Trump Is Right. It’s Time to Make Shipbuilding Great Again.

America desperately needs to make shipbuilding great again.

President Donald Trump announced in his Tuesday night address to Congress that he will sign an executive order creating an office of shipbuilding to “resurrect the American shipbuilding industry, including commercial shipbuilding and military shipbuilding.”

Trump’s announcement, though it may be surprising, is long overdue.

The total collapse in American shipbuilding over the last several decades has become an economic, military, and national security crisis of particular concern in an era of increased great power competition, particularly with China.

From Dominance to Decline to Crisis

At the end of World War II, American shipbuilding was in high gear and producing ships on a scale never seen in human history. During the war, the U.S. employed more than a million people in the shipbuilding industry. The fleet America built was an overwhelming two-ocean force that outstripped all the navies of the world combined by war’s end.

The U.S. had over 1,200 ships in 1946. Today, the Navy has 287 ships and that number could continue to decline unless America revitalizes its shipbuilding capacity.

A recent report in The Wall Street Journal highlighted how the once powerful U.S. shipbuilding industry has steadily declined since the 1980s and ceded its dominance to other countries.

“In the 1970s, U.S. yards were building about 5% of the world’s tonnage, equating to about two dozen new ships a year,” the Journal noted. “But the number of ships coming out of these yards has slowed to a trickle. The U.S. accounted for about 0.1% of the world’s tonnage in 2023. The few U.S.-made commercial ships now come from just two shipyards: one in Philadelphia and another in San Diego.”

We are now far away from the days of President Ronald Reagan’s 600-ship Navy. In the intervening years the U.S. commercial shipbuilding industry languished due to reliance on foreign countries, a collapse in the number of U.S.-based firms, and a dwindling labor force with the technical knowledge to do the job.

In practical terms, this decline means that the U.S. now struggles to support a Navy that can meet its basic obligations. Ships are pressed into service past their due date and are increasingly retired without replacements.

As American shipbuilding prowess waned, other countries eagerly filled the void.

The China Threat

While the U.S. shipbuilding industry went into steep decline, some nations—mostly in Asia—made enormous gains. China has become by far the world’s most dominant shipbuilder.

While the U.S. Navy remains the largest in overall tonnage, China’s navy now outnumbers the U.S. in overall ships. Even more concerning is the fact that China’s shipbuilding potential is now so far beyond that of the U.S.

Palmer Luckey, the CEO of the innovative new arms company Anduril Industries, explained in an interview just how stark the difference between America’s and China’s shipbuilding capacities has become. He said that China has hundreds of times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States.

Luckey said that some people cast doubt on the numbers because they only include commercial shipbuilding. But, as Luckey noted, China mandates by law that all commercial vessels must meet military standards.

This means that in a large-scale conflict where ships will likely be destroyed and need to be replaced quickly, China can quickly turn on the spigot of production to serve the national interest.

In assessing the U.S. Navy’s inability to procure ships, defense analyst Gil Barndollar wrote in Foreign Policy that after years of strategic drift and deindustrialization, the Navy is “ill-equipped to endure a sustained high-intensity conflict in the Pacific.”

Sobering.

Trump’s Plan

To make up for the gap in shipbuilding capacity, the U.S. will have to rely on allies like Japan and South Korea to pick up the slack, at least in the short term.

Trump even acknowledged in a recent interview that we may have to rely on South Korea for a time because our need for ships is so dire.

“We are going to do something with ships. We need ships and we may have to go a different route than you would normally go,” Trump told talk radio host Hugh Hewitt in January. “We used to build a ship a day. We don’t build ships anymore. We want to get that started and maybe, we’ll use allies also in terms of building ships. We might have to.”

For now, South Korea and other partners can provide a necessary Band-Aid.

But relying entirely on foreign help is not a sufficient long-term plan for a U.S. that intends to maintain naval dominance through the 21st century and beyond.

What Trump made clear in his address to Congress is that American naval strength will require a resurgent home-grown industry.

Trump’s plan, according to Wall Street Journal reporters who reviewed a draft of his executive order, focuses both on jumpstarting the U.S. domestic shipbuilding industry and on decreasing reliance on China.

“The draft executive order includes measures that create Maritime Opportunity Zones and a Maritime Security Trust Fund to boost investments,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “It also says that revenue from fees on Chinese cranes and ships at U.S. ports would fund domestic maritime investments.”

Chinese ships will be hit with hefty fees when they enter U.S. ports and the money raised will be used to fund the U.S. shipbuilding industry.

Trump’s draft order includes a plan to revamp the acquisition process and includes the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to ensure that money is being allocated efficiently.

This all means that the Trump administration has a clear strategy to address an area of vital national interest. Theorists like Alfred Thayer Mahan and James Corbett have long placed an emphasis on the connection between naval power and national power.

The Trump administration seems to understand that. Hopefully our era of sea blindness is over. It’s time to rebuild.

The post Trump Is Right. It’s Time to Make Shipbuilding Great Again. appeared first on The Daily Signal.