The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution
468 comments
·February 3, 2025fuzzfactor
thtowbs
There are lot of MAGA people in tech too. Seems party won't last any longer for Americans
franktankbank
Seems the party wasn't good for us anyway.
mc32
[flagged]
thtowbs
Sanders would sell the country to China
Facemelters
tell us more about how you know nothing of american politics
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themgt
I had one interesting comment, conversation with Zyuganov... They talked about they don't want this NATO expansion. They know it's not in their security interests, and on and on, and said, well, if you do that, we may have to look to China. And I couldn't help using the colloquial expression from my state by saying to Zyuganov: "lots of luck in your senior year." You know, good luck. And if that doesn't work, try Iran. I am serious. I said that to them, and they know I knew they knew. Everybody knows that is not an option. And everybody knows, every one of those leaders acknowledges and needs, and they resent it. But they need to look West. - Joe Biden, Atlantic Council, 1997
amanda99
A lot of folks are saying big ships are outdated. Keep in mind that war is 80% logistics: and if you are going to engage an enemy far away from your landmass (or project power for that matter), you need huge capacity to move materiel to said location, and that normally means ships.
An interesting thing to look at is something called the "Fully Burdened Cost of Fuel": for every gallon that the US delivers to a Forward Operating Base, they spend something like 6-20 gal getting it there.
The point is that you need to move insane amounts of stuff to fight a war effectively. The actual fighting is just the tip of an iceberg of logistics.
maxglute
I think fully burden fuel costs greatly skewed by GWOT where a shit load of supplies was brought in via air or land convoys since AFG land locked. Napkin math Vietnam war cost 1/8 of GWOT adjusted to same dollar which is argument for big ship logistics.
But big ships are outdated crowd surmises big ships used to support logistics (including of other big ships) are also not survivable especially against peer power, not irregular forces that can't touch rear. TBH once adversaries can hit logistics tail (or even CONUS), and they increasingly can thanks to proliferation of rocketry/missiles, the backbone that supports US global expeditionary model breaks. And if enough adversaries can threaten that model, it's value drops even against irregular forces with larger power backing.
The point is, for the first time in modern history, the era of US having uncontested/effective ocean logistics during war time, especially vs peer may be closing. And there simply may not be viable alternative to support expeditionary model that relies on heavy tooth-tail ratios. Which isn't to say sea power is over, just value diminished. At some point it maybe not be economical / feasible to fight large wars on other side of world against adversaries fighting in their backyards. And that's something planners need to account for.
einpoklum
> if you are going to engage an enemy far away from your landmass > (or project power for that matter)
Here's an idea: How about _not_ engaging far away from your landmass and not "projecting power"? The rest of the world has had quite enough of your projections.
2OEH8eoCRo0
Bad idea. I want the US to continue projecting power because the alternative is worse.
einpoklum
Somehow, all those people whose countries get bombed, embargoed, invaded, or have their governments switched by the US - generally seem to fail to agree with you.
justin66
"The rest of the world" is famous for sharing one single opinion on things.
twelve40
both can be true! if a huge ship can be destroyed by a $100k drone boat, we still have a problem
echelon
“Infantry wins battles, logistics wins wars”
That said, for smaller engagements when you have a forward operating base, you can air drop a massive amount of tonnage on a dime with C-5s. And if we ever turn Starship into an orbital equipment delivery system, we'll be able to open new salients quickly.
pixl97
Planes are tiny.
The largest plane can carry 225 or so tons.
The largest ship can carry 225,000 tons or so.
That is 3 orders of magnitude different.
aylmao
Not as much as ships and not nearly efficiently enough to fight a war
indymike
I don't share the confidence in large ships being the future of naval anything. Even in the 90s, surface ships were easy pickings for submarines and antiship missiles. Smaller ships acting as drone carriers combined with arsenal ships can allow local power projection to keep shipping lanes open.
Submarines and aircraft remain the safest, and best way to deliver offensive firepower. The aircraft carrier does have a role, but it is far behind the contact line.
openasocket
But submarines require a shipbuilding revolution too! The total number of submarines in US Navy service has been steadily decreasing over the last decade or so. We don't have the industrial capacity to build submarines faster than our old ones are decommissioning. The issue actually isn't with carriers, I believe we're more or less on schedule with carrier building. The issue where this is most apparent is submarines, and also with the merchant fleet (which would be needed during wartime to ship supplies).
indymike
I'm not sure how much longer submarines will be militarily relevant. Longer for sure than large surface combatants, but we're relying largely on hiding for defense... and there's no guarantee that hiding will work forever.
openasocket
Sure, but if you are holding out for something that will be militarily relevant forever, you're going to be waiting a long time :)
I also think the concerns about the the ability of large ships to defend themselves in modern combat are a bit overblown. Just because there exists a weapon system that can defeat something, doesn't mean that thing is irrelevant. You'll see all these comparisons of the cost of a surface combatant with the cost of an anti-ship missile or drone as though that decides the matter. But it really doesn't. It costs a ton of money to train and equip and infantry soldier, and yet you can kill that solider with a bullet that costs pennies. Does that mean infantry have been obsolete for the last few centuries? Of course not! A system is not obsolete until something comes along that can perform that same role, but better.
jabl
> The aircraft carrier does have a role, but it is far behind the contact line.
That's why they're called 'aircraft carriers'. The entire point of them is that the offensive firepower in the form of aircraft can reach out pretty far. They don't need to sail the carrier right up beside the enemy in order to hit him with their swords, you know.
Jokes aside, there might (eventually, maybe not today?) be a point in what you're saying. It's been a long time since 1945 when carriers last were used in a major peer conflict, and a lot has changed since then.
throw0101d
> The entire point of them is that the offensive firepower in the form of aircraft can reach out pretty far.
Cruise missiles have ranges >1500km:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile_family)
And they're putting missiles in shipping containers so as long as you have a flat surface you can place them just about anywhere:
* https://gcaptain.com/pacific-dragon-is-the-shipping-industry...
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iuscommune
Agree - this is a key lesson of the Falklands War which, despite being in the 80s, is one of the few hot naval wars of the missile age.
philwelch
The problem with arsenal ships is twofold. One, we don’t have enough missiles to fill the ships we have now, let alone a ship specialized to carry as many missiles as possible. Two, missiles and ships are like eggs and baskets. To counteract the egg/basket problem you want to distribute your missiles among multiple ships, and then equip those ships with sensors and defensive systems so they’re harder to sink and so you can develop a detailed picture of the battlespace. We have a name for that kind of ship; it’s a guided missile destroyer.
You can go smaller (that’s called a guided missile frigate) but thanks to the square cube law, a bigger ship can carry much more than twice as much missiles, sensors, etc. as two ships that are half the size. You also get economies of scale on maintenance. There are tradeoffs here, and the DDG as the backbone of the surface fleet and the guardian of the aircraft carrier is a great solution to those tradeoffs.
Don’t be a doomer when it comes to the arms race between missiles and air defense. Air defense can defeat a concentrated missile/drone attack, as we’ve seen in the two recent Iranian attacks on Israel. There are novel air attack threats from drones, but there are also novel air defense systems to counter them such as lasers (https://x.com/osinttechnical/status/1886259012632535520). If I had to guess I’d say that the balance is actually shifting in favor of air defense on net.
I do agree with you that submarines are important. In fact the Ohio class SSGN practically is an arsenal ship. The problem with submarines is that they have to operate as lone wolves. Surface ships and carrier aircraft can share sensor data and use sensor fusion to construct a shared picture of the battlespace, but submarines can’t be looped into the network without exposing themselves. Again, tradeoffs. And usually the solution to these tradeoffs is combined arms—you build a task force with a carrier, some surface ships, and some submarines and each ship has its own job to do to cover the weaknesses of the others.
ianburrell
The aircraft carrier needs to be protected by surface ships. Submarines can’t shoot down missiles. Drone ships can’t do the job unless they are the size of destroyer. Ships on long deployments need maintenance, so now you have manned ship. We almost can’t make automomous ships, they need
Arsenal ships are a bad idea because putting all the missiles in one basket. It is better to have 3 destroyers that can cover different directions, or go on separate missions. The Navy has finally figured out reloading, it is much better to send one ship away to reload and still keep defense.
Ylpertnodi
>Submarines and aircraft remain the safest, and best way to deliver offensive firepower.
Until drones carrying drones carrying drones becomes a thing.
XorNot
That doesn't mean anything. There's no reason to think a drone carrier ship would be smaller or cheaper then an aircraft carrier (if it was providing air capability at similar ranges, and if it's not then it'll be much more vulnerable).
rtkwe
Ships can also loiter and provide better cargo capacity for that sustained presence compared to aircraft which is it's own benefit. To replicate that with an air based carrier you'd have to have more of them flying in shifts to maintain presence and coverage of the area.
indymike
It depends on what kind of drones you are operating doesn't it? Range, speed and payload seems to be the drivers for gigantism in military vehicles. So if you look at shorter range, or more accurate, smaller explosive delivery, you don't need a USS Ford size thing to act as a mobile base for them. One of the big lessons in Ukraine is that small, cheap and accurate works.
FuriouslyAdrift
There are already submarine drones and sub drone 'fleets'
indymike
Arial drones are a subset of aircraft.
bluGill
close ship on ship battle is dead but large ships are needed for large long range weapons that can hit opposing targets that cannot be seen. a wwi battleship could ignore a small drone of today - a much larger system is needed to sink a ship.
deltarholamda
Can a large ship, or any ship, intercept a hypersonic missile? Because that's the reality of today.
openasocket
The term "hypersonic" is not a particularly helpful one. The generic term refers to an missile system traveling faster than Mach 5, but there are 3 distinct types of weapons that fall into this category, which are very different.
1. Ballistic missiles: most ballistic missile systems are hypersonic. We've had ballistic missiles since WW2, the very first American ballistic missile (the redstone) was hypersonic, and that was back in the 1950s. This is not new. People make a lot of missile like the Khinzal, but this is just an air-launched version of the Iskander missile, which is from the 1990s.
2. Hypersonic glide vehicles: normal ballistic missiles drop a re-entry vehicle that just falls to earth. It might have some stabilizing fins, and some ability to make minute adjustments to its course to improve accuracy, but this is limited. In a hypersonic glide vehicle, the re-entry vehicle is meant to be more of a glide body, and is able to make actual maneuvers and turns. The technology here is also not new. For example, the Space Shuttle is an example of a hypersonic glide body. Research in this field has been around for a long time, though it's only in the last few years that countries have begun actually fielding weapons featuring glide vehicles. The annoying part with this is that the term "hypersonic glide vehicle" implies that the reason these are so difficult to intercept is because of their speed. But it's actually the opposite: in order to maneuver, a hypersonic glide vehicle actually has to travel slower than a traditional ballistic re-entry vehicle! The advantage of a HGV is not its speed, but its ability to maneuver, which makes it harder to intercept.
3. There are also hypersonic cruise missiles. These are missiles that use ramjet or scramjet engines to fly at hypersonic speeds. These tend to be even slower than HGVs, and will have much shorter ranges because they have to consume fuel to maintain this speed. Several of these are in development, but I don't believe any have been fielded. The main advantage of these is even further maneuverability, and a lower flight altitude which should make them harder to detect. Additionally, because they are flying in the atmosphere, it requires a different type of interceptor to defeat.
bluGill
There are trade offs. That missile is expense and (see other discussion) might not even hit. A ship is mobile and moves erratically - the enemy needs to find it (not as easy as it sounds even with satellites all over). A missile that lands in the sea 100 feet from a ship does no damage. Hyper sonic often means limits to how you can maneuver it, so you have a chance of figuring out where it can be and thus getting the ship away (depending on your ability to detect it and predict where it is going). The rest of interception was covered by other comments.
A ship lets you get closer to the action. The closer you get the easier it is to overwhelm electric warfare - either because the slow drones can be programed and so don't need a radio (or fiber connections), or because you can make your signal strong enough to overcome it.
Missiles don't have infinite range. Different ones have different limits. Longer range costs both more money and payload. A ship can laugh off anything a tiny drone can do (even a commercial ship).
The above are all trade offs. However navy warfare is not dead and unlikely to die.
greedo
Yes. Patriot has intercepted Kinzals in Ukraine (and older versions of Patriot at that), so the tech is well established. SM3/SM6 missiles on Aegis equipped ships can defend themselves against hypersonic missiles.
FuriouslyAdrift
CIWS does a pretty decent job but the reality is that a hypersonic missile would be met with a large nuclear response as it's a first strike weapon.
If you can read between the lines of the posture reviews, any potential full scale war with China would include a massive nuclear first strike by necessity.
Everyone is aware of this and is avoiding a large scale engagement.
Most likely a regional war with China (probably over Taiwan or less likely, the Philippines) would draw in lots of regional players because everybody want's to pick China apart.
machiaweliczny
True, Hitler mostly lost a war due to megalomania and spending 1/4th of naval budget on big destroyer instead of producing more ubots.
pphysch
How did lack of Uboats make him lose the Eastern Front?
indymike
Failure to disrupt US shipping lanes to the Allies resulted in Germany having to fight much better-equipped Allied forces. A tank, a howitzer, or a truck on the bottom of the ocean is not a threat. The amount of equipment shipped to the USSR by the US is staggering as well, and one can argue that the Eastern Front would have collapsed without those supplies. More U-boats likely would have dramatically changed the war.
pzo
Didn't warfare changed big enough that big navy might be more obsolete? Ukraine-Russia conflict showed that you can make hordes of cheap naval drones that can easily harass your very expensive ships or put them out of combat. By now probably you can still make more advanced but cheaper underwater drones, smart torpedos etc.
nickff
The jeune ecole thought that torpedoes and small torpedo boats would doom battleships; they were wrong. People thought SAMs would end bombers, and anti-tank missiles would end tanks. There’s always a new weapon, but it doesn’t mean the old ones are obsolete.
jabl
Not always, but sometimes it does. Cavalry charges aren't a thing anymore, for instance.
XorNot
No but mechanised assaults are. Mounting up on a fast transport and charging the enemy lines is still a viable tactic, what changed is the horse got too vulnerable and the robots aren't cheap or fast enough yet.
Humm-Vees, Bradley's and other infantry mobility vehicles with mounted guns for fire support have very much stepped into the tactical role.
greedo
The idea of a cavalry charge is nonsense. Rarely done, and mostly a relic of cinema. The Polish cavalry actually performed quite well during WW2 despite being tarnished as outdated.
The roles of a "cavalry" unit are reconnaissance/scouting, raiding, pursuit. Whether they're on horseback or mounted in M2/M3s doesn't matter. Today the cavalry role still persists in most large militaries because the fog of war requires it.
justanorherhack
Or revolvers, bolt action rifles, muskets, bow and arrows, spears, swords, shields, catapults, castles/ land forts.
jltsiren
Vulnerable, not obsolete. Unless the war is in North America, you need cargo ships to get the heavy equipment and fuel there. And then you need a navy to protect the cargo ships from those cheap naval drones and other threats.
bell-cot
> Ukraine-Russia conflict showed...
Hordes of cheap naval drones is what Ukraine had the ability to produce. And long before the current conflict started, Russia's navy was well-known for having very serious maintenance, performance, and survivability issues. They would have proven similarly vulnerable to a very wide variety of weapons.
fifticon
You can't get a revolution, but it appears you have managed to get a coup.
RobKohr
A democratic election without using violence to force a result is by definition not a coup.
It is ok to not like the result, but don't misappropriate words for it, thus diluting their meaning. Words having concrete meanings are important for reasonable discourse.
bamboozled
I think they're referring to the unelected people doing illegal things completely unchecked (currently)?
mordae
Also elected people doing illegal and unconstitutional things, repeatedly.
Hasu
Violence is not inherent to the definition of a coup, and Elon Musk, who is not a government official, who has no official status in the government, has taken direct control of the Treasury's payment systems. An unelected billionaire has illegally and unconstitutionally taken control of the United States government.
That is a coup, plain and simple.
animal_spirits
There are already thousands of unelected government workers that already have control over these government systems. I understand it is different that one person now has access to them all now, but the unelected part of this story I think is a nothing burger.
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fransje
Listen, you need to start somewhere..
senectus1
Look, If you MUST implement Tariff's then do it in a way that triggers explosive manufacturing.
IMHO thats on the only way a tariff can be successful. If you want vertically integrated growth then by logic you should run Tariffs for all the parts and resources needed for triggering that growth. If you decide that ship building needs a shot in the arm thats going to be iron ore and steel (largely).
throwing tariffs around for imaginary slights isnt going to trigger anything useful in your country... (unless thats the idea of course. There is a theory that a collapse is the point)
niffydroid
The UK has been in a similar situation. We have a ship building industry plan and it seems to be going ok. Top of the range ships like type 26 are massive, expensive and cutting edge so will take time to build and commission. So what we've done is gone and brought an off the shelf design (Iver Huitfeldt-class frigate) and started building it. It's not cutting edge or massive, it should need less crew and most of it's system should be off the shelf. The first in class was paid in April 2022 and is to be launched this year with an inservice date of early 2027. To compare that against the first in class of the type 26, that was laid down on 2027 and is looking to be in service at the same time as the first type31! We're also building nuclear subs as well!
niffydroid
laid 2022 * Type 26 laid 2017
codemusings
> [...] if the nation is destined for maritime irrelevance and the laying of its prosperity at the whims of autocrats a world away.
Considering what happened in the last two weeks alone this lack of self-awareness is simply brilliant.
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justanorherhack
What has happened exactly in the last two weeks ?
bamboozled
Our former allies are going to stop sharing intelligence with the USA. That's for sure.
They're also going to start finding ways to go around the USA with trade, military alliances and more.
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i_am_proteus
Interested readers may enjoy Freedom's Forge by Arthur Herman, which chronicles, amongst other things, how Henry Kaiser led the rapid construction of the shipyards used to build the merchant fleet that helped the United States win the second world war.
The book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/208564/freedoms-for...
squeedles
Recently read that on a recommendation from a friend. Great review of the sausage making necessary to get something as big and complex as the US moving in a different direction.
Only quibble about the book is that the author seems to subscribe to a great man theory of manufacturing, where having a CEO say "we will do it" is all that is needed and the rest of the engineering is left as an exercise to the reader.
throw0101c
> Interested readers may enjoy Freedom's Forge by Arthur Herman
Please note that, while a good read, the book was initially financed by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a group of large corporations who have a vested interest in making business look good.
* https://www.aei.org/research-products/book/freedoms-forge/
I, too, have read this book and was struck by the tone the book took every time the topic of unions came up. You'd think that unions were Nazi sympathizers wanting to sabotage the war effort or something.
So while it's worth a read, please be aware of the slant of the book.
metalman
Impossible.Beurocracy.Insurance.Unions.No demographic with the skills that must be learned early in life to do the work, hard ,dangerous work that requires trust and inate skills to acomplish quickly and safely. I aprenticed with some of the last marine smiths, and also worked(very briefly) in a shipyard building military frigates, and spent 95‰ of my life next to the salt water. Add to that my repeated attempts to conduct business as an entrepneur, only to be undermined by impossible (new) regulatory requirements, insurance requirements, labour (ha!) trouble, and lack of scaled banking services. I fill out the same tax form as the very largest companys in the world, and the government is generous enogh to give me a 9 digit space to fill in the amount of my return. It is 125 years since the steel ship building industry took off, there are no mysteries around how it must be done, but the nature of the greed machine, means that China and Korea can put a finnished ship into service, for much less per pound, than I can buy raw steel. The revolution we ARE going through, is the one where, fat, lazy, complacent,etc,etc,etc, so and so's, have very successfully captured all of the relevant power and control. U'r not gona talk a ship into the water. Lead, follow, or get out of the way and cheer!
Ylpertnodi
>labour (ha!)
Where are you, and how much are you offering per hour?
mainecoder
you are assuming he isn't paying much but think you assumed that there are many people who can do the job that are unemployed when the reality is that most or almost all are either overworked due to under staffing and paid well or retired and it would be difficult to just pay those already working more to just bring them because they are working on an actual US Navy ship and can't be bothered.
Ylpertnodi
Pay, and the people will come.
K0balt
Sadly, and I say this with an equal measure of sadness and conviction, the bell has been rung on this (and industrial might in general )for 2+ decades.
There was a chance to rebuild the us into a formidable industrial power, but it was lost in the early 2000s.
We gifted all of our knowledge advantages to an industrial adversary with a 4:1 population and resource advantage. They have improved their primary education to be vastly superior to ours, and their secondary education is not far behind.
Strategic goals were superseded by greed, and we will now have to settle for second fiddle or lower on the world stage with no hope of recovering a leadership role. Our military might will eventually be eclipsed by China as well, and in the interim will only serve to slightly slow our fading into irrelevance, while being an increasingly heavy yoke to bear as the expense of maintaining aging systems that we cannot replace continues to grow.
Yet, There is one inflection point that we might possibly be able to change this at: an all out, no holds barred investment in space resource and energy harvesting:
this expands our high technology edge, gives us a resource advantage, gives us new territory, incentivises rapid robotic expansion of our industrial capacity….
We could leverage dominance in the space frontier while we still possess the military advantage on-planet to defend our will to do so. But we will have to throw everything behind the effort, in basically a wartime footing, or we cannot hope to succeed.
This is quite literally the last chance to avoid a CCP dominated world within 5 decades.
carlosdp
Repeal the Jones act, get a commercial shipbuilding market going again domestically.
In the meantime, leverage the best asset we have: alliances with western nations. South Korea is really good at shipbuilding, to the point they are now authorized to repair US Navy warships based in the PACCOM AOR. Let them build ships for us too.
echelon
> get a commercial shipbuilding market going again domestically.
How do you start a flywheel? Our industry is light years behind China and would be prohibitively more expensive.
Tariffs? That's a moral equivalent of the Jones Act, just with more options for buyers.
The thing that worked really well for China was to force Western manufacturers to partner with their domestic industries so that they could learn the tricks of the trade, then be kick the Western companies to the wayside and discard the relationships when they're no longer useful.
I don't think we can mimic the China playbook because of our labor costs. There's no gradient or arbitrage to exploit. Maybe a partnership between the US and Mexico where we take advantage of Mexican labor, yet use US capital and retain ownership?
araes
A part that at least helped with China was that after the Great Recession (and somewhat before), China was also willing to subsidize and invest heavily in local manufacturing and helping individual businesses and communities finance "relatively" expensive purchases for equipment that might have been prohibitive otherwise. Low cost loans with relatively forgiving terms. [1][2]
An example is chain link fencing. It's not especially glamorous, yet its a huge industry. The machine's don't have to be especially advanced, yet for somebody normal to even consider purchasing a chain link fencing weaving machine (especially in early 2000's China) look(s|ed) prohibitive. It still looks prohibitive in 2025. A lot of manufacturing looks that way. You need 10-50k up-front in machinery and capital purchases at the low end.
In America, the ROI calculations would always look bad, and the standard lenders would "almost" always turn you down for suggesting investment in a thin margin industry with "old" tech. You're not proposing 10x returns. You're not proposing get out tomorrow VC. You're proposing a decade long relationship of manufacturing chain link fences. Except now China rules the entire chain-link fence manufacturing industry.
The focus on scraping America's modern tech has a lot of the same issues. China didn't get a quick jump in naval ship building by scraping America tech and twiddling more silicon. They got it by buying an old Russian aircraft carrier from Ukraine and tugboating it half-way around the Earth. (Liaoning, original created as Riga for the Soviet Navy in Ukraine) [3][4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_stimulus_prog...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Development_Bank
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_Liaon...
[4] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-very-first-air...
>The Nation Needs a Shipbuilding Revolution
Somebody noticed :)
Too late now, Nixon "opened up" China and Ronald Reagan said "NO!" to the kind of prosperity that would be needed in the 21st century.
It's like political parties haven't been paying attention at all for a "little" while now.
If American voters can not get over electing media "personalities" acting as leaders, those kind of fakers are not going to be far enough in the rear-view mirror to allow pulling ahead by the 22nd century :\
We're already 1/4 of the way to 2100.
And more gloomy than ever in the 21st century so far, recovering industrial leadership just got dramatically more unlikely in the last few months :(