To get there from here, look back

Reprinted with permission Commander Salamander

Shyam Sankar’s First Breakfast Substack last week laid down some cold hard truth…and hope.

I don’t care what the primes’ booths at Sea, Air, Space look like. I don’t care what strategic document is extruded between Arlington, VA and Pennsylvania Avenue.

This is the core of the issue.

There are currently 154 active shipyards in the US, spread across 29 states. That’s an impressive figure, except when you realize only ten are engaged in building large-scale vessels, and only four do any shipbuilding for the U.S. Navy. The possibility that this number may shrink further has put Congress and the current administration on notice. They realize they need to address America’s shipbuilding gap with China before it’s too late. Because if civilian shipbuilding disappears from our shores, the US Navy will be on a trajectory for irreversible decline, as well.

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Chinese shipyards have 200 times the capacity of US yards. Some are building as many as 13 ships at once, with naval and commercial vessels coming down the slips at the same time.

Meanwhile, the FY 2025 budget forecast has the US Navy building just six ships in 2025, while decommissioning 19 vessels—a net loss of 9 ships. In 2023, China added 30 ships to its navy. The United States added exactly two.

Our present blinkered tinkering isn’t the solution.

But the most effective approach might be to reinvent the entire enterprise. Doing so will require us to take a lesson out of the history books, and look carefully at how master builder Henry Kaiser managed to upend the entire shipbuilding industry during the Second World War.

Shyam has five lessons from Kaiser’s response to the demand to grow our Navy last time we found ourselves in dire straits. Read his Substack for the details, but in the link you will find three of the five.

Lesson 1: Stop thinking like you are building ships.

Lesson 2: Rethink processes and materials from the hull up.

Lesson 3: Stop worrying about workforce, just hire and train whoever is willing to show up.

You have two major factors needed to build a large Navy: workforce and facilities.

The U.S. population in 1941 was only 38% the population we have today. Automation does much of what people used to do manually. Finding workers is not a real issue—it just lacks imagination.

Locations to build facilities? Again, all it takes is a knowledge of history, imagination, and will. Geography has not changed.

The image Shyam uses on his Substack is just one of the three Kaiser shipyards in Portland. In this case, the Oregon Shipbuilding Yards near the St. Johns neighborhood in North Portland, OR, roughly 45N 36’ 20.33” - 122W 46’ 47.33”. Here is what it looked like in 1943.

This is what it looks like today.

It is somewhere between a brownfield and a forgotten low-rent backwater. From Washington State to Puerto Rico we have the bones of a former world-beating maritime industry bleaching in the sun just waiting to be reanimated, but do we have the political will to do it?

Of note, go to the link about the yard above and see a zoomed out picture. Screw the environmental impact statement requirements…just look at all the filling in and draining of wetlands that has already been done. Whatever is rebuilt will be a net neutral.

We have what we need to build the Navy, merchant fleet, and industry our nation requires. All we lack are the leaders to get us there.