On April 9, the Trump administration signed an executive order promising to “restore America’s maritime dominance.” A grand idea—if your definition of dominance includes spreadsheets, interagency working groups, and rebuilding shipyards that have long since been paved over and turned into condo developments with nautical names.
But hey—credit where it’s due. This executive order actually identifies a real problem. Our shipbuilding capacity is on life support. China builds more commercial ships in a single year than we’ve managed in nearly a century. They’ve got shipyards cranking out container ships, tankers, and warships side-by-side while we’re still figuring out who’s in charge of ordering steel.
It’s not just about economics. This is national security. You can’t float a blue-water Navy on foreign hulls. And when your merchant fleet looks more like a museum exhibit than a supply chain, you’ve got a problem.
The order talks about setting up a “Maritime Action Plan,” which sounds impressive until you realize that much of our shipbuilding infrastructure no longer exists. You can’t revive a working waterfront when it’s now a row of Starbucks and luxury lofts. The only thing being built on most of our coasts these days are overpriced high-rises with ocean views—and good luck welding a destroyer in a WeWork.
Still, the intent is solid. The EO outlines coordination between the Pentagon, Commerce, Labor, Homeland Security, and more. It calls for workforce training and financial incentives to draw private investment. All good ideas—on paper.
But here’s the rub: building ships isn’t like building buzzwords. It takes years. It takes steel, welders, dry docks, supply chains, skilled labor, and most of all—political will that doesn’t disappear after the next quarterly report or tweet storm.
According to Proceedings magazine, the United States controls just 0.13% of the global shipbuilding market. That’s not a typo. It’s an obituary. Meanwhile, China sits at 47% and growing. We may still lead the world in carrier groups, but when it comes to merchant shipping—the unglamorous but essential lifeblood of global logistics—we’re barely clinging to relevance.
Even worse, our procurement system gets in the way. Bureaucratic delays, budget overruns, and a culture of risk-aversion have slowed Navy shipbuilding to a crawl. We can’t just throw money at the problem—we have to overhaul the system that keeps tripping over itself.
And let’s talk about workers. American shipyards, the few we’ve got left, are short-staffed and aging out. Shipyard workers earn less than they should for the skill required—and that’s assuming you can find people to take the job in the first place. We’ll need not just training programs, but serious incentives to bring blue-collar labor back to the waterfront.
So yes, this executive order is a step. But it’s one step on a very long pier.
If we’re serious about building ships again, we’d better be ready to rebuild more than infrastructure. We’ll need to rebuild the entire culture around maritime work. That means investing in labor, reforming the Navy’s contracting systems, partnering with allies like South Korea and Japan, and—perhaps most importantly—figuring out where to actually put these new shipyards in a country where real estate developers got there first.
America used to build Liberty Ships in days. Now it takes us years to write the specs.
Restoring maritime dominance isn’t a speech. It’s a grind. It takes steel, sweat, and staying power. And we’ve got a long way to go before those dry docks are anything more than footnotes in a press release.
But here’s hoping. Because the water’s rising. And we’re going to need more than slogans to stay afloat.