Or should we look to strengthen the capabilities of the U.S. shipbuilding industry?
U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel of Chicago Most successful mayorOpinion piece for The Washington Post this week They are calling for Japanese shipyards to be used to maintain the U.S. Navy ships stationed there.
“It’s time to change our approach and be honest with ourselves about the problems and the solutions,” the former Obama administration chief of staff said, arguing for an increase in the defense budget and citing a series of figures showing the Navy’s severe repair bottlenecks.
Consider this: Japan is home to not only the 7th Fleet but also the Navy’s only forward-deployed carrier strike group, so this bottleneck is not a new problem. All of the American warships based in Japan are returning to American ports for repairs, leaving behind a great vantage point from which to watch the Chinese Navy grow and grow. And Emanuel has long been a pusher for decentralizing maintenance work to foreign shipyards; he wrote about this in an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal. last year.There Skills Gaphe said.
“At a time when U.S. shipyards face challenges in finding skilled labor, having Japanese shipyards help with maintenance would free up that limited labor force to expand the fleet instead of just maintaining it,” he argued at the time. This week’s opinion has the labor shortage argument removed, but is largely unchanged. He praises Japan as a security partner and argues that moving naval maintenance to Japan would allow U.S. shipyards to build new ships instead of repairing old ones. Of course, Japanese shipyards are eager for profitable ships. US Defense Contracts.
But there’s one argument in Emanuel’s opinion this week that wasn’t there before. In his conclusion, he says: length Building domestic shipbuilding capacity takes time. Too long!
“Even if new U.S. shipyards were to break ground now, it would be more than a decade before construction on ships could begin,” Emanuel wrote. “Meanwhile, Japan and South Korea have ample modern shipyard capacity to undertake repair and maintenance work.”
Emanuel asserts that the United States currently has the capability, and given the threat of a potential conflict with China, there is no time to waste in increasing the nation’s shipbuilding capabilities. But the scenario he presents – expanding shipyards immediately – raises the question of what is being done to improve U.S. shipbuilding capabilities in the long term, a question that is not answered, much less posed, in the brief.
However, nothing is said here about revitalizing the shipbuilding industry. Petition submitted to the Biden administration That bill may or may not be the case, according to a report filed this spring by the United Steelworkers union, which noted that commercial production of large ocean-going ships has virtually disappeared from the U.S. in recent decades and called for imposing a fee on all Chinese-made ships that enter U.S. ports to prevent them from being grounded. Merchant Shipbuilding Revitalization Fund.
Why Chinese ships? Because they are the product of powerful state support, far in excess of that offered by any other sovereign nation, that has propelled Chinese shipbuilders to market dominance in recent decades. The U.S. government stopped supporting commercial shipbuilding in the 1980s, and production fell. The results are predictable. By 2022, for exampleAt the time, there were just five large ocean-going ships under construction in U.S. shipyards; there were 1,794 in China.
And why improve the commercial sector of the U.S. shipbuilding industry? it is It becomes surprisingly smallAbout 80% of U.S. shipbuilding is tied to military procurement and repair, but its supply chain has clear overlaps with military shipbuilding, and growing one industrial base improves the health of the other.
As Scott Paul, president of the Federation of American Manufacturing, put it in a recent opinion piece:
When shipyards close, demand for everything from electrical wire and paint to aluminum and marine engines falls. About 20,500 U.S. shipbuilders have exited the market over the past few decades, affecting defense procurement. The U.S. Navy’s inspector general recently said that U.S. shipyards can only build two destroyers a year. Supply-chain problems have already delayed completion of the Ford-class aircraft carriers under construction in Virginia by several years. The delays will only put further strain on remaining contractors.
“American commercial shipbuilding will not recover unless we address the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” Paul wrote.
So Ambassador Emanuel is going to funnel federal defense dollars to a foreign shipbuilding industry that is already the third largest in the world for reasons of geopolitical expediency — yes, sure — but we should also get creative and rebuild our domestic shipbuilding capacity.
