariners, industry leaders, the Navy community, and policy experts the same three questions:
1. What’s working in American maritime?
2. What’s the biggest barrier?
3. What would you fix first?
A common-ground report will be delivered to policymakers, their staffs, and the public at the end of the series.
About the Guest
Charlie Papavizas is a partner at Winston & Strawn LLP, where he chairs the Maritime, Ship Finance & Offshore practice group. He is the author of Journey to the Jones Act: U.S. Merchant Marine Policy 1776–1920, a history of American merchant marine policy. A former chair of the Government Regulation Committee of the Maritime Law Association of the United States, he has been recognized as a leading maritime attorney by Chambers USA, Legal 500, Best Lawyers in America, and Lawdragon 500. He serves as a member of the American Bureau of Shipping, the Propeller Club, and the editorial board of the Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce. He is currently at work on a second volume, covering the era from World War I through the Korean War.
References
[1] Charlie Papavizas, Journey to the Jones Act: U.S. Merchant Marine Policy 1776–1920. See also Winston & Strawn LLP attorney profile.
[2] On series production and government shipbuilding programs, see Salvatore Mercogliano, “The Maritime Administration and the U.S. Merchant Marine,” in The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Security (Routledge, 2022).
[3] The Sustaining and Honing International Partnerships for Shipping Act (SHIPS Act) and the President’s Maritime Action Plan both propose measures to expand American shipbuilding capacity and the U.S.-flag merchant fleet. Key provisions were included in the House version of the FY 2027 NDAA but face resistance in the Senate, where the Commerce Committee chairman has been skeptical. Most maritime provisions may not survive conference.
[4] On the history of foreign crew refusals to enter combat zones, see Arthur Donovan and Joseph Bonney, The Box That Changed the World (Commonwealth Business Media, 2006), and the Maritime Administration’s sealift readiness studies.
[5] The Effective U.S. Controlled Fleet (EUSC) was tracked by the Maritime Administration through the Cold War. See MARAD annual reports and Papavizas’ discussion in Journey to the Jones Act.