Defense One Radio, Ep. 167: How U.S. Navy shipbuilding sank so low

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Guests:

• Matthew Paxton, president of the Shipbuilders Council of America;
• Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va.;
• Brent Sadler, retired Navy captain and senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation;
• And Mark Montgomery, retired rear admiral and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Sources and additional reading:

• Navy Force Structure and Shipbuilding Plans: Background and Issues for Congress (PDF);
• U.S. Navy budget materials;
• "Navy adds $1B to unconventional effort to boost sub production," by Lauren Williams, reporting Sept. 2024;
• Defense Department's 2024 Defense Industrial Base strategy;
• And "Restoring Our Maritime Strength: An agenda for the next president’s first hundred days," by Brent Sadler and Jerry Hendrix, writing in the National Review in late October.

Here's a rough transcript of today's episode:

The U.S. Navy will celebrate its 250th birthday next year. That’s pretty old. In fact, it’s considerably older than China’s navy, which wasn’t even officially established until 1950. At that time, the U.S. Navy was generally regarded as the best and largest in the world. But it’s not the largest anymore. That distinction goes to China. 

The U.S. Navy currently has 297 ships. At the end of World War II, it had more than 6,000 active ships in the force. And that’s kind of an inconceivable number, so we won’t really be talking about it again.  

More recently, in my lifetime for example, the Navy peaked at around 590 ships in 1987. Again, today it has almost half that. But as analysts will tell you, Soviet naval technology of the 1980s is not Chinese naval technology of the 2020s and beyond. So historical comparisons are only marginally helpful in understanding the current dilemma that is the American shipbuilding industry. 

Here are a few numbers to make the discrepancies a little more clear. The latest public navy ship count has China at 370, and the U.S. as we mentioned before, has 297. The commercial shipbuilding industry side of things is far more stark. Consider that in 2022, the U.S. had just five large oceangoing commercial ships on order. China had 1,794. 

But China’s shipyards crank out both commercial and naval or military ships. And in this regard, the U.S. Navy estimates that China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times our own. For example, China has 13 shipyards. One in particular is especially notable. Here’s Germany’s DW News, reporting just four days ago.

From a big-picture consideration, as engineer Brian Potter recently wrote, “successful shipbuilding countries are often island countries or (like Korea) effectively islands that are highly dependent on imports and exports.” And an analysis from U.S.-based defense firm Palantir reiterated that point just last month, writing: “There has never been a dominant naval power that was not also a dominant commercial shipping power. China understands this. Do we?”

These sort of considerations led me to wonder: What is a normal year for U.S. Navy shipbuilding? It turns out that’s a bad question. Because what I’ve learned is that the U.S. Navy’s force structure has been in flux for most of the last decade. And the wider problems contributing to that extend far beyond a single decade. 

Here’s Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro speaking at an event hosted by the Stimson Center think tank earlier this year.  “If you take a look at what happened, basically in the early 1980s when President Reagan was president, he believed that we could actually leave the core elements of the shipbuilding industry, the commercial shipbuilding industry, to the private sector. And he was right. We did leave it to the private sector. And regretfully, countries like China took over with cheap labor, basically, and were able to really build up their commercial shipbuilding industry and dominate the market.” 

The U.S. had eight public naval shipyards when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Today, there are only four. 

Here’s Del Toro again: “But the commercial shipbuilding industry atrophied through the Cold War. We shut down many shipyards in this country, thinking that we would not need them. We became less competitive as well, too, and now we're at the point where our commercial ship building industry has really suffered….But because of that, our building of our naval capabilities, of our naval ships have become far more expensive because there are far fewer shipyards that actually build our Navy ships.” 

Out of those four remaining public shipyards, only two of them can work on nuclear-powered subs—in Virginia and Connecticut. And nuclear-powered subs are basically how the U.S. maintains its edge and keeps world war from erupting again. 

The big problem? The U.S. can’t quite repair or replace those submarines as fast as they’re aging. Lawmakers know that. The Navy certainly knows it. That’s why they’ve set a goal of building two nuclear-powered subs along with one nuclear-armed submarine each year. 

But since the pandemic hit, the Navy’s been unable to reach that goal. Why that is is partly what we’ll be talking about today. 

It’s all part of a somewhat pernicious dynamic. And it can be really frustrating for patriotic Americans who remember the industrious elbow-grease-and-bootstrap legacy of the country’s defense industries going back to the Second World War, when the U.S. shipbuilding industry cranked out a new destroyer every 17 days.  

As my colleague Dan Darling messaged me recently, the U.S. has never lacked for naval innovation or design creativity, yet right now, it can barely build a single Navy submarine in a single fiscal year.

And those subs? They eat up half of the Navy’s desired shipbuilding budget. Its latest shipbuilding budget came in at more than $32 billion dollars. And with that money, the Navy expects to build 10 new ships—but another 19 are retiring. So that’s a net loss of 9 ships for fiscal year 2025. 

In order to reach the service’s current goal of a 515-ship Navy to counter China around the mid-century mark, the shipbuilding industry will have to crank out a net gain of 10 ships every year—and every year for 35 years. Remember, the Navy is currently working on a net loss of 9 ships for the current year. 

I’m no mathematician, but that is not trending in the desired direction, if you’re a U.S. Navy officer. That’s at least partly why you may have heard this commercial on TV or on internet video ads in places like YouTube for example. 

That ad came from Texas-based Blue Forge Alliance, which has been promoting shipyard jobs through its “Build Submarines” advertising campaign. Blue Forge Alliance has netted more than a billion dollars over the last two years to promote jobs in America’s submarine industrial base.

But the Navy seems to need a lot more help beyond just its submarine problem. According to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service (PDF), “The Navy is currently facing challenges in designing, building, crewing, and maintaining ships.”

That’s pretty much all aspects of being a Navy. And a variety of recent developments have illustrated this somewhat painfully. 

That includes:

• The Navy recently lost its only oiler in the Middle East when it ran aground and “partially flooded off the coast of Oman” in September. 
• In October, another 26 ships were discovered to have received faulty welds at the Huntington Ingalls Industries shipyard in Virginia.

And subs aren’t the only ships coming out of shipyards at a dismally slow pace. The country’s latest aircraft carrier is at least 18 months behind. Its FFG-62 Frigate program is 36 months behind schedule, too. 

On top of all this, the Navy is also experiencing a recruiting shortfall, which means it can’t quite even fully staff the dwindling number of ships plying the world’s oceans to protect global commerce and shipping lanes so you can get that out-of-season citrus or watch those Amazon packages arrive on time. 

But those shipping lanes are already being cramped and pinched by challenges to the navies of the U.S. and its allies. Look at the Red Sea, for instance. The Iran-backed Houthis know this. It’s why the U.S. is having to divert so much of its Navy to the Middle East, redirecting entire carrier groups away from the Pacific, leaving other allies like Taiwan somewhat vulnerable to a possible Chinese blockade or potentially a future invasion. 

So how did we go from that Reagan-era high point to the current post-pandemic low? 

Sadler: Well, the first thing is we got lazy. 

That’s Brent Sadler, a 26-year Navy veteran who is now a Senior Research Fellow in Naval Warfare and Advanced Technology at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington. He’s also author of the 2023 book, “U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century: A New Strategy for Facing the Chinese and Russian Threat.” 

Sadler: We got lazy in our post-Cold War kind of malaise, and then when we got distracted with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, thinking that all we needed was the ability to fight these high-intensity, low-tech kind of wars, and we just assumed for far too long that we'd be able to operate our Navy wherever, whenever we wanted. And as a result of that, we under invested. We didn't invest in new capabilities, starting 20 years ago. We didn't invest in infrastructure, in shipyards when we knew we didn't have the capacity to maintain the fleet that we had at the time, which was north of 300 ships. And now we can't, for the last 10, 10+ years, we can't, we can't actually grow the fleet north of 300 and we're only talking like from 292 to 300 so eight new ships. We can't even do that. And at the same time, we have an accelerating aged fleet that's getting at its retirement, so we've under invested. We ignore the impending need to invest massive capital investments, both in people and in infrastructure, to turn the tide on a navy that's nearing the end of its lifetime, and it comes at the same time that we are just now realizing with real seriousness the true danger that China poses, and we're realizing this as our deterrence is failing all over the world. So that, in a nutshell, that's kind of it, and it's not very rosy happy message, but that's what I tell folks, and it's not one administration, it's not one political party, it's not the executive branch, it's not Congress, it's not the Navy—it's all of them.

Paxton: The United States is a maritime nation. We're an Arctic nation.

That’s Matthew Paxton, president of the Shipbuilders Council of America.

Paxton: We have a vibrant maritime industry that goes unnoticed. We move Commerce on our inland rivers, on our coastal lanes. We build the most advanced, lethal and sophisticated navy and coast guard the world has ever seen. But largely the maritime industry is kind of the unseen industry. We're incredibly important for our economy. And right now it's the U.S. Navy, with some of our allies, that are keeping global commerce moving. We're doing that. The idea that the freedom of the seas would ever be questioned coming out of the 1990s and the early 2000s is a real question now.

One particularly notable inflection point occurred about 10 to 12 years ago. U.S. officials knew this. But what the world knew about China’s ambitions was only beginning to change—and in an especially stark way. 

Sadler: what was clear from someone in government at the time was that at the highest level, there really wasn't a commitment to the vision of really confronting China. I mean, the Obama administration come in the tail end of its first term, and then through the first half of its second term. Um, still had hope of a partnership with China. And so when it came to tough choices and making putting money behind the actions that were needed, back in 2012 2013 and 14, it really wasn't there. So failure of commitment to a vision and a course of action by the most senior leadership to include the president, President Obama, I don't think was fully committed. I think the political calculations were to try to cut DoD funding overall, and this is the age of sequestration, so they could fund other domestic programs. At the time it was the Affordable Care Act was real, the priority. So our priorities were misaligned, despite the rhetoric. And I would say it was remarkable that then-President Obama did come over in January 2012 and announced with the Secretary of Defense the rebalanced Asia-Pacific. The formal title was the Defense Strategic Guidance at the time. But beyond that, what we were able to achieve, as modest as it was, about about $12 to $13 billion of new investments and activities in the Indo-Pacific in those three years was basically by hook and crook. It was not the president driving it as aggressively as would have been needed to have a real lasting impact, because at the same time, the Chinese were building their island garrisons in the South China Sea, and so we weren't really having the effect that we could have.

Sadler: It's worth kind of rolling the clock back to the world that we were in in 2011 to 2013—presidential elections, Russia was kind of poo-pooed as not a concern. China was a partner in waiting, and you had the Arab Spring that was going on. So it's important to kind of go back in time and remember what it was like. It's similar to what we just went through, but different and very distinct. Now you've got a major war in Europe, the Middle East is a flame, and China is not deterred, as we saw in the South China Sea over this last summer.

So how can the U.S. begin to fix these problems? That’s what we’ll turn to next with a focus on the real movers and shakers—the actual shipyard workers themselves, the dwindling number of them anyway, and the very particular challenges they face today.

Remember just a few minutes ago I noted that the Navy’s force structure has been in flux for the past several years. That’s been a quiet catastrophe, and the mounting costs of that unpredictability are finally clear to lawmakers and industry officials. 

Paxton: Our shipyards have invested billions of dollars of capital infrastructure into their facilities and their workforce to meet the demand signal that we had. And so when that demand signal turns up or turns down. You know, we have to either ramp up quickly or, you know, unfortunately, in certain instances where that demand signal because of sequestration or coming out of COVID or other things, you know, we've had to, you know, lay off workforces. We are similar to other manufacturing sectors where we've had a graying of our workforce, particularly coming out of COVID You had a lot of folks who they retired out, kind of that aging workforce moved out, and there was a real effort to get that skilled craftsmen, and it takes, you know, a good Five years for most you know those skilled shift arm workers to get to that level of efficiency. And right now, I would say across certain sectors of the industry, we have, we have a we have a tightening, lower amount of that five year, you know, skilled craftsmen so and what we've also been experiencing is it's hard to retain, you know, you'll go out and you will recruit, you know, hundreds of you know, next generation shipyard workers. And you, you know, won't retain all of the individuals, and that's, that's an expense for the shipyard. You know, they pay for those apprenticeship programs. They are investing in that worker, and with no guarantee that they'll be there, you know, you know, five years out.

That kind of uncertainty has functioned like a poison to the American shipyard industry. Because as anyone who is trying to support a family knows, you need predictability in order to buy a home and live in almost any way as a dependable member of your community. Take that away, and people start leaving—or retiring. And lately those retirees have not been swapped out by younger blue collar workers, as Virginia Rep. Rob Wittman explained in a recent interview with Defense One Executive Editor Bradley Peniston. Here’s Wittman. 

Wittman: The shipyards have struggled to make sure that they replace senior ship builders that are retiring with new people in the workforce, and we've seen some hiccups that have happened with that. Because the new workforce today works differently than the workforce of years ago. You know, they are hands on, but they also like to use technology—going to, instead of blueprints on a table, to go to iPads and go to other ways to make sure that you can recruit the best and the brightest to come and work in the yards. Another element too is, you know, being able to make sure that there's certainty there for those workers, what we see a lot of times is ship building happening waves. So we see a bow wave of ship construction that all sudden it wanes, and then you have another bow wave of ship construction. Consistency is key. Congress needs to be part of that. Congress needs to make sure that when we acquire ships, we do multiple year ship acquisitions to make sure there's certainty there, and so that when folks go to work at the yard, they can become that next master shipbuilder of the future, that ship builder has been there for 40 years. 

That last point: multi-year ship purchases is a particularly tall order. And the last 10 years of fluctuating force structure ideas out of the Navy did not help. Government shutdowns because lawmakers can’t get along? That didn’t help either. 

But strangely enough, there’s another big factor in why America’s Navy shipyards are so backlogged. 

Wittman: Listen, we are in a very competitive area as far as salary. You. Look today, when you can go to a fast food restaurant and make $17 an hour with full benefits, and then you look down the road and they're asking you to work outside under pretty, you know, challenging conditions, and you're going to make $18 an hour. So salaries have to go up.

Just this week, the Biden administration asked Congress for more than $7 billion in emergency funds to prop up its submarine industrial base. More than $500 million of that is specifically for “wage productivity enhancements.” That’s on top of another almost billion dollar contract with the Blue Forge Alliance the Navy announced in September. That money, too, is intended to prop up the country’s flailing submarine industrial base. 

And that industry needs more than just wage increases to lure workers; it also needs upgrades to its infrastructure. Because America’s ability to make submarines isn’t the only thing falling behind. The country’s ability to maintain and repair its subs is in even worse shape, with a three-year backlog for major work. And the Biden administration’s three-country deal to supply submarines to Australia—known as AUKUS—that only adds extra pressure to the already shaky industry.

But both Rep. Wittman and Matt Paxton believe some solutions are within reach. Here’s Wittman in conversation with Defense One’s Brad Peniston. 

Wittman: I would argue that there is some additional capability at existing yards, but one of the untapped potentials there are the ship maintenance yards. Ship maintenance yards have, you know, a whole bow wave of work that comes in, they get the work done, and then the work drops off. 

Peniston: And just to be clear, you're talking about private maintenance yards?

Wittman: Exactly, private maintenance yards. The public yards are pretty much level loaded. They have an issue, too, with aging infrastructure there, where they're going to have to be able to take some of that infrastructure down, which means we have to find other places, the private sector, ie, to do that work while we're modernizing the public yards, but these private repair yards have a lot of capacity to do work in new construction while they are managing the repair work there, much of it is exactly the same. In fact, what we're seeing right now is the big yards using smaller contractors to build parts of those ships. So they'll build a panel that slides into a submarine. They'll build panel and parts for aircraft carriers for other surface ships. We need to find more opportunities to do that, because there are certain areas out there with untapped potential. We need to be fully utilizing that potential before we even start down the road and talking about the time and money that it takes to build a new yard. So let's look at existing facilities.

Paxton: I think the industry has more than enough capacity and capability to meet the fleet's demands, both in new construction and in maintenance and modernization. What we just got to do is we got to right-size those workloads. So we're optimizing throughput through all our shipyards. And that's, that's, you know, these shipyards are a national asset. You know, I oftentimes refer to the 280 billion that US taxpayers put into the chips Act that was passed in 2002 to, you know, reassure our semiconductor industry. You know, that was all of a sudden that became a real national security concern where we couldn't—we're wholly dependent on other countries for our semiconductors, and we recognize we need to have that capacity and capability here in the United States. To the tune of two 80 billion we had to reassure that we have a competitive—we have a capable, the most capable, I believe, because we're building the most advanced and capable nuclear assets in the world, right here in the United States, that are building ships and repairing ships every day. So we don't need a, you know, a CHIPS act for our shipyard industry. What we do need, again, not sexy. We need that market stability so our shipyards are making the investments, and those investments are, you know, being returned with, you know, the ability that we can be highly efficient. You know, you started this interview talking about China—well, China and Japan and Korea that now dominates over 96% of the world's, you know, output of commercial tonnage. That's all about economies of scale, and you achieve that when you have big order books and you just optimize volume through your shipyards. 

There may also be a place for emerging technology in all this. Here’s Rep. Wittman again. 

Wittman: Many parts on the ship in years past had to be constructed through castings, which was an arduous process. So you had to create a sand mold, you had a port, then you had a machine that very rudimentary piece of metal into a valve or whatever other structure on the ship today, advanced manufacturing can short circuit that you can do things with. With all kinds of new digital printing, we can actually digitally print metal parts. That happens much, much faster. There are companies out there that do that. So you could short circuit a lot of what happened before in what took a lot of time and took a lot of resources with current technology. So additive manufacturing, there's actually some entities here. One of them is in Virginia, in Danville, Virginia, that actually is putting together an educational opportunity for folks to come there and learn about additive manufacturing, so essentially to be retrained. So if there's somebody that's skilled in CNC machining, you can go there and figure out, well, how do I now take a piece that is advanced manufactured with with a tooling that actually lays down layers of metal, and then machine that so there's much less material to remove, and then make it a more efficient and faster process and retrain the workforce to do that. So I think you have to provide incentives to do that. It has to be more than just providing the training. It has to say, Okay, how do we make sure that you get a benefit as a ship builder for doing those things?

Here at the end of 2024, the U.S. sits at a very interesting crossroads in terms of possibly changing all these factors slowing America’s shipbuilding industry. With the Trump administration promising an about-face on everything from public education to immigration to the economy, these next few months could be especially revolutionary for the U.S. Navy as well. That anyway, is the thinking among many conservatives like Brent Sadler of the Heritage Foundation. 

Sadler: The conclusion I came to about two and a half three years ago was the only way we're going to fix navy ship building and navy repair, you know, and the supply defense supply base is to actually revitalize our maritime industrial base. I mean, we have shrunk our ship building, shipping and commercial maritime industrial sector, so much that there's no surge capacity, and there isn't a population out there that you can draw from and recruit into the naval sector. We've been able to demonstrate that we can't sustain just a pure naval maritime industrial base and so the Ships for America Act, that's something that has great promise for trying to invigorate that national maritime industrial base so that you can get more naval architects, you get more blue-collar, high-competency, pay scaled workers—working and maintaining robotic systems in the yards, for steel plate pipe fitters, all a very wide breadth of skill sets—into the shipbuilding maritime industrial sector, to try to encourage some of that investment. That's on the commercial side. Over on the Navy side, you hear things like Blue Forge Alliance; that up until recently was actually with Navy and the ship builders working together to contract out, to help identify and to foster new entrants, like the supplier base, at the same time trying to help get and recruit shipyard workers into the workforce. But I think it's starting to shift, and it needs to shift to try and help at the shipyards grow capacity. So some of the money in there to try to help longer term and capital investments to grow the ability to build more than 1.33 submarines a year to get it to 2.33 is what their need to. So Blue Forge Alliance? An interesting kind of approach. I'm withholding my assessment or my view on that until I actually start seeing some real, tangible results in the production rate of submarines.

Wittman: We have a ton of data, you know, a DDG-51 you ought to know what you need to repair that ship. We have a ton of data. We have a ton of historical data to know what's the likelihood of a valve going bad in the ship, what's the likelihood of a tank need to be recoded and do modeling to do that. There's models out there that can make that happen, these digital twin models. So, how do we do a better job in predicting work? How do we do a better job in keeping work on track? How do we make sure, too, that we get past the delays that come with change orders a lot of times two. Change Orders affect the flow of work on the ship. Because if you have a change order, something that has to be done in order for the next piece of work to be done, and the change order delays that then you have this cascaded delays that never ends. And then all of a sudden a ship avail goes much longer. And what happens if a ship availed maintenance ale goes too long? The Navy says, We don't care. Zip the ship back up, get it out of dock, get it back to sea with work done worth left undone, and when it's undone. Guess what happens to the expected service life of the ship becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. All of a sudden, maybe comes back, goes, we need to retire these cruisers, you know, like, Well, why? Well, because this is decaying, and that's the king. And they said, Well, why is he decaying? Well, you and you look back at the maintenance records, you look back at the insert inspections, where the inserts say, Guess what? We've defined all the work that needs to be done, and then it doesn't get done in the yard. In the yard. And all of a sudden, on the third or fourth maintenance of mail, you look at and go, Wow, all this work is gathered up. And all of a sudden, you look at it in the material condition of the ship is in such a case where the Navy says, well, it doesn't pay to go ahead and try to fix it because it's in such bad shape, we're just going to retire it. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.

We’re gonna turn briefly now to one of those other big obstacles in the way of growing America’s Navy. Negotiations between lawmakers on Capitol Hill. 

Paxton: On the government side, we've seen instability in kind of that government demand signal, going back to 10 years of sequestration. We don't pass annual appropriation bills. We’re right now debating a continuing resolution that will go into March of next year, potentially, you know, there's talk of maybe a full year CR. And so oftentimes we talk about government shipbuilding, we talk about navy ship building—there's a very important aspect of that that's also navy ship repair, navy ship maintenance and modernization.

Sadler: Continuing resolutions have become the norm of behavior up in Capitol Hill. And I would say, despite, you know, I worked on the CNOs personal staff, and I can remember preparing and getting the input for his statements in the past about the impacts of continuing resolutions, but the reality is, the armed services have grown accustomed to this, and they've adjusted their contracting and the way they do business to almost expect CRs. That's not to say it's a perfect way of doing business, but they've been able to mitigate a lot of the damages. And quite frankly, Congress needs to do a better job of holding and getting the debates done and coming to a conclusion on the budget, whether it's lower, higher or unchanged. They just need to go ahead and agree to something and I think when you have one party in control of both the House and the Senate, it becomes more likely that you don't have continuing resolutions. But I mean, I could be proven wrong. There are still a lot of contentious issues in government spending that have to get addressed and to get under control.

Wittman: Well, it has to be a joint effort between authorizers and appropriators. Your authorizers have to say, this is what you will do. This is a time frame you'll do it in. These are the resources that you'll use to do that. And the appropriators need to put in there the requirements on saying, by the way, in order for these appropriations to be available, this is how you will use them in executing ship building. 

Peniston: So you're going to talk to your colleagues and say, you know, this what we need to write into the new defense bills?

Wittman: Yes, well, there'll be a lot of discussion in this year's NDAA about how we further streamline and make the shipbuilding enterprise much more efficient. And there are things I think that we can do. You know, the challenge is, is the balance. You don't want to be overly prescriptive. You don't want to come in and say, you know, do A, B and C, because a lot of times that stifles innovation and creation. But what you want to do is to provide the tools for things to get done quickly, provide the tools for innovation and creation to occur. Provide the incentives for them to use new technologies, additive manufacturing, whatever it may be, and let them push forward with that, because they're going to be the best creators and innovators in this enterprise. So just enable them to do that, and make sure there's incentives there to say, Hey, listen, if you do things better, if you do it faster, if you do it more efficiently, there is a benefit to you in doing that, so create some positive rewards for them to do that.

What sort of things can the Trump administration do in the months ahead? Here are a few of Sadler’s ideas, which he spelled out in a recent article he co-authored along with Jerry Hendrix in the National Review. 

Sadler: There's no time to waste, and so you have to have a clear plan, and you have to start executing. And you can't allow the perfect no more analysis paralysis through analysis. We've admired these problems for years now, and we know enough to take action. So the first thing is act and and we lay out several things in there, you know, from the operational side, but we're talking ship building specifically today in the ship building part, build it go to Congress, get a dedicated, large block by I advocate for a naval act, because there's, we have stable ship designs we have known year on year the numbers of destroyers, Arleigh Burks, Virginia-class submarines. We know the frigates got some issues, but we know the design is now finally, perhaps stable enough. And we also know about amphibs, that we know stable designs. How many numbers that the Navy needs to buy, just go ahead and write the check. Congress, get it to the ship builders. Shift the risk on to them, and let the yards make the best business decisions, the best engineering decisions, but hold them accountable on delivering ships on time. That's in my mind, the most urgent is to do that, and then there's, of course, accounting and some reorganization within the Navy's program offices as well. But the big thing is to commit to a plan with resources, and then hold the ship builders to schedule, rather than what we've been seeing and billions of dollars being spent to build parking garages, pay wages and micromanaging the shipyards. I mean, if they need to manage the money to get their infrastructure to recruit the workforce, it should be included in the price of the submarine package deal. Let them take the risk, not the taxpayers, and ease the burden. Make it easier for Congress's oversight role to come into play, because right now, it's just overly complicated. It's, it's, it's moved across several funding cycles. It's, in my mind, an elegant solution as a naval act, and that's what's called for

Montgomery: Look, Something's gotta change in shipbuilding. 

That’s retired Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery. He now works as a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank in Washington. 

Montgomery: Either we're going to— we need to significantly increase the Navy shipbuilding budget. If we're going to have the Navy, we need to counter the threats we face, even if you're just in a China context, if you want to be a, you know, a restrainer, you know, or a prioritizer and say, Oh, I'm going to worry about China, which I think is not sensical. But if you're going to be that, or if you're going to be like me, and he believes that you're going to have to deal with multiple problems at a time, because the adversary gets a vote. And if you say, All I care about is China, if you say, All I care about is China and Iran, you know, speeds to a nuclear weapon, you're going to get involved in Iran. But my point is, if you're going to have the Navy you need, you're going to have to change the top line on navy ship building in a fairly dramatic way. Or you're going to have to move into the system and control services. You know, the Navy's program of record ethos. You know, their desire to just keep building what they're building, or Congress's intervention here for example, to build more and more large deck amphibs for a joint forceful entry operation that's not going to happen. Or you're going to have to reimagine where you build things at a labor cost you can afford. So one of those three things is going to break. So if you don't think that the ship building budget is going to break, you know that we're going to break out and get, like, a 10 to 15% increase, you know, for several years. Or you don't think that we can convince Senator Wicker to just stop building large deck amphibs and build something, take the risk that you'll win the contract to build what we replace it with, and that that's the problem there. I think he'd do it if he knew we're going to violate every rule of contracting and put the, you know, the whatever air, whatever craft we realized we needed, into his shipyards or his state shipyards. Okay, if those two aren't going to happen, then you have to realistically address number three, which is the cost of ship building. And to do that, there are, look, I'm not sure I'd start building DDGs in Korea, Japan, although both of them build great DDGs, you know, but I could start building the support ships there. I mean, our convoluted attempts to build large deck support ships over the last 20 years in the United States is rife with disappointment and failure. Um. And, and we really need to, you know, we could transfer some of that over there and maybe get ships for might not be 25 cents on the dollar like you could with a purely civilian ship, but maybe 35 or 40 cents on the dollar for a mill spec, you know, support ship, and 100% I would build my MSC, MARAD—that's the Transportation Department's contribution to sea lift—and the Army's waterborne, all three of those are operating at about 40% in need right now, or less. And I don't think we can survive with one of them there. So those ship replacement ships and the repair of those ships should be preferentially moved to lower cost ship building and ship repair.

Sadler: Well, well, to be clear, the if the Marines in the army actually do so, and this is something going back to the rebalance to the Pacific, back in 2012 that, that I kind of was working on, is that those forces would already be in the Philippines and in Japan, so you don't have to do forcible entry. And certainly no one's talking about invading Mainland China. I mean, there's a saying, you know, avoid, avoid a land war in Asia. So that's not what's in the cards. The idea is moving under in a contested environment, this north, south kind of lateral movement, shoot and scoot marine sometimes we'll call it, but the idea that you have long range fires from heavy army, uh, regiments and Marine Corps, smaller elements, also with longer range air defense, you complicate the Chinese targeting problem and but you're not doing forcible entry, you're doing contested logistics. But you still need those big amphibs working in concert with the smaller ones, because you're going to have to move large amounts of material in in a contested environment. The large amphibs kind of carry that, not to the touchdown when you get within the five yard line, and use a football analogy. So from the 50 yard line, you're using big amphibs from the 10 yard line you're moving, you're using a whole bunch of smaller amphibs, complex, hard to do, but necessary, driven by the geography and the type of weapon systems the Chinese have spent pretty much 20 years perfecting and and deploying.

One big question I have is: How can the Trump administration pay for this bigger Navy? Granted, despite the talk from lawmakers every few years, the U.S. has never been terribly afraid of running up its deficit and taking on more debt. 

Sadler: I mean, I mean, there's a lot of fraud, waste and abuse that's going on in government that's been accepted as normal. But if you actually just, you know, you look at Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, you look at unexecuted COVID money, the list goes on. And so this DOGE with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami, I mean, they're going to hopefully try and streamline government. You take half of that savings and you pay down the debt. You take the other portion of that, you basically can fund the Marine Corps and the Navy for for several years, with the amount of money we're talking about.

That sounds a little too simple to me. But time will tell. 

And the Navy’s future? It’s not just in ships staffed by new sailors recruited into the force. America’s future Navy will have lots of drones. And that, too, will take money. 

Here’s Wittman again. 

Wittman: The key, though, is it can't just be writing a bigger check. It has to be, how do we get more per our dollar than the Chinese get for their Yuan, and the Russians get for their ruble? This is really an issue with the challenge we face with the deficit and debt is, how do we get more out of the money that we have? Do we need additional dollars in the enterprise? Absolutely, but it can't just be writing a bigger check at the expense of increased efficiencies and increased efforts necessary to make sure we have the capacity and capability necessary in our Navy, and it also is going to make us look too at other ways to capitalize capacity and capability quickly. It's not just the exquisite platforms, they're incredibly important, but it's also capitalizing exquisite platforms, in addition to attritables and expendable platforms. So how do we do that? How do you create mass quickly. Listen, it takes years to do the financing of a ship. It takes years to construct the ship. It takes again time for it to go to sea, get sea trials and then actually be operational for the Navy. We can close that gap much faster with dollars and time and and and numbers of platforms by doing these attritable platforms, and they're pretty doggone effective. So the Pentagon is doing a lot in that realm. Replicator is one of those realms where they're trying to put in place those uncrewed systems quickly—putting hundreds of them by August of next year. And I think they're on track to do a lot of that. It'll remain to be seen if they meet the top goal there. And then the next effort in Replicator, Replicator two is, you know, what do you do then to create counter systems? For years, I've always had conversations with the Navy. They do all kinds of great research projects. I mean, when you, when you go, when you go to the labs, you look at this, go, Wow. This is a great under, you know, underwater unmanned vessel. This is a great unmanned surface vessel. You look at it, all kinds of great things going on. You go, Okay, well, tell me which one of these systems you're going to field. Oh, we haven't made a decision about feeling the system yet. We're still kind of figuring out, you know, all the possibilities. And I'm like, Well, you know what? Your adversaries are fielding systems. You're still doing science experiments. So the key is, is, how do you cross over from doing the experiments into actually fielding these systems? The Navy has now made that first step into fielding those systems. They have now begun to acquire large numbers of unmanned surface vessels, unmanned underwater vessels. They're still a little bit slower than what they need to be to operate at the speed of relevance. But I think that they finally understand that their gap closure in the Indo-PACOM is going to be attritable platforms, and, for that matter, in many instances, to expendable platforms.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not even super clear on what kind of drones the Navy wants or is thinking about for its future force. I’ve always kind of assumed that with the Navy, like its submarines, its drone ambitions and prototypes are super secretive. So I asked Brent Sadler what he knows about these things. 

Sadler: I've walked the deck of the medium, the large, unmanned—I'm not really sure. Navy keeps changing how they can't characterize it—but the Mariner, so it was up in Annapolis a couple years ago. And it's optionally manned. It can operate unmanned or or, or with a completely unmanned kind of situation. It can carry, or has actually carried SM-6 missiles that they've launched and taken out targets in exercises two years ago. So these things are lethal. We do have the capability to actually employ them with lethal intent, if we want to. The key thing is, the Navy and Congress have not really put the money down and made the bet. And that's, I think another thing for the first 100 days, is just go ahead and buy six of these and like Task Force 59 out in the Persian Gulf, just start operating them. And the learning, that will accelerate the learning and accelerate the knowledge to do better within second flight of six of these large unmanned surface vessels. That'll improve, but we don't have time to wait for perfect, because that's going to get us into a situation, a crisis and confrontation with China. There's a whole family of smaller unmanned systems — from drones moving cargo, up to 200 pounds of cargo, between ships and also to shore. There are, of course, robotic systems under the sea that are able to monitor and to sense, you know, hostile submarines. But also, there's shipping. It is an inevitable reality of the battlefield, as the Ukrainians have proved in the Black Sea, but we have to replicate rapidly what we saw with Fifth Fleet, the Task Force 59, and we need to get these platforms out to sea. And I don't buy the notion that we can't operate them near the Chinese. You can operate in the Philippine Sea. Again, knowing these waters very well, they're not a whole lot of shipping. There's some big gaps of just wide open ocean that are far from shipping lanes. You could operate these in, like a picket duty with long range strike or even air and missile defense. For Guam in the Northern Marianas, there's lots of missions and roles that they could fill and relieve our destroyers to go operate much closer up inside the first island chain, day to day today that we just haven't taken the risk. It's a risk aversion. So it takes a leader to push and to get the institution moving in the right direction, and they're right on the cusp of it.

It might be tempting to think the “golden age” of U.S. shipbuilding was in WW2, but that’s not true. You have to go back even further. Before WW1. Before the turn of the century. Before the Civil War even—from 1840 to 1860. That’s what we’ll get into in our next episode…

A big thanks to our contributors—Matt Paxton, Brent Sadler, Mark Montgomery, and Rep. Rob Wittman. And thanks for listening.