The pandemic laid bare the danger of relying on foreign manufacturers to supply our needs. While it’s clear that we must work to build out domestic capacity in critical sectors like microchips and energy technology, ships and shipbuilding could easily become another choke point in our nation’s supply chains.
Investing in manufacturing and our own commercial fleet will help to insulate us against future disruptions.
The Chinese Communist Party understands this as well as anyone. China’s shipyards are currently working nonstop to build a fleet of ships capable of exporting a huge array of products, including subsidized goods that it intends to dump in U.S. markets at unfair prices, further threatening our economy.
This not only keeps us reliant on Chinese goods but also hinders growth in our own industries.
We cannot afford to offshore our economic and national security to foreign manufacturers who have the power to cut off shipments of goods at any time, for any reason.
In 1975, the domestic industry was a leader in global shipbuilding, with more than 70 commercial ships on order in American shipyards and employing 180,000 workers.
In the early 1980s, federal spending for the construction and operation of the U.S. shipbuilding industry was significantly slashed. Following these cuts, U.S. commercial shipbuilding largely collapsed, unable to compete against foreign competitors that continued to operate with significant and growing subsidies from their own governments.
Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs over the following decades, as major shipyards closed and our nation’s shipbuilding industrial base was reduced from close to 30 major yards to only a handful.