Interview transcript:
Terry Gerton We’re going to talk about shipbuilding. But before we get into the particulars, I want to start with kind of an overarching assessment. President Trump has talked about wanting to have a Golden Fleet. Secretary of Defense Hegseth is out selling the “arsenal of freedom.” As we think about all of that, it seems like there might be a conflict between aspirations and capabilities. What is the actual starting point for the U.S. shipbuilding industry today?
Seamus Daniels Growing the fleet and bolstering the maritime industrial base is a major priority for the Trump administration. But it’s worth pointing out that this has been a goal for successive administrations, both Republican and Democrat, stretching back over the last couple decades, particularly if we think towards the end of the Obama administration with their 355-ship goal. What this is really stemming from is, one, looking at historical trends in the size of the fleet. We’re at a historical low point in the size of the fleet right now. The size of the fleet peaked in 1987 during the Reagan administration. But currently, our fleet at just over 290 ships is about over 50% of that 1987 fleet. And actually, we’re asking that fleet to do a lot more despite being that small size, so its operational tempo is very high. At the same time, China is outpacing the United States in actually producing ships and has surpassed the Navy in the number of battle force ships. So there’s that objective to grow the size of the fleet. As you rightly identify, the shipbuilding enterprise is really struggling to produce ships. And it’s struggling because ships are more expensive, and they’re taking longer to build. But on top of that, there are also cost overruns and shipbuilding programs are facing significant delays in actually delivering ships to the Navy themselves. So there is a challenge in meeting this longstanding goal of growing the fleet and what the shipbuilding enterprise is able to actually accomplish.
Terry Gerton How problematic in creating that kind of environment is an inconsistency in strategy? Sometimes we think that we need this giant blue-water Navy, and then we think, oh, air power is going to solve it, or drones or missiles or robots or satellites. We can’t seem to keep a consistent approach to shipbuilding.
Seamus Daniels I think the challenge is that we’re asking, that policymakers are asking, the Navy to do so much. Given the focus on the Indo-Pacific region, we are asking this historically small Navy, and we’re giving it more and more missions to do every day. But it’s not only the daily missions and the daily high operational tempo. It’s the fact that policymakers asking the Navy to then respond to contingencies. If we think through conflicts or crises that pop up in the Middle East, we’re sending aircraft carriers or carrier strike groups to the region. And that disrupts their planned deployment schedule and planned maintenance schedules. So really, as we’re focusing on this need for growing the fleet, we have to be mindful of what we’re asking the fleet to do today.
Terry Gerton And our shipbuilding industry addresses naval ships, but also Coast Guard ships. We forget sometimes that we have this other force out there.
Seamus Daniels It’s important to note that we have this historically small shipbuilding industry. We’ve had a lot of consolidation over time, and they’re not only trying to meet the demands of the Navy, but the Coast Guard itself.
Terry Gerton Well, let’s talk then about industrial capacity, which really is sort of the first hard limit to getting more ships out the door. You mentioned consolidation of the industry; there’s speed, scale and cost drivers that the Navy wants. We just seem to have this conflict between more ships faster, what we want, and some ships more expensively, which is what we get.
Seamus Daniels I think it’s helpful to think of U.S. shipbuilding as an enterprise, and we’re facing enterprise-wide challenges. It’s hard to really assign blame to any actors involved, because that enterprise includes the Navy, the Pentagon, Congress, and also shipbuilding partners and the broader industrial base and supply chain. So we have to think, okay, this is a systemic problem with many interwoven issues. But facing the industry side of that are numerous challenges and obstacles. Particularly, that also comes from the consolidation of the industrial base. Now, according to the Navy, over the last 50 years, 17 private shipyards that built ships for defense industry have either closed or left defense industry. So you’re seeing this consolidation, especially in the drawdown from the Cold War, so you have fewer builders themselves. But you also have these other issues that are really limiting the United States in its ability to produce ships. You have workforce limitations, in terms of both the number of workers but a lack of skilled workers, especially as you’re incorporating more green, newer workers over time. And this stems in part from the decline of the U.S. manufacturing sector. On top of that, you also have limitations with infrastructure, both shortages in terms of capacity, literal space to build ships, but then also aging infrastructure. And add on top of that a brittle supply chain, where you have a lot of single providers of key parts of ships that the larger shipbuilders rely on, but they may have challenges in scaling up to meet the demand that the government places and then that those larger shipbuilders really need.
Terry Gerton I want to come back to the workforce issues you mentioned there, and we’ll do that in a little bit. But let’s talk a little bit more about the industrial base of shipbuilding. Do we build other ships in America? Do we built container ships, cruise ships, anything else that might be cross-purposed to build Navy ships?
Seamus Daniels This is an interesting point right now given the Trump administration’s focus on shipbuilding writ large. So obviously there is the focus on building the Golden Fleet, increasing the size of the Navy. But the Trump Administration also issued an April 2025 executive order that was focusing on bolstering shipbuilding capacity at large, both naval and commercial. So when we’re talking about growing the size the Navy and growing the naval industrial base, there’s an ongoing conversation and dialog over whether increasing and growing the commercial shipbuilding industrial base will actually be able to contribute to that. And it’s an interesting question, because we see in other countries that you have a commercial demand for ships for some shipbuilders that will then even out their work on naval vessels. The challenge with the U.S. is that we’ve seen a significant decline in commercial shipbuilding, and this stems to the Reagan administration when it ended subsidies for commercial shipbuilding and we saw a lot of those private shipbuilders close. The challenge in potentially bolstering commercial shipbuilding and looking to it to benefit naval shipbuilding is that you don’t always have the same skill sets and expertise. If you’re thinking through the complexity of U.S. naval vessels, there’s a lot of outfitting, there are parts, there are advanced systems that go within that. And you have to meet the detailed specifications and requirements that the Navy puts out. Whereas commercial shipbuilding, there is more of a focus on that business line at the very end of things. So there is a challenge in potentially expecting commercial shipbuilding to bolster naval shipbuilding. We may not actually realize those gains by bolstering ship build, by bolstering commercial to help the naval side of things.
Terry Gerton Are there lessons we should be learning from how China has grown their shipbuilding industry?
Seamus Daniels I think there are significant differences between U.S. and Chinese shipbuilding, obviously given the influence of the Chinese government in helping to bolster production there and having these broader enterprises that are working both on the commercial and naval side of things. I would say that the environment for U.S. naval shipbuilding is very different in that way.
Terry Gerton One of the keys to building an industrial capacity is getting consistent demand signals. And you’ve touched on this a little bit already, that we’re not very good as a government in sending consistent demand signals to our shipbuilders. How do changing requirements, unstable ship designs, and shifting budgets impact how the shipbuilding industry responds?
Seamus Daniels What we often hear on the part of industry is the need for a stable, long-term demand signal to provide some indication of where the government is going, so then industry and the shipbuilders can make their own long- term plans and investments to respond to potentially changing demands. If you need to increase your output, then you need make investments to be able to scale up production. But, what we’ve seen on the part of the government — even though there’s been this emphasis on growing the fleet for a couple decades from successive administrations — is that we don’t always see that consistency. We can look to it in terms of the long-range, 30-year shipbuilding plan that the Navy puts out annually. We’re always seeing increases in the number of ships that the Navy wants in that, but we’re not seeing consistent goals in terms of the numbers of ships between different classes and categories. On top of that, we will also see fluctuating budgets and fluctuating demands for certain ships year on year, which does not help industry plan at the same time. So there are useful contracting methods, like multi-year procurement and block-buy contracting that the Navy and government can use to actually provide more of that stable demand signal. But the other point that you raise are volatile requirements and unstable ship design, which has a significant impact on industry’s ability to produce ships on time and at cost. And it’s worth noting that there’s so much complexity when it comes to these naval vessels, right? U.S. naval vessels are among the best, if not the best, in the world. They have advanced weapons systems; they have to be able to survive against enemy attack potentially. But the problem with U.S. naval procurement is that it generally allows construction to begin before the design is mature. So you may have modifications to the design during construction that will ultimately contribute to delays and may contribute to cost overruns over time. What we see from some international shipbuilders is that they will have a mature design before they actually begin construction. You’re not running into issues of having the design change as they’re trying to build the ship.
Terry Gerton It’s one thing to say you want a stable design, but we also want to be on the leading edge of technology. And many of these technologies are changing very, very quickly, everything from material science to satellite controls and communication systems. How do you get stable design in that kind of environment?
Seamus Daniels Well, it’s really about using the leading practices within shipbuilding. And we’re seeing this particularly within Northeastern Asian allies of the United States, in Korea and Japan, in their shipbuilding practices and using the best methods from AI and automation. So really, it is about the government working with U.S. shipbuilders to make sure that they’re using those leading practices. One helpful thing is that we’ve seen the Maritime Industrial Base Program, the MIB Program within the Navy, helping to make those investments and direct those investments for leading practices, which will ultimately help U.S. naval ship design.
Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Seamus Daniels. He’s a fellow in Defense Budget Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All right, Seamus, let’s come back to the workforce questions now. We talked about industrial base, we’ve talked about fluctuating demand, but at the end of the day, there are people who have to put these ships together. What are the biggest workforce challenges that the shipyards are facing?
Seamus Daniels Well, number one, we can start with the number of workers. The Maritime Industrial Base Program has discussed the need to grow the maritime industrial workforce by over 250,000 workers over the next decade. So that’s the first challenge. Second is making sure that you have a skilled workforce. What shipbuilders are often running into these days is a larger percentage of their workforce are green, or they don’t necessarily have that experience that takes time to build up. So you’re going to have to necessarily invest the time and money to grow that workforce. But the challenge within this, and this goes back to the decline of the U.S. manufacturing sector, is that there are not always available workers. And particularly, this is a challenge in different geographic regions of the United States, where on the Gulf Coast you may have more workers and more shipbuilders, but then you run into challenges in areas like New England and the Great Lakes in being able to attract the adequate and skilled workforce to be able to work on those programs and ultimately deliver ships to the Navy.
Terry Gerton So some places and some manufacturing options, we’re talking about machine versus human. Can we replace some humans with robots?
Seamus Daniels Automation can definitely contribute to shipbuilding, but there is a need for skilled workers to actually be able to make sure that we are building ships up to U.S. naval specifications.
Terry Gerton What would a workforce skilling investment look like?
Seamus Daniels I think what we’re seeing, particularly from the Navy’s MIB program, are investments in both recruiting and then training workforces. So they’re helping to direct Navy funds into these areas where they will be able to recruit new workers and ultimately develop a green workforce into a more skilled workforce. But as I mentioned before, they’re also making those investments into trying to uptick the use of leading practices within shipbuilding as well that could helpfully alleviate some workforce issues.
Terry Gerton We’ve been talking so far mostly about shipbuilding, but ship maintenance is another big issue that requires access to the shipyards. And the Navy seems to be pulling more ships out of deployment than it is building and putting more ships into the fleet. So how does this readiness and availability issue factor in?
Seamus Daniels I think this is a significant challenge, particularly given the historically small size of the Navy, and that policymakers are really asking that Navy to do so much in terms of the number of missions and the operational tempo that they are taking on. But to your point, it’s also the fact that the Navy is retiring ships that are approaching the end of their service life, and when you’re facing these delays in shipbuilding programs and you’re facing longer construction times, it’s really a challenge. But add on top of that fact that you have maintenance delays. So it’s a challenge on top of that to actually be able to get those ships through their necessary maintenance and sustainment cycles and back out into the fleet where they can contribute to the mission. But ultimately, this is a significant question about the readiness of U.S. naval forces and making sure that the Navy can really reduce those maintenance delays to make sure that there are available ships out there for missions.
Terry Gerton Seamus, we’ve talked a lot about the constraints on this, the whole shipbuilding capacity, availability, readiness challenge. It sounds like you’re describing the need for really long-term attention and sustained investment. As a nation, we’re really bad at long-term sustainment of these kinds of investment programs. So what do you recommend in the short run that’s going to help address the capacity issues in the longer run?
Seamus Daniels In the short term, there really needs to be more of a focus on delivery times and making sure that ships are being produced on schedule as well as at cost. But the problem is right now that the focus in contracting is on the cost side, rather than on the schedule side. So there should be a focus on, how do we reduce construction time — or as a mere starting point, how do we actually make sure that ships are being delivered on time? But the second part is thinking through, how should the Navy and Congress really work on providing that steady demand signal to industry over time? And that can be through the expanded use of multi-year procurement and block buys, which really give that stable demand signal into industry, and then passing that on downwards to supply chains.
Terry Gerton There’s been a lot of disruption in the contracting world over the last year, lots of experienced contracting officers on the government side, changes in the regulations and the FAR. Do you feel like, coming into 2026, that the Department of Defense has both the capacity and the expertise to put some of those new contracting objectives into practice?
Seamus Daniels I think when it comes to the U.S. naval shipbuilding challenge, the Navy and the entire shipbuilding enterprise has to be open to new methods and incorporating new ideas. And if that’s expanding the use of multi-year procurement and some of these other contracting practices, I think they really need to take advantage of that. But I think also when we look at it — and you rightly raised the point that this going to require years and years of sustained investment and attention from the Navy to improve — the Navy has to be open to using other new methods, new approaches at the enterprise-wide level. And that could be something like expanding work with partners and allies. We’ve seen in the recent deal for icebreakers announced this year in building icebreakers in Finland and then bringing production back to the U.S. So that’s one area. But the U.S. also needs to think through, okay, we need to think through more federated methods, adopting modular design to take advantage of various manufacturing hubs within the country and shipbuilding companies to really maximize production and make sure that we are moving ships out as quickly as possible.
Terry Gerton You watch this sector very closely. Are you seeing evidence that makes you hopeful that that level of innovation and creativity and attention is coming through?
Seamus Daniels The Trump administration has been forward-leaning, especially in cooperation with partners and allies, in both the recent deal for icebreakers for the Coast Guard with Finland, but also in its discussions with South Korea and having South Korean investments in U.S. shipbuilding. We recently saw Hanwha acquire the Philly shipyard to expand capacity, and we’re seeing other investments in the United States as well from companies like Hyundai. So, I think the administration has been forward-leaning on that side, and that’s an encouraging sign. The issue will be making sure that the rest of the shipbuilding enterprise can get onboard with these innovative ideas and how to break out of the mindset that has really limited shipbuilding over the last two decades to be able to actually deliver ships on time and at cost.
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