You know your empire is in trouble when your former warzone is offering to build your warships.
At the 2025 Sea Air Space conference, South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries offered to help the U.S. Navy catch up to China—by building Aegis-equipped destroyers for us. That’s right: a foreign shipbuilder is stepping in to make up for the fact that we can’t build our own damn fleet fast enough.
You can’t make this up.
You don’t have to.
Hyundai says they can crank out five Arleigh Burke-class warships a year—those are the backbone of our destroyer fleet, tipping the scale at 9,800 tons of steel and packed with the Aegis Combat System, our most advanced naval defense shield.
Meanwhile, back home, we’ve got American yards turning away contracts, rusting under bureaucratic bloat, and begging for welders, steel, and congressional clarity. Our grand naval expansion plan? It’s more PowerPoint than power projection. The Navy wants 381 ships by 2054—up from 296 today. That means building 364 warships in 30 years, or 12 a year.
We’re currently building fewer than half that.
So what does that tell you?
It tells you that the arsenal of democracy outsourced its blueprint. It tells you that we’re staring down a second Pacific century with Cold War infrastructure and Walmart strategy.
And it gets better. Hyundai’s not just offering a helping hand—they’re forging partnerships with U.S. defense firms left and right: Fairbanks Morse, Huntington Ingalls, Anduril Industries. You know what that is?
That’s a beachhead.
And before someone screams “foreign influence!”—let’s be clear: this isn’t Hyundai’s fault. This is America’s industrial grave-digging coming back to bite.
We’ve spent the last four decades:
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Offshoring manufacturing
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Ignoring maritime infrastructure
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Treating engineers like disposable printers
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And letting Wall Street call the shots while shipyards fell silent
So now we’re in a race with China’s navy—and we’re out of breath before we reach the drydock.
The Pentagon knows it. Congress pretends otherwise. And Hyundai?
They smell the rust and opportunity.
This should be a five-alarm fire for anyone still pretending we’re the undisputed global naval power. It’s not about pride—it’s about preparedness. When China can build 10 ships before we finish one, and South Korea offers to pick up the slack, it’s no longer a question of whether we’ll lose the next big war. It’s a matter of who’s going to tow our broken hulls home.
So here we are:
The most powerful military in history can’t find enough steel or skilled labor to float a fleet on its own schedule.
And instead of fixing it, we could be laying the keel of American defense in foreign shipyards.
If that doesn’t make you seasick, check your pulse.