The article claims that the US has over 100,000 shipyard workers, while Japan has about 70,000 and yet produces 20x more tonnage. This suggests that there's a lot more to it than just US deindustrialization.
It's a decent report for someone that has the merest of an idea what the Navy does/uses/needs. It shows how thoughts about various aspects of a ship's needs have changed over the years including walking back from implemented changes as they've responded to opponents' reactions to those changes. It's also in an interesting format seeing the difference from a report vs a presentation style slide deck that must be so tempting to use. Glad to see that actual reports are alive and well outside of the tech bubble.
edit: downvote if you want but it's rather rude to do so with out providing an answer to my question. It comes off more like you're offended that your assumption in thought is being questioned.
In World War II we hijacked most of the industrial base for the war machine. After the war, there was incentive to be certain that the US was capable of outfitting the Armed Forces regardless of whether manufacturing slowly shifted overseas.
South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are too geographically close to a number of likely antagonists in the next global conflict. In the latter case, the distance might be negative.
They may be occupied or their industry bombed to dust as the opening moves in a protracted conflict.
There is something to be said for the DoD to effectively be paying rent (or a retainer, if you prefer that analogy) to Western Hemisphere manufacturing, with a large fraction in the continental US.
The English speaking world has been on a decades-long campaign to reign in industry. Energy availability has been reduced. Environmental protection has been given supremacy. Manufacturing outsourced to Asia. An impenetrable net of regulations put in place to force businesses to conform to the average. There is the pattern of bailing out incompetent managers so that the financial system doesn't have to reform. In that environment, number of people is a weak metric.
The US has people, educated people and otherwise great people. I don't think at any point anyone has accused this of being a people problem. The issue is that capable people are being prevented from improving the situation.
What situation, specifically, needs to be improved? The US Navy does not, at present, have any need whatsoever to drastically increase the size of its fleet. Every ship that gets built is a ship that needs to be manned and maintained, which siphons money from elsewhere. We can bemoan the inefficiency of the existing shipbuilders, but that's just how the US sells welfare programs to conservative voters.
If you think that a hot war with China is in the cards, forget investing in shipbuilding infrastructure and instead put that money towards onshoring the rest of the national critical supply chain, much of which is in far more dire straits (ahem) than the shipyards.
[0]Read: unacceptable for it to be otherwise for a superpower that would like to stay one. Actually cranking out ships is another thing but the capacity needs to be there (and tested/validated accordingly).
> The US Navy does not, at present, have any need whatsoever to drastically increase the size of its fleet.
How much of US military spending should be classed as welfare? Between Ukraine and Israel the US appears to be in a 1.5 front war and the European front hasn't covered itself in glory. This might be a good time to think about re-purposing the military from welfare projects to defence, if there is a hot war with China it'll be US vs. the world's preeminent industrial superpower. It'd be wise to prepare before it becomes necessary, they learn how to build things faster than the US does.
I don't think it is likely, but we've seen this last year how close the US is to a 3-front war. There are uncomfortable odds they'd lose; their ability to sustain overseas operations is in question. We're already looking at a debt crisis with what they pulled off in the last 20 years and that was mainly a fight with guerrillas and goat herders.
Yes, there are some commitments in the Eastern Med, but as Ford heads home, the Bataan ARG of literally three ships and zero full-sized aircraft carriers is judged sufficient to hold that down, because remember that their role in Israel is to, uh, do exactly nothing.
Now, putting aside Israel-as-such, there is Ike's group in the Red Sea. The Red Sea presence isn't directly about Israel, but about Houthi threats to global shipping. If the US was in a hot war, global shipping could go around Africa (which Maersk and another line had already decided to do, I've seen some pundit modelling on the costs and consequences, it's pretty miserable from the standards of peacetime, with consequences on the consumer supply chain, but in terms of "oh no the US might lose a hot war with China", going around Africa will just have to work itself out).
And yes, they're moving amazing amounts of arms to Ukraine, but not as much as it looks like. There's a lot of already-destined-for-scrap vehicles, and a lot of ammunition that was approaching the end of its shelf life, and so on. What fraction of Abrams went to Ukraine? (under 1%) How many F16s are going to Ukraine? (I believe that all nations collectively have committed around 60 F16s, which if supplied entirely by the US would be about 2% of US fighter aircraft.) Don't get it twisted, the US is not going full-bore in Ukraine. The stockpiles and production capacity of 155mm is a concern for sure, and air defense missiles too. But it's not even close to being a "front", even in terms of the logistics demands (and obviously in terms of combat personnel it is 0% of a front). And because of that conflict, Russia is nearly incapable of doing anything more aggressive than it already is, which frees up military resources relative to the situation 2 years ago. Except 155mm, of course.
None of this means that the US does or does not need to increase the size of its fleet to meet goals involving its pacing threat, which is the context of this thread, and I'm agnostic about that higher-level claim. And I'm not saying that everything is peachy, neither with respect to the health of the US fleet in general, or in particular with respect to industrial competitiveness vis a vis China. But the US is not currently in a 1.5-front war, that's just absurd.
How would we know that? We haven't seen the US go to war against a top-ten global power in something like 70 years. They might be quite close to the cap of what they can do for all we know. Obviously they have nukes so they aren't going to be invaded, but their ability to control conflicts the like of which we see in Europe, sorta-present in the Middle East and potentially in Asia is very much open to doubt.
The linked article is suggesting that the US shipbuilding industry is operating at 1/20th of what a competitive shipbuilding industry in Japan is, that has interesting implications on the fact that the US is spending 10x as much in their military budget as Russia and 4x China.
I'm not up to speed on the state of stockpiles and democracies tend to be violent military behemoths. So I'd still bet on the US being comfortably ahead of everyone else. But it's performance in the Ukraine has not been as impressive as the gap in budgets suggests it should be. We might observe that it is exhausting the US's ability to provide military support. The US also happens to be broke if anyone cares to check in on their finances. It isn't at all absurd to question the US's military strength here; these wars are not easy for them. Particularly if the response to "this seems inefficient" is going to be "well it is really a welfare program; we don't expect effective production to be happening here".
We have massive stockpiles of equipment and ammunition that we specifically earmark to give away and that's what we've been giving Ukraine. We do not and will not dip into what's allocated for national defense.
All of the "$X billions of aid" headlines are misleading, because most of it is material, not cash.
Israel has plenty of its own weaponry and can do what it pleases.
So in GDP you can see clearly Finance sector growing while Manufacturing shrinks. Parasitic relationship. No one seems to be able to comes up with tools to invert that dynamic. I thought Big Tech would be the natural source of such tools but they have been over run by financial engineers too.
The other potential counter balancing force is govt getting into manufacturing big time, but Wall St has too much influence there too. They are great experts in getting govt to hand out subsidies and tariffs which they then siphon off.
There's no doubt that the US shipbuilding is stagnating, but it's not _that_ much stagnating.
Every congressional district gets a piece of the pie, so the process is incredibly inefficient by design.
For all the hooh-rah, the US military is probably the greatest make work program since the pyramids. Many industries, especially tech, exist due to the largesse of the military.
When you hear pandering politicians quack about efficiency, they are a fool or a liar.
Do VCs invest in industries that are so mature that they are almost as old and civilisation itself?
Long story short, yes, VCs have entered the defense industry (writ large) and although I have my doubts about whether said VC money will achieve FB-like returns, they are trying.
And to answer the GP poster.... The industry is not "ripe for disruption" because it's dominated more by the "invisible hand of the lobbyist" much more than the "invisible hand of the market".
Fwiw, from my ~20 years in the defense industry.
That would be like saying that VC's don't invest in communication companies because communication is as old as civilization, and who wants to invest in semaphores and stone tablets anyways?
Of course, as SC Justice Thomas showed, there’s no real moat. And the people in power are just your friends. They’re not placed there by you. And the gifts you give them are just gifts. If you think you can make a better ship, convince my friend in power.
There is nothing within the Jones Act itself that currently prevents an innovative and enterprising American entrepreneur from building ships at a lower cost.
There is. Without the Jones Act an innovative and enterprising American entrepreneur could build ships partially or wholly outside the US.
She could sell them to a re-invigorated domestic shipping industry. The re-invigoration coming from (1) lowered costs by being allowed to hire foreigners, (2) lower cost of capital, because foreign ownership is allowed, and (3) from the foreign competition spurring on productivity improvements.
A repeal of the Jones act would lower the costs of our American ship building entrepreneur directly, and increase demand for her products, by lowering the costs of her customers.
At a hypothetical example, consider if Thailand passed the equivalent of the Jones act but for computers. At the moment, Thailand produces a lot of hard disks. There are used all over the world, but also in Thai computers. With protectionism in place, Thailand would produce some complete computers for domestic use. But they would be just as abysmal and expensive as American ships. The overall size of the industry would likely be smaller than just the hard disk branch alone was.
(This example worked better before SSD were widespread.)
In the real world right now, a Thai entrepreneur can start building computers easily, because she's allowed to source parts from anywhere around the world. And Thai computer users are allowed to let foreigners service their computers, too.